Geoff Allen tackles his favourite set of overarching questions: ‘What is true?’… ‘What is real?’… ‘What exists “out there” in reality?’... He presents the core debate between scientific realists and social constructivists. (Can we say that electrons are ‘real’, or are they simply sociocultural constructs?)

We are all guided by personal tastes, interests and biases – buffeted by our our biology and psychology. We expect judges to overcome these constructs in order to create ‘justice’. We expect scientists to overcome these constructs in order to discover ‘truth’. Perhaps this is asking too much.

The history of things that were created (novels, pyramids, declarations of independence) necessarily involves a story about human authorship – acts by someone. That is the greasy human handprint on the history of knowledge-making. Can we discern any ‘truth’ behind these smudges? Can humans grasp mind-independent reality?

Topics also include: Trump and the post-truth attitude; scientific realism and climate science; empirical regularities versus metaphysical regularities; why scientific knowledge is special.

A bibliography for each episode is available here: https://geoffallenwriting.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/extrapolator-bibliography/

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