To Be Is To Be The Value

The Totality Of Our So-called Knowledge Or Beliefs, From The Most Casual Matters Of Geography And History To The Profoundest Laws Of Atomic Physics Or Even Of Pure Mathematics And Logic, Is A Man-made Fabric Which Impinges On Experience Only Along The Edges. Or, To Change The Figure, Total Science Is Like A Field Of Force Whose Boundary Conditions Are Experience.

The Lore Of Our Fathers Is A Fabric Of Sentences. In Our Hands It Develops And Changes, Through More Or Less Arbitrary And Deliberate Revisions And Additions Of Our Own, More Or Less Directly Occasioned By The Continuing Stimulation Of Our Sense Organs. It Is A Pale Gray Lore, Black With Fact And White With Convention. But I Have Found No Substantial Reasons For Concluding That There Are Any Quite Black Threads In It, Or Any White Ones.

Yields Falsehood When Preceded By Its Quotation.

Unlike Descartes, We Own And Use Our Beliefs Of The Moment, Even In The Midst Of Philosophizing, Until By What Is Vaguely Called Scientific Method We Change Them Here And There For The Better. Within Our Own Total Evolving Doctrine, We Can Judge Truth As Earnestly And Absolutely As Can Be, Subject To Correction, But That Goes Without Saying.

For Me The Problem Of Induction Is A Problem About The World: A Problem Of How We, As We Are Now (by Our Present Scientific Lights), In A World We Never Made, Should Stand Better Than Random, Or Coin-tossing Chances Changes Of Coming Out Right When We Predict By Inductions. . . .