The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Here is an even more speculative possibility. The largest benefits of any universality, beyond whatever parochial problem it is intended to solve, come from its being useful for further innovation. And innovation is unpredictable. So, to appreciate universality at the time of its discovery, one must either value abstract knowledge for its own sake or expect it to yield unforeseeable benefits. In a society that rarely experienced change, both those attitudes would be quite unnatural. But that was reversed with the Enlightenment, whose quintessential idea is, as I have said, that progress is both desirable and attainable. And so, therefore, is universality. Be that as it may, with the Enlightenment, parochialism and all arbitrary exceptions and limitations began to be regarded as inherently problematic – and not only in science. Why should the law treat an aristocrat differently from a commoner? A slave from a master? A woman from a man? Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke set out to free political institutions from arbitrary rules and assumptions. Others tried to derive moral maxims from universal moral explanations rather than merely to postulate them dogmatically. Thus universal explanatory theories of justice, legitimacy and morality began to take their place alongside universal theories of matter and motion. In all those cases, universality was being sought deliberately, as a desirable feature in its own right – even a necessary feature for an idea to be true – and...