Kwame Anthony Appiah: belief

Transcript context

…But not just incomplete, but wrong. What core views or models of yours are most likely to be wrong? My inclination is to believe about the basic physical structure of the world that some mixture of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity can be made to work. But we’ve been trying to do that for a very long time — basically since they were invented, those two theories — and we haven’t had a huge amount of success. What people seem to think, currently, is the most plausible way of reconciling them strikes me as (a) incredibly difficult to understand — string theory, and (b) something that a reasonable person might doubt. But if you ask me what I think the best current physical theory is, I’m going to say string theory, but with a sort of confidence that’s probably below half. [laughs] Take Pan-Africanism. Do you think, in the broader course of history, this will go down as merely a 20th-century idea? Or is Pan-Africanism alive and well today?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.