CRITICAL ESSAY OF SCIENCE PHILOSOPHY OF K. POPPER. I (Kriticheski ocherk philosophiyi K. Poppera. I)

A review of Western European theories of science philosophy is made, with focus on neopositivism. The analysis of K.Poper's theory, critical rationalism, is focused on his verification method based on the principle of falsification for demarcation between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. It's shown that absolute reliance on this principle, denial of the objective truth of scientific knowledge, conventional interpretation of human perceptions about the natural world, dissociation of the knowledge producer from the produced knowledge is not in compliance with K.Poper's theory of growth in scientific knowledge. The method of critical rationalism, elaborated for physics, is spread by K.Popper on social sphere. It's shown that his treatment of history as 'interpretation of events', which, not being a verifiable hypothesis (conception or theory), can be falsified, that is, rejected by new facts, is quite effective, as it supposes both distinction between and common character of history and natural science. Unlike neopositivist formal and logical analysis, K.Popper's logic of scientific research represents an attempt for theoretical reconstruction of the dynamics of science, development of science through 'tries and mistakes, or, more exactly, through removal of mistakes'. An indisputable contribution of him is reconstruction of science in its irreversible history and not as an aggregate of separated static deductively organized systems. His historicism implicitly complies with the principle of non-linearity of the scientific progress, hence, the ontology of a theory is always conventional and relational, and the resulting fallibilism (exposure to mistakes) of a theoretical construction supposes that it can be falsified when confronted by contradictory empirical data.