The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded?

transmutation – the conversion of one chemical element into another

How do we know? One of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious, local means by which we create them.

Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves.

For most of the history of science, it was mistakenly believed that we ‘derive’ them from the evidence of our senses – a philosophical doctrine known as empiricism:

They are guesses – bold conjectures.

Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.

Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.

despite being quite wrong about where scientific knowledge comes from, empiricism was a great step forward

That alleged process was called ‘inductive inference’ or ‘induction’, and the doctrine that scientific theories are obtained in that way is called inductivism. To bridge the logical gap, some inductivists imagine that there is a principle of nature – the ‘principle of induction’ – that makes inductive inferences likely to be true. ‘The future will resemble the past’

inductivism’s two most serious misconceptions.

First, inductivism purports to explain how science obtains predictions about experiences. But most of our theoretical knowledge simply does not take that form.

Scientific explanations are about reality, most of which does not consist o...

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’,

the future is unlike the past,

Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before.

since inductivism is false, empiricism must be as well.

one cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations.

Discovering a new explanation is inherently an ac...

they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

As for the celestial sphere, despite being visible in broad daylight (as the sky), it does not exist at all.

our explanatory theories

can be improved, through conjecture, criticism and testing.

Empiricism never did achieve its aim of liberating science from authority. It denied the legitimacy of traditional au...

misconception that knowledge needs authority

justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge.

‘by what authority do we claim . .

This misconception is called justificationism.

fallibilism.

to those of us for whom creating knowledge means understanding better what is really there, and how it really behaves and why, fallibilism is part of the very means by which this is achieved.

Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are

predisposed to try to change them fo...

it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,*

So we perceive nothing as what it really is. It is all theoretical interpretation: conjecture.

People observed the world. They tried to understand it – but almost entirely in vain.

the Enlightenment

rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

That is the context in which empiricism – purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge – played such a salutary historical role, despite being fundamentally false

The Enlightenment was at root a philosophical change.

Testability

Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.

instrumentalism. It denies that what I have been calling ‘explanation’ can exist at all.

realism, the common-sense, and true, doctrine that the physical world really exists, and is accessible to rational inquiry.

relativism,

A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb.

Just as conflicting predictions are the occasion for experiment and observation, so conflicting ideas in a broader sense are the occasion for all rational thought and inquiry.

we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not adequately capture or explain it.

shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children