Introduction

This is the conclusion of Popper's grand lecture "On the sources of knowledge and of ignorance". We reach part 13 and move all the way through to part 17 - the conclusion. This is a celebration of Popper's epistemology. He summarises his outlook on how other views are mistaken and what it really takes to generate knowledge. He speaks of his vision as a critical rationalism and a critical empiricism - a form of knowledge creation that corrects the errors in advances made nearer to the beginning of the Enlightenment but also in the mould of some of the ancients like Xenophanes. Popper explains how truth is real and objective and why the idea that anyone can possess the truth causes knowledge to become subjective, rather than objective (in short because anyone claiming to possess the truth is themselves a subject claiming authority over truth). Popper explains in this part of the lecture how we are all equal in our infinite ignorance - and so his philosophy reaches into humanism - a celebration of fallibility and of our capacity to come to understand reality.