Reading paths · Five steps
How we know things
Five steps that do not agree with each other. The disagreement is the point.
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The Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan
Why the question is urgent rather than academic, argued by someone who is patient with the people he disagrees with.
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Cosmos
Carl Sagan
Science as a way of seeing rather than a body of results. The case for the method, made by demonstration.
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
The complication: science does not actually advance the way the first two books make it feel like it does.
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An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
The problem underneath all three, stated two centuries earlier and still unresolved.
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The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
Added last because it is the one modern attempt to answer Hume rather than restate him. Deutsch argues that good explanations, not observations, are what knowledge is made of — a position the previous four make you want.
A path is an order, not a syllabus. Every step says why it sits where it does, so you can disagree with the sequence on the evidence rather than on faith.