What do you do when, as is the usual case, you don’t have a definite measure for judging the achievement of your intended act? You go ahead and act on your intuition. Not only do artists not suffer for lacking a standard, their work is better for it. And most of the worthwhile in living is an art. Karl Popper speaks to the point in terms of a criterion of truth, but what he says holds generally:
I believe that it is the demand for a criterion of truth which has made so many people feel that the question ‘What is truth?’ is unanswerable. But the absence of a criterion of truth does not render the notion of truth non-significant any more than the absence of a criterion of health renders the notion of health non-significant. A sick man may seek health even though he has no criterion for it. An erring man may seek truth even though he has no criterion for it.
And both may simply seek health, or truth, without much bothering about the meanings of these terms which they (and others) understand well enough for their purposes. (Quoted from The Open Society and Its Enemies, v. II, by Karl R. Popper, Princeton University Press, p. 373.)
For a brief biography of Karl R. Popper, click here.
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