Why humans discover

We humans are a remarkably inquisitive and exploratory species, and very optimistic about discovery. We tend to assume that we live in a world that is orderly, intelligible, and accessible, such that we can reveal the reasons why things happen the way they do, that these reasons will make sense to us, and that explanations for natural phenomena must necessarily be the same for everyone everywhere. What rash confidence! What faith! Social theorists, philosophers, and others who encourage each other to divorce their thought from practicality can toy with abandoning this old-fashioned commitment, but even these people eventually power down their computers and walk around in the real world. There they, like the rest of us, implicitly expect things to operate by consistent rules that obtain in a physical universe that extends far beyond our individual or collective heads. Moreover, they, like all of us, benefit constantly in society from the way that this presumptuous “discovery attitude” has played out in the careers of thousands of scientists, engineers, and inventors. To ask why are we like this seems trivial, an essay whose conclusion would be new to no one. We are intelligent, and intelligent creatures (in this sense) investigate things and want to understand and control their environments; and our unflagging confidence comes from the successes that we have had in such understanding and control. But a couple of provocative after-dinner questions will suffice to show that we hold diverse and contradictory opinions on these matters, and that an informed person can find two frequently argued and opposing views both very plausible.