Is the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future.

David Deutsch, a renouned phisicist, postulates that Knowledge consists of explanations (assertions about what is out there beyond the appearances). For most of the history , we had almo...

Are ideas that replicate.

The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, includi...

• Empiricism: said that we derive it from sensory experience. False, We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. We create new explanations through conjecture. One cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly c...

Problems are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too.

Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no cont...

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.

There is only one way of making progress: conjecture (guesses) and criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The rol...

Science is not about prediction. But explanations. Predictions are used to validate new explanations.

• Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge. 
• A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of b...

2 interpretations of human progress inspired 2 broad branches of the Enlightenment:

1. The Continental Enlightenment understood that problems are soluble but not that they are inevitable
2. The British Enlightenment understood both equally.