Daily Maieutic

W. W. Bartley III on the sociology and economics of knowledge; concluding remarks:

" To sum up the conclusions reached in the first Part of this study: what we think we know, the knowledge that we have, is unlikely to be right; even if it is right, it is autonomous, independent from us, and imperfectly known to us. /Far from being manifestly true, it is unfathomed knowledge/. And whether right or wrong, perfectly or imperfectly known, it is subject to distortion arising even from the very form in which it presents itself.

Rather than being a cause for despair, these circumstances give point to rational investigation and, especially, to education. For the fundamental task of education is /unlearning/: making ourselves, and the ideas by which we conceive and create ourselves, strange and alien, and thus transcending our old selves.

Hence it is worth recalling that theories of education today often wrongly, yet in accordance with the sociology of knowledge, characterise the educational process as little more than a good opportunity, provided by the state, for teacher and student to express themselves. But education, because of the nature of objective knowledge, is far more than organised mutual self-expression. It is at once the enactment, the reconstruction, and the creation of culture. The teacher must present a structure of knowledge that he does not fully understand to a student who also cannot hope to fully understand it. Such a relationship is perhaps the smallest social unit in the 'marketplace of ideas,' but it illustrates, once again, how - despite all distortions - such a market acts as a discovery process in a situation in which none of us knows what we are doing. "

_Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth (1990), Chapter 4, p. 85

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

- Probably the most beautiful passage in Charles Darwin's _The Origin of Species_