18.45, Monday 1 Jul 2002

Karl Popper's Approach to Knowledge places Popper in the field of beliefs (a Revolutionary Conventionalist, apparently) and outlines his classification of knowledge into three worlds: One is of objective truth; Two is of subjective understanding; World Three emerges out of the two before and is the cultural truth, accepted knowledge, myth I guess. Okay, so I'd like to explore World Three a little more. Any resources, thoughts, let me know.

More on that taxonomy of metatheories of knowledge (that's a better link): It looks like Conventionalists don't believe that observations are necessarily equivalent to objective truth. The Revolutionary Conventionalists put a feedback loop in here -- our basic assumptions affect our experiences; it's our experiences that we use to build our assumptions (I think I've got this right, and: I can go with that).

Merge this with cultural truths and World Three and I guess you have a time-evolving reality. At which point I have to collapse back, having over-reached, and say: what kind of truth/reality do we mean here? Does my cultural knowledge really affect the existence of stars in the night sky? How much?