Karl Popper: All facts are theory laden

For Popper singular 'factual' statements such as "This is a glass of water", are conjectural or hypothetical in nature, as they are only possible owing to universal statements that are implicit in them. For example the universal statement "Glass is breakable", which does not refer to any glass in particular, but describes a law-like property that all individual glass objects can be described by. So universal statements (which are theories or laws of nature) are implicit as embedded "universals" that dispositionally inhere within words such as "glass" and "water" of singular statements such as "This is a glass of water". This is a modern version of Platonism and a criticism of the idea that being empirical means collecting facts and data in order to distinguish oneself from theoretical or speculative researchers. This is not possible for Popper as all facts are theory-laden, we are theorising all the time

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