> Unfortunately, what we know about epistemology is contained largely in the work of the philosopher Karl Popper and is almost universally underrated and misund

> Unfortunately, what we know about epistemology is contained largely in the work of the philosopher Karl Popper and is almost universally underrated and misunderstood (even — or perhaps especially — by philosophers). For example, it is still taken for granted by almost every authority that knowledge consists of justified, true beliefs ------------------- The Gettier problem has been well known in Philosophy since the 60s. Probably the most famous example would be barn-façades, first showing up in the mid 70s. It's taught in undergraduate courses. It's the second bullet point on the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's Epistemology article. ------------------- > How could I have ‘extrapolated’ that there would be such a sharp departure from an unbroken pattern of experiences, and that a never-yet-observed process (the 17,000-year interval) would follow? ------------------- One rather assumes your experience with numbers has included 20 following 19 before and you extrapolated the rules from that and similar experiences with assigning numbers to things. You were, after all, previously told that it's how years worked - and doubtless you've lived through at least one year changing. ------------------- > Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not ‘true’ in the sense studied in mathematics and logic. Thinking consists of criticising and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or justifying extrapolations from sense data. ------------------- Be that as it may, some guesses are better than others. Generally the guesses that are based on more data. You lock someone in a room for 19 years, don't talk to them beyond the basic social interaction required for them to develop language, and then ask them to guess what an atom bomb is, they're not going to get very far. Even guessing what an atom is, or a bomb they'd be hopelessly out of the context of their experience. Guesses, in so far as they're meaningful, have foundations. Those foundations limit what you can guess about and have any practical chance of refining towards truth with more evidence. You can't start off knowing nothing and then go to nuclear weapons in one step. You have to make smaller guesses, based on what you know. And much though the author you might criticise Bayesian probability, this is bound up in the idea that probability is based on dividing the search space between the explanations we can come up with for a thing and then weighting it with evidence.