David Miller (philosopher)

David William Miller (19 August 1942 in Watford – 20 November 2024^[1]) was an English philosopher and prominent exponent of critical rationalism.^[2] He taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK,^[3] where he was a Reader in Philosophy. He had been an Honorary Treasurer of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

He was educated at Woodbridge School^{[citation needed]} and Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1964 he began to study logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Soon afterwards he became one of Karl Popper's research assistants.^[4][5] In a series of papers in the 1970s, Miller and others uncovered defects in Popper's formal definition of verisimilitude, previously a mostly ignored aspect of Popper's theory. A substantial literature developed in the two decades following, including papers by Miller, to assess the remediability of Popper's approach.

Miller's Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence^[2] is an attempt to expound, defend, and extend an approach to scientific knowledge identified with Popper. A central, "not quite original", thesis is that rationality does not depend on good reasons. Rather, it is better off without them, especially as they are unobtainable and unusable.^[6]