Emma asked:

I have a question that I am having difficulty with. It is: What role does truth play in Popper's
philosophy?

If you could give me some guidelines and outline some of the key concepts that would be great!

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Popper was concerned with scientific truth — more specifically, the truth of scientific theories. His
main claim is that we can never prove the truth of a theory — only disprove it. Put simply, this is
because we would have to look at an infinite number of cases to see they all happen as the scientific
theory predicts, while a single failure to happen as predicted falsifies the theory. This account of
science as falsifiability is very influential. Although it has some problems and is not widely accepted
now, I think it would be fair to say that most modern philosophy of science is based in developments
from Popper's ideas.

Tim Sprod

According to Popper, what demarcates scientific claims from non-scientific claims is that scientific
claims are falsifiable. This is a point about justification. The scientist makes conjectures, which may
be based on little or no evidence. These conjectures can be experimentally tested, that is the only
justification the scientist needs for making them. However, Popper is a realist about truth. The
scientist can make a conjecture, and in the absence of any decisive experiment they may never know
whether their conjecture is in fact true, or in fact false.

Michael Dummett, in his writings on the clash between realism and anti-realism, describes a
'falsifiability conditions' theory of meaning by analogy with a 'verification conditions' theory of meaning
(see Truth and Other EnigmasDuckworth 1980). Both theories as Dummett conceives them are
anti-realist, in that they deny that the notion of the 'truth out there' plays any role in our understanding
of the language in which we make statements about how things are, or might be. This is emphatically
not Popper's view.

Geoffrey Klempner