00:00:00.000 Once we realize that our theories cannot be certain, nothing helps but save criticism in this
00:00:15.600 It is the only thing by which we can improve our theories, get them nearer to the tools.
00:00:23.400 The trouble with self-criticism of the crosonian kind, if I may put it like that, rather than
00:00:30.120 the kind which is undertaken at the behest of the political police, is that it is like trying
00:00:36.920 It just doesn't work, or perhaps even trying to hit yourself over the head with a hammer.
00:00:44.120 And in invincible affection prevents one putting any real force behind the blow.
00:00:49.960 In other words, in general, intellectual self-criticism often fails because the critic and
00:01:02.600 Well, an implication of that, of course, that science can't be an activity conducted by
00:01:11.640 a Robinson Crusoe without effective criticism, is that science is a social institution,
00:01:17.160 and in your later writings you develop this a good deal into the idea of the theory
00:01:22.840 of objective knowledge, that as well as the knowledge that in some sense or other contained
00:01:29.360 in the brains or minds of individual knowers, there is common knowledge which to some extent
00:01:37.640 contains or overlaps that individual knowledge, but to a considerable extent goes beyond
00:01:45.080 Now, what I want to illustrate is the distinction between two kinds of knowledge.
00:01:56.080 The knowledge, let us say, I know and the knowledge, it is known.
00:02:04.760 I know is knowledge in the subjective sense and it is known in the objective sense.
00:02:16.640 I want to stress that the basic knowledge is, of course, subjective knowledge which is known
00:02:28.760 I will however show how far you can build beyond this basic knowledge and how incredibly
00:02:37.360 important knowledge in the objective sense has become especially, especially since the invention
00:02:47.960 of language, of writing, of printing and everything which follows up to this logarithms,
00:02:59.440 books of logarithms, these can be computed and a computer can be made to print out a book
00:03:12.840 Of course, we have somebody has to have the subjective knowledge needed for instructing
00:03:21.320 the computer who will compose these logarithms, but the actual logarithms will be known
00:03:30.320 only by the people who use them and it is unlikely that they will be ever used more than
00:03:39.040 a main new traction of what is in a full book of logarithm, let us say, up to seven
00:03:49.640 days of words, it would be a library needed for keeping them.
00:03:57.520 So there will be objective knowledge not used, not known to anybody.
00:04:06.160 Now, theories are important for our lives in a sense in which it is rarely realized.
00:04:17.080 Think of all that which is involved in a flight from let us see London to Edinburgh.
00:04:28.800 Now, Singapore can have the knowledge in his head which actually enters here into this
00:04:37.120 question of safety and it is a lot of knowledge of subjective knowledge which is here related,
00:04:55.160 One of the subjective knowledge is in the various people's head so fast and something
00:05:02.800 is there which nobody has in his head, namely the way in which all this is interlinked.
00:05:11.080 This is built up by an organization and this organization is objective and impersonal or
00:05:20.160 whether it has been developed during many years by mainly the correction of mistakes
00:05:31.200 Now, in this sense, the realm of objective knowledge is great, very great, very important.
00:05:42.480 The best example still is libraries and the interesting thing is that the philosophers
00:05:51.960 who have dealt with the theory of knowledge have overlooked this.
00:05:57.840 They all sort of knowledge in the certain primary subjective sense in which people cause
00:06:07.240 they are and act on the basis of what they remember, what they know.
00:06:17.480 Hardly anybody has seen that the product of our thinking which are very largely expectations,
00:06:29.760 there is especially theories that the product of our thinking is really a kind of knowledge
00:06:41.400 which just as well as the right to be called knowledge and is called as always knowledge.
00:06:49.800 We speak of scientific knowledge, meaning of course objective knowledge.
00:06:56.000 To the product of our thinking becomes impossible.
00:07:01.720 There is a remark of books which comes to mind here, something like the individual is foolish
00:07:09.840 That perhaps doesn't want to be taken too literally since if the species is to become wise,
00:07:14.120 it becomes wise through the intellectual enterprise of particular individuals within it.
00:07:21.840 It seems to be a moral is that the individual can only make intellectual progress by utilizing
00:07:29.520 the accumulated tradition of knowledge and procedures for acquiring knowledge which constitute
00:07:43.800 But there is one particular thing you say, you go on to say about objective knowledge
00:07:48.640 where you say it's best understood in an evolutionary perspective that it's something
00:07:54.600 that's evolved in a more or less Darwinian way by selective preservation of some favorable
00:08:02.400 elements and the competitive exclusion of undesirable elements.
00:08:08.240 Now one actually do see as the significance of this comparison, perhaps it's more than
00:08:16.640 As there is indeed a theory, it is called a revolutionary theory of knowledge which plays
00:08:26.160 now a considerable role in biology and in evolutionary biology, especially since the last
00:08:37.600 great development in genetics and this theory is really an application of the trial and
00:08:51.520 error theory, the theory of that we learn by trial and error elimination, learn from
00:09:03.360 our mistakes, one can see that from the amoeba to Einstein there is only one step, both
00:09:16.000 learn by trial and error and the elimination of error, the main differences that Einstein
00:09:28.440 is intensely self-critical, which the amoeba is not, Einstein develops his theories
00:09:39.080 and throws them into the waste paper basket many times before he comes to the theory
00:09:47.680 which he would perhaps publish, the new way of looking at these things is really that
00:10:02.520 life from the beginning is problem solving by this method of trial and error elimination
00:10:16.600 and this holds both for the individual organism and for the species and the evolution of
