Sublime

We do not begin with ‘white paper’ at birth, but with inborn expectations and intentions and an innate ability to improve upon them using thought and experience. Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose

Recentrant son propos sur le politique, il s’agit de démontrer que la meilleure organisation publique est celle qui laisse à chacun la liberté de croire, de penser et de s’exprimer.

Note that the economist Robert Lucas dealt a blow to econometrics by arguing that if people were rational then their rationality would cause them to figure out predictable patterns from the past and adapt, so that past information would be completely useless for predicting the future (the argument, phrased in a very mathematical form, earned him

Inductivism seeks to justify predictions as likely to hold in the future. Problem-solving justifies an explanation as being better than other explanations available in the present. Inductivism is a dangerous and recurring source of many sorts of error, because it is superficially so plausible. But it is not true.

For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.

Just about every fault in the Popperian book!