ABSTRACT
Suppose you and I both accept the Core Scientific Story. When people contradict it, for example by saying the sun is smaller than the earth, we judge them to be mistaken. We do so from our own point of view, which means we do it on the basis of our own theory. (We could hardly do it on the basis of someone else’s.) That doesn’t mean we regard our theory as beyond correction. We are open to reason. We have to admit the likelihood that some of our beliefs, though we don’t know which, are false. But at any particular time we assume our theory is true – that is why it is ours – and there are parts of it which at present we cannot imagine could be seriously mistaken. For example, I cannot imagine how we could be mistaken in the belief that the sun is bigger than the earth.
