Deutsch Explains

"The ability of scientific theories to predict the future depends on the reach of their explanations." @DavidDeutschOxf, The Beginning of Infinity. ––Chapter 9: Optimism.

"Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address." @DavidDeutschOxf, The Fabric of Reality. ––Chapter 4: Criteria for Reality.

"Science has limitations. Reason, however, does not. There will be ultimate limits of science beyond which their progress will only ever be made with philosophy, broadly speaking." @DavidDeutschOxf

"The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theories." @DavidDeutschOxf

"Rational criticism compares rival theories with the aim of finding which of them offers the best explanations according to the criteria inherent in the problem." @DavidDeutschOxf, The Fabric of Reality. —Chapter 3: Problem-solving.

"Science is a way of dealing with theories regardless of whether or not one believes them." @DavidDeutschOxf

"The tradition of criticism is responsible for moral progress in societies that best institutionalize criticism." @DavidDeutschOxf

"An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate and is based on traditions of criticism." @DavidDeutschOxf

"We make our progress through explanatory conjectures and criticism. And, as Popper says, by letting our ideas 'die in our place'." @DavidDeutschOxf

"Just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them." @DavidDeutschOxf, The Beginning of Infinity. —Chapter 15: The Evolution of Culture.

"Empiricism miscasts science as an automatic, non-creative process. And art, though acknowledged as ‘creative’, has often been seen as the antithesis of science, and hence irrational, random, inexplicable – and hence unjudgeable, and non-objective. But if beauty is objective,…

"We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand." @DavidDeutschOxf, The Fabric of Reality. ––Chapter 1: The…

"Once an irrational idea is embedded in a culture, it creates psychological pressure on any member of that culture not to allow themselves to question that idea: people whose respect you psychologically depend on will despise you if you do. So an anti-rational meme emerges."…

"Conjectures are the products of creative imagination. But the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth." @DavidDeutschOxf

"The best argument against moral equivalency is that denying that one culture is better than another entails denying that the future state of one's own culture can be better than the present. It denies the possibility of progress, is hostile to it, and sides with evil."…

"Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity." @DavidDeutschOxf