Worrall attended Leigh Grammar School in Leigh, Lancashire and originally planned to join the school's Scholarship Stream in order to then apply for university admission to Oxbridge. He later described his change of mind, saying: "Think The History Boys – it then meant an additional year in the Sixth Form, and so another year in Leigh and I just couldn't face that!" After receiving a single brief career advice session he instead decided to apply to the London School of Economics "to study mathematical statistics, with a view to being an actuary. So I applied to the LSE for stats, without knowing the first thing about what actuaries do." As a first year LSE student Worrall elected Alan Musgrave's 'Introduction to Logic' module as his sole optional course unit. This choice included a further optional lecture series, given by Karl Popper, which Worrall also attended, later saying " most of my fellow logic students soon dropped them. But I was hooked". As a consequence of his interest, Worrall changed his undergraduate studies from Statistics to Philosophy. He was the only student in his year to select the Mathematical Logic option, for which the tutor was Imre Lakatos. Worrall later recalled, "He got me all sorts of special permissions to go on studying some maths and stats alongside philosophy. He set me a ferocious list of tasks, including working through Stoll’s Set Theory and Logic and Courant and Robbins' What Is Mathematics?, telling me not to see him again until I had worked through the list. I think he believed he would not see me again. When he did, he branded me a 'hopeful monster' and from then on took a very keen interest in my studies and, later, my early career. Studying his Proofs and Refutations was the intellectual event of my undergraduate study."
Career
Worrall continued to study under Lakatos, advancing the methodology of scientific research programmes through his work in 19th-century optics. He is best known for resurrecting the theory ofstructural realism in the philosophy of science, a view previously associated with Henri Poincaré. Additionally he has published important work in the philosophy of medicine. He has also published widely in journals and anthologies, edited Imre Lakatos's collected works, and a recent volume on The Ontology of Science. He was editor-in-chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science from 1974 to 1983. He has supervised numerous philosophers including Jeremy Howick, Jeffrey J. Ketland and Ioannis Votsis. In February 2007, Worrall was one of the guests on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme, discussing the theories and legacy of Karl Popper. Worrall discussed Popper's theory of falsification in an episode of A History of Ideas broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 5 August 2015. Worrall was the president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in 2010–11 and a Vice President of the society in 2014–15.
Selected publications
Underdetermination, Realism and Empirical Equivalence, Synthese, Vol 80/2, 2011, pp. 157–172.
History and Theory-Confirmation in J. Worrall and C. Cheyne, Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006, pp. 31–61.
Why Science Discredits Religion in M. Peterson and R. Vanarragon, Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion. Blackwell, 2004
Kuhn, Bayes and "Theory-Choice": How Revolutionary is Kuhn's Account of Theoretical Change? in R. Nola and H. Sankey : After Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend: Recent Issues in Theories of Scientific Method, 2000;
