John Lisle

So the capacity for humans to rationalize things, if you start from a false premise, we can rationalize a world to make sure that we believe in that false premise.

And it's not—

People typically associate rationalization with religion or this kind of cult behavior like this group I explained.

But actually, I'm a historian of science, and it actually plays an important role in science itself, like the method of science, how science works.

If you don't mind, if I can briefly describe the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn.

He's this famous philosopher of science.

He wrote the most influential book in the philosophy of science called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, basically explaining how does science change or progress over time.

His concept was that scientists operate within a paradigm, a worldview.

So we believe in Newtonian gravity or we have the worldview of the germ theory of disease or whatever it is.

So this is our paradigm, whatever group of scientists we are.

Within that paradigm, we do normal science.

He says puzzle solving.

We do experiments to try to prove our paradigm right.

So if my paradigm is, you know, if I'm a follower of Ptolemy and I believe in the geocentric universe, I'm going to be observing the way that the, you know, the planets and the stars are moving across the sky to try to prove Ptolemy right.

I'm going to try to prove that his predictions actually come true.

So this is just called puzzle solving.

What scientists actually do, Thomas Kuhn says, many of them, they just puzzle solve.

They just try to prove the paradigm right.

In the process of doing that, they uncover occasionally an anomaly.

An anomaly is something that seems to contradict the paradigm.