I know this one, but the answer is complex…

There is a seductive logic in Abelson's 1979 paper Differences between belief and knowledge systems. This seduction comes in the form of an implicit promise that the formulation of a working epistemological address to the problems raised in the paper will give us a toolset that will blow away the fog of belief from the human landscape. This paper proposes that the very dynamism that makes the human landscape a swamp of wicked problems makes Abelson's conjecture – however true they may be on a meta scale – an unproductive addition to the designers toolbox. It proposes that middle-range theories offer productive addresses to the complex systems and wicked problems that define our world. This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.