The initial guesses at what knowledge was all about

amounted to what is known as the justified true belief vision of knowledge and it's still the most prevalent idea today

Anyone who calls themselves a Bayesian is a justified true believer and that's the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify

As true your beliefs and if you've done so then you can say I know that thing

So if I can justify as true my theory of gravity then I should believe that theory of gravity and only then can I say that it's known

The problem with this is that there is no method of showing as true any piece of knowledge

So the improvement doach promotes in his books is this vision that pop a gave us that

All we have are guesses about reality

Conjectures people think oh that sounds a bit wishy-washy. It's just a guess

Well, it's not a random guess. It's not just anyone decides to have a guess and therefore that stands on equal footing to every other

No, it's a guess that has stood up against trials against attempts to show that it's false and

When people are unable to show that it's false fire this method of refutation then we accept it as a piece of knowledge

This allows us to thereby

Accept the fact that we're going to be able to make progress in the future because all of our knowledge is conjectural

All of it is our best guess at the time and therefore there's this elasticity within the knowledge that allows us to say

There's going to be errors we're going to correct them and thereby be able to make progress off into the infinite future

This is unlike the previous conception of knowledge which says once you've justified something is true

Well, it's true if it's true that means there is nothing false about it and therefore it can't possibly be refuted

It's a very religious notion the modern incantation of this is Bayesianism Bayesianism says you have a theory

You collect more evidence and you become more and more confident over time that your theory is correct

And it gets a little bit worse than that because then it says this Bayesian reasoning enables you to generate

New theories which are can't the best that it can hope to do is to show you that you are more confident in this theory than what you are in that theory

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