Sublime

predicting the future is integral to a scientific paradigm’s success.

It is hard to know where to begin in criticizing the inductivist conception of science – it is so profoundly false in so many different ways. Perhaps the worst flaw, from my point of view, is the sheer non sequitur that a generalized prediction is tantamount to a new theory.

Charles Sanders Peirce’s observation that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically, which means that if you insist on rigorous proof of the merits of an idea during its development, you will kill it if it is truly a breakthrough idea, because there will be no proof of its breakthrough characteristics in advanc

Popperian maxim that one should always be willing to carry on the discussion in the opponent’s terminology.)

Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples.

Learning to think is all about what another 20th-century philosopher, Karl Popper, came later to call ‘conjectures and refutations’. Everyday problem solving, suggested Dewey (and Popper), comprises a process a bit like going into a coconut shy: you put ideas up and you do your best to knock them down again; you shouldn’t just accept the first idea

In short, we can rely only on what we learn from experience.

No-holds-barred public debate is the most reliable process for attaining such knowledge, since other processes—accepting another’s authority, following emotions, agreeing with the most attractive advertising, acting on gut-instincts—are not directed toward knowledge and reach it only by accident. The higher the level of public debate—that is, the c