Popper’s Unworldly World 3

Abstract

At the Third International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held in Amsterdam in August, 1967, Sir Karl Popper astonished the philosophical community by formulating his doctrine on “the third world”, or world of ideas, or “objective mind”, which he later called ‘World 3’. In his paper, titled “Epistemology without a knowing subject”, he wrote as follows: “without taking the words ‘world’ or ‘universe’ too seriously, we may distinguish the following three worlds or universes: first, that world of physical objects or of physical states; secondly, the world of states of consciousness or of mental states, or perhaps of behavioral dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art” (Popper, 1968, p. 333).