00:00:00.000 It was popular as skeptic, not in the philosophical sense of the word, it was quite the opposite.
00:00:12.280 Skeptics believe in the justified true belief theory of knowledge.
00:00:15.800 They rightly conclude, one can never be absolutely certain about knowledge claims, but then
00:00:20.080 they wrongly conclude that this means knowledge isn't possible.
00:00:24.320 Papa was a critic of this idea, he rejected it completely, he threw it away route and branch
00:00:28.520 and started from the ground up, the idea here that he had was to divorce knowledge from
00:00:33.080 it being about certainties or justified truth, instead knowledge is possible because there
00:00:39.000 is an objective difference between knowledge claims.
00:00:42.280 None of them are final absolutes, but in almost all cases, always where there are two or more
00:00:47.840 competing claims, one of them is better than the others.
00:00:51.720 The process of criticism rules out all but one of the ideas, ideally.
00:00:57.080 The one that survives we say, I know that, that claim comes to be called a part of our
00:01:02.200 knowledge of the world, but it's always revizable, always improvable.
00:01:07.720 Papa wasn't a skeptic about knowledge, it was a critic and these are quite different things.
00:01:13.520 One assumes knowledge is not possible because certainty isn't, or the other says almost
00:01:20.520 The pursuit of knowledge and its objective growth and the improvement is only possible
00:01:26.200 because certainty is not, so to unpack this, if we were able to have the final certain word
00:01:32.200 on anything, then this would mean we would have direct access to the final certain truth,
00:01:37.200 and this would mean the quest for knowledge would stop.
00:01:39.720 We just tap into that ultimate source of truth and that would be that game over, we'd
00:01:44.160 never improve anything because we'd have the final complete answer and all the answers
00:01:49.600 So the pursuit of knowledge would stop, happily, the pursuit of knowledge isn't like this
00:01:53.080 at all, knowledge is hard one, and it comes to us with much misconception, almost all
00:01:58.440 we know contains misconception, and we can never be sure which is misconception and which
00:02:04.960 As long as our process of error correction keeps on sifting the misconceptions from the
00:02:08.920 kernels of truth so that we make progress, this is all we need to be able to say we are
00:02:13.200 creating knowledge, or that we are learning on making objective progress.
00:02:17.280 We can't know we've got the final truth ever, but what we can know is that our process
00:02:22.520 of criticism, experimental falsification and other kinds of refutation makes the ideas
00:02:28.000 that survive this process objectively better than the ideas that do not.
00:02:33.760 The purpose of science is to correct our knowledge of physical reality.
00:02:38.000 Here we see improvements most obviously perhaps, objective progress seems to be made all
00:02:42.480 the time, new medical discoveries improve our health and lengthen our lives, and Q&A
00:02:46.560 disease that was previously a death sentence, each new iPhone is better than the last
00:02:50.160 one, one great theory is overturned by another even better theory, new explanations
00:02:54.720 replace old ones, the new ones are not certainly true, they're just closer to these
00:02:59.720 on to logical truth, then it's rivals are, Carl Popper called this very silomitude,
00:03:06.440 this means closeness of truth, but by truth we mean the ontological truth.
