ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the basic Enlightenment idea of learning from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards an enlightened world. Despite the enormous improvements that Karl Popper has made to the traditional Enlightenment Programme, his version of the Programme is defective. The basic intellectual aim of inquiry may be said to be not knowledge, but wisdom — wisdom being understood to be the desire, the active endeavour and the capacity to realize what is desirable and of value in life, for oneself and others. The basic intellectual aim of the kind of inquiry we are considering is to devote reason to the discovery of what is of value in life. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper claims that the more falsifiable a theory is, so the greater its degree of simplicity. Any conception of rationality that systematically leads us astray must be defective.
