No, detlof, Popper did not, from what my admittedly limited knowledge of his ideas can tell (oh my God, Jetter, here's where we could, just could, veer into Jung!!!! Stooooone the witch!!!).
I'm not sure about his personal life, but, basically, in the end, in his philosophy he still defaulted to an assumption that the systematic analysis of science redeemed it as a method, even though his own critique on that method - that science is always finding new truth, so how can they ever say they have The Truth - undermined that hope, in a logical sense. I would say he had an intuition that this had to be the case and so adopted it. I feel the same BTW, to an extent, that extent tempered by my knowledge of what science IS, its limitations, and the true ground of science.
From what I know of the LSE philosophy dept, where Popper ensconsed himself, the quantification of reality (the progeny of British empiricism, Hume, Berkely, et al) was perhaps, in its lingering influence, not quite as far away as he might have thought. I think Popper was simply part of the general deconstruction of science - seeing its limitation through an application of its own reductionist rules to itself - that has been going on for quite a while now (you see, WilBishop, I do know how old some of this is....). He saw a facet of that limitation, but like all deconstructionism, never looked beyond that reduction to see a solution. Maybe that accounts for his ultimate default to science's systematic rigor for a grounding, and thus avoiding the conclusion of nihilism (the consequence of groundless-ness). Given that his own observations seemed to contradict that conclusion, perhaps that was, in the end, a personal choice of belief, perhaps one adopted in fear of what he believed to be its logical contra (without some ground in logic, reality becomes ground-less)
[except that reality is not grounded by logic...]
There are certainly some people out there who know more than that and can, perhaps, add or correct what I've said (OH MY GOD!! There it is, Jetter, the possibility, rearing its head like a regression to religion, like a hydra, of this thread going out of control, out of control of the thinking scientific mind towards some so-called creativity or dialogue that keeps us from controlling the truth, making it serve our purpose! Oh God, save us!!)
Detlof, if you know about Popper, perhaps - while we wait for Krusty to come back and for Jetter to think - I would be interested to know what you know. Anyone else too.
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH CABLE?!
There, all served up, just like a baseball on a tee, just like when you were five.
