Habermas radicalized Popper’s falsificationism through a pragmatist perspective to restrain technical rationalism.

Evidence

Logical empiricism, or neopositivism, had projected an ideal of what science ought to be on to scientific practice, without bothering to produce any real scientific discoveries. In accordance with the view, dominant until well into the 1960s, that the development of science was fundamentally determined from within science itself, this approach treated science as being in principle an ahistorical, asocial third world' (as Popper termed it) of objective knowledge, the inner structure and development of which were subject only to logic. Popper broadened this outlook and brought the problem of scientific progress into the foreground, although this was restricted to the context of refutation’the epistemological and logical examination of theoretical hypotheses and the experimental testing of them, based on the principle of falsification, with the aim of achieving a closer approximation to the truth. He excluded the `context of discovery’, the external influence of psychological and socio-economic factors, which he alleged to be irrelevant to the logic of scientific discovery. … Habermas made the following move. He took Popper’s philosophy of science as a first stage of self-criticism by positivism; he radicalized this first stage by means of a pragmatic perspective that brought the model of discovery in the natural sciences into an even more general context than Popper did; then he himself drafted a pragmatic perspective for Popper’s idea of critical, rational discussion. He provided a pragmatic justification for Popper’s logic of scientific discovery in order to make room for the logic and the pragmatic foundation of the dialectical type of research, and ultimately to provide cultural restraints for the technical rationalism that had been absolutized both by logical empiricism and by Popper’s critical rationalism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2417

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Popperian context-of-refutation vs context-of-discovery distinction and how Habermas used it.
• XREF: Connects to the pragmatist tradition Habermas absorbed from Apel, and to critical theory’s broader anti-positivism debates. — connects to: Habermas radicalized Popper’s critical rationalism via American pragmatism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2417; Habermas’s early thought championed protective restriction against over-rationalization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2302; Habermas critiqued Popper immanently by contrasting the bourgeois public sphere with free dialogue conditions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2416 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Lakatos fused Lukács and Popper into a two-part theory-testing model #complicates (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 433
• MPS members preferred stricter ideological policing over Popper’s open debate #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 196