OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, MAY 2016A good explanation—such as the microbial theory of disease, or evolutionary theory—can bring a wondrous sense of understanding. Unfortunately, for a time, so can a bad one—like the medieval miasma (or “foul-cloud”) theory of disease, or supernatural accounts of the creation of species. Does our sense of understanding carry any objective signs that we are right? If not, what accounts for the dramatic success of modern science, a success driven by ever-more powerful and accurate explanatory understanding? This is the question I take up in Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science.
A sense of understanding exercises a visceral grip on us: visceral because explanation itself has a biological backstory. The simple sea slug Aplysia cannot explain, but it can learn. It can learn, through classical conditioning, to retract from a noxious stimulus, and through operant conditioning, to bite more frequently. To learn, an organism need only anticipate: it is all a matter of frequent exposure and coherent expectation. In humans, this learned anticipation of reward or punishment tells us what to expect. We like good feelings, and we want more of them. But that doesn’t mean satisfying feelings or actual rewards track consistently with truth.
Objective truth is similarly decoupled from the sensation of insight. Some researchers describe insight as an “aha” moment that can result ...
