Think Science .

Fallibility and robustness are important for a ‘good’ theory. A ‘good’ theory should have scope for tests to verify it’s hypotheses and moreover shouldn’t be ambiguous to throw many feasible ’solutions’ from which a convenient one can be chosen without any rationale. Another important criteria for a good theory is universality. It should conform to all the events of the universe. A ‘better’ theory also predicts some unobserved yet verifiable events whose discovery would further strengthen the theory. ( Lee Smolin has a lot to say on this in the first few chapters of ‘The trouble with physics’)

I don’t want to digress but I am not convinced with David Deutsch’s view on epistemology. When totally discarding empiricism, is he accounting for abstraction, a powerful tool which human brain possesses? We don’t see mathematical formula in mountain but we have the power to abstract certain properties which can be mapped to a mathematical model, or at least that’s what I feel. It’s true that all observations are theory-laden and one can say that knowledge is conjectural but how are the conjectures arrived at? My feeling is by applying our tool of abstraction to the observations made. Moreover if some(or all) knowledge is innate, the question is how did we get those innate knowledge?

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