Fallibility and Growth
Progress is provisional, incomplete, and continuously shifting
At the heart of the idea of an open society lies the principle of fallibility. Fallibility implies that individual knowledge of reality is provisional and incomplete. Humans are incapable of measuring and analyzing the entirety of the world. As a result, we resort to the use of mental shortcuts and theoretical constructs.
Constructs are models, but no model is a perfect reflection of the underlying reality. Maps, for instance, are used to navigate across the territory, but they do not reflect the territory as it is. Constructs, just like maps, have to leave out many concrete features in order to allow us, by picking out parts and thinking of them as representing the whole, to comprehend the “chaos of human experience.”
Constructs are essential to understanding reality because they allow us to transcend the limits imposed by the problem of induction. For there is no logically valid reason to believe that “those instances, of which we have had no experience, resemble those, of which we have had experience,” according to Hume. We usually justify our belief that, say, the ball will move if we hit it by invoking the fact that, in the past, when we applied force to the ball, it moved. However, saying that the future will resemble the past because, in the…
