Editing Karl Popper (section)

==== Popper's three worlds ====
{{Main|Popper's three worlds}}
Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e., knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (''Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach'', 1972). He proposed [[Popper's three worlds|three worlds]]:<ref>Popper, Karl, "Three Worlds, The Tanner Lecture on Human Values", The University of Michigan, 1978.</ref> '''World One''', being the physical world, or physical states; '''World Two''', being the world of mind, or individuals' private mental states, ideas and perceptions; and '''World Three''', being the ''public'' body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms (e.g., "scientific theories, ethical principles, characters in novels, philosophy, art, poetry, in short our entire cultural heritage"<ref>[[Mario Vargas Llosa|Vargas Llosa, Mario]], ''The Call of the Tribe'' (''La llamada de la tribu'', 2018), trans. John King (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), "Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994)", p. 148.</ref>), or the products of World Two made manifest in the materials of World One (e.g., books, papers, paintings, symphonies, cathedrals, [[particle accelerator]]s). World Three, Popper argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path in the jungle is the creation of many individual animals but not planned or intended by any of them. World Three thus has an existence and an evolution independent of any individually known subjects. The influence of World Three on the individual human mind (World Two) is in Popper's view at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total, accumulated wealth of human knowledge made manifest as to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three.

Many contemporary philosophers, such as [[Daniel Dennett]],<ref>Dennett, Daniel C., [https://dl.tufts.edu/pdfviewer/3x817009m/5712mk336 review of Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, ''The Self and Its Brain''], in ''[[The Journal of Philosophy]]''. '''76''' (2): 91–97. Retrieved 12 May 2025.</ref> have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, mostly due to what they see as its resemblance to [[mind–body dualism]].<ref>{{cite web |title=Karl Popper (Stanford encyclopedia) |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ |website=Stanford encyclopedia |access-date=14 February 2025}}</ref>