How Much of Science is "Just" Thinking About the Right Things?

People seeking usable knowledge of how we know what we know, and what is truth, and how to only know what is true and not know what isn't so will almost certainly spend some time thinking about science, and why it is "successful".

In High School science texts, in my day, they gave a quick tour of certain canonical facts, but also made some feeble attempt to answer the question of why science works.  The answer they gave was something like "The Experimental Method".  It is something like:

On finding a tractable domain.

Oceans of ink have been spilled trying to explain successful sciences by characterizing methods, and such requirements as that meaningful propositions must have conceivable falsifications.

But has it been suggested that the biggest reason for the success of a few domains of knowledge it that they looked in the right direction, and found a tractable domain?

The kernel of truth in postmodernism

The kernel of truth in postmodernism, with its obsession with the modern "gaze" and "master narratives" is, if you look at the world from a Gods-eye point of view (as the universal observer as opposed to just you - in whatever weak position you happen to be in) -- whatever solutions you may think of to the worlds problems will tend to start with "STEP 1: Get control of everything".  Step 2 may be "Nationalize all wealth", or it may be "Reduce government to the functions of preventing crime and enforcing contracts", but you will never get to step 2, but be stuck making a mess of step 1 forever.

Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, Black Swans, etc.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a trilogy of books about the sort of human tendencies (and/or tendencies of our culture) that helped  bring about the financial meltdown and the current recession.

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Truth-seeking, Human Nature, the Big Ideas, and the little observations.

Something in human nature draws us towards promises of great truths, or what at least seem to be great truths, like how it all began, or great unifying truths that promise to reveal all people as alike in some way, or that all of matter, movement, and space have a set of unifying rules brief enough to be put in a book.

One great discovery of the Enlightenment, which put us on the road to modern science and technology, was that the key to accumulating vast storehouses of useful knowledge was for many people to seek many small truths, even consciously resisting the urge to sum up the "big picture".

The Social Epistemology of Alvin Goldman and others

Far from dismissing academic epistemology, I have been spending a lot of time with it lately, to the point of attending a graduate workshop on social epistemology after doing much preparatory reading.  Social epistemology as practiced by Alvin Goldman and his colleagues squarely faces the fact that we know all but a tiny amount of what we know through the testimony of others, and through our ability to distinguish reliable and unreliable sources of information.

Truthology or Epistemology?

To the students and professors of philosophy who may look at what I'm doing (and I hope there are some), why even consider an undignified sounding made-up word like truthology rather than epistemology?

Short answers: (1) I would like to foreground the word "truth". (2) After  years, my wife still asks "Remind me which is epistemology and which is ontology?"

Is there a "New Rationalism"? CFAR or Center for Applied Rationality, LessWrong.com, etc.

From time to time the discovery is made that most people think pretty irrationally.  Often too, people have gotten the idea that some kind of new emphasis on rationality will put an end to the horrors of despotism, warfare, and much more.  Perhaps it will work out some day, but experience suggests caution, and I doubt we have seen the last of the false hopes raised by such thinking.  I don't want to attack CFAR (see below) and its siblings, but I do approach them skeptically.

Why I got started on this path (The Real Truth Project, then Truthology 101)

A "good enough" grasp of reality is necessary to our very survival.  Having an inaccurate view of reality can easily kill you. Winston Churchill was nearly killed in New York city because of a very simple misconception of reality he "knew" cars drive on the left side of the road.

Something ideological opposites can agree on

If there is one thing that people of the most opposite political opinions can agree on, it is that an alarming number of people are wrong about the plain facts regarding very important issues.

It may sound like a joke to call this a shared concern, when each side is pointing accusingly at the other's wrongheadedness, but is there any way to turn this agreement into a movement or project to raise our national "Truth Quotient"?