The issues of Truth and "objective knowledge" are critical matters for anyone interested in understanding Science of Ethics. Because historically science has been presented as the search for Truth, many of those excited by its discoveries and even those involved in it have been misled on these issues. Current understanding allows us to realize that Truth is about language statements not reality. Thinking we can obtain "objective knowledge" confuse observations with knowledge. In order to further address these matters a seminal book by an author qualified to speak on these matters is presented below. My "dialogue with the author" aims to explore these ideas as they relate to Science of Ethics. The seminal books is:

“THE TRUTH OF SCIENCE: Physical Theories and Reality,” Roger G. Newton, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.

p. 1: “As heirs of two clashing cultural progenitors, the Enlightenment (rational, orderly, measured) and the subsequent reaction of Romanticism (liberating, creative, irrational, and destructive), we approach the end of our millennium riding the wave of science but threatened by an undertow. From the crest we observe that the meteoric ascent of modern science allowed the West, and large parts of the rest of the world, to enjoy an economic prosperity previously unimaginable. The greatly accelerated pace of scientific advancement during this century has made all earlier human knowledge of the universe seem primitive and shallow. We have reason, now, to be confident that we understand a large part of the structure and constitution of the universe, from the interior of atoms to the farthest stars; we can successfully explain the mechanisms underlying the processes of matter and the forces between its constituents, and we are beginning to fathom the secrets of life from the gene to the brain.”

RESPONSE: In my mind what Newton says above is all true as far as it goes, and justifiable reason for pride in the achievements of our species. Certainly we understand a tremendous amount about how the universe seems to work at its biggest and smallest levels, and pretty much everywhere in between. Still, it would seem better to me that rather than having confidence “that we understand a large part of the structure and constitution of the universe,” we should recognize that our knowledge of the universe is quite limited. But that is OK.

But more importantly we need to recognize that all the understanding science has provided us now makes it possible to realize that Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System, not the universe. So no matter how much we learn about outside reality it is the application of that knowledge to improving the quality of human life that is most critical.

Science of Ethics is the result of all that science has shown us thus far especially biology as guided by Darwin’s contribution on evolution by natural selection. This provides us the understanding to recognize that meaning of life can be taken into the domain of science and actually provides the fundamental unifying principle for science.

p. 1: “The fruits of this knowledge in our ‘age of science’ are visible everywhere; they have transformed our lives and, with the conquest of many dreaded and devastating diseases, doubled our lifespan. Communication through radio and television, transportation by auto and plane, transmission of information through computers have shrunk our planet into a global village. Justified or not, these developments have give scientific pronouncements an unprecedented authority; scientists are called upon to make judgments and predictions concerning the fears and hopes of a population that trusts them perhaps more than any other group in our society.”

p. 2: “Nevertheless, we find everywhere, as well, a deplorable ignorance about the contents and character of science…. Others see only the dark side of the rapid advance – increasingly destructive weapons, environmental degradation…. The very success of science has spawned resentment against it.”

RESPONSE: It is my feeling that the foregoing results because science has failed to make the next step to utilize its findings to expand the application of naturalistic interpretations to everything in the universe including the area of “meaning of life.”

Up to this point the knowledge provided by science has been turned over to those who are motivated by non-naturalistic images who have often used this knowledge destructively and left science holding the bag. Until science replaces non-science we can’t expect much improvement in the foregoing. As discussed above the real culprit in all the foregoing is not science, but folk religions. Because folk religions are now the alchemy and astrology of our age we have no guidance in using the power and possibilities science has placed in our hands. Therefore, our greatest need is for a Science of Ethics.

p. 2-3: “This antagonism, aimed primarily at the physical and biological sciences, comes from two diametrically opposed directions. Those who are in despair over a widespread deterioration of moral and cultural values blame the skepticism and eternal uncertainty of science for eroding the comfortable feeling of certitude and security they drew from their spiritual beliefs…. From the opposite direction, some practitioners of the more recent and less developed social and political sciences question the claim that the world truly is understood through science…. Influential sociologists announce with great confidence that the results of science – painstakingly gained by much observation, experimentation, and thought over the last four hundred years – have nothing to do with Nature and the external world under investigation, but are simply narratives, like myths and fairy tales, or the outcome of social agreements. Scientific “truths,” they say, express the special perspective of the group from which they originate and are designed to further the group’s political advantage.”

RESPONSE: Certainly both of the above anti-science forces are very real. But it seems to me that they both come out of a problem Science of Ethics might help to solve. For both fundamentalists and post-modernists the Human Beings As the Ultimate Reference System concept when understood might help them recognize that science is not the enemy, rather it would then provide the answer to what has diverted them into non-productive paths: for fundamentalists a rigid attachment to dogma of a relativist nature, and for post-modernists getting hung up on cultural relativity.

And at the same time this concept would not weaken science. Rather it would ground and guide it in ways not possible up to this time.

p. 3: “These ideas, hardly the harmless errors of a few mis-guided ignoramuses, are bound to have results detrimental to our society and corrosive to civilization as a whole. A world full of ignorance and superstition is a world full of fear, hatred, and panic.”

RESPONSE: And that is why Science of Ethics is so desperately needed in the world especially now that traditional stabilizing forces are disappearing under the impact of advancing technology and communications.

p. 3: “That social influences exist – on the questions science asks and the problems it posits – can hardly be denied; this idea is neither new nor particularly controversial…. The results of science are not based on pristine apperceptions of naked facts, obtained by pure intellects working in isolated laboratories or ivory towers, but neither are they agreed-upon narratives or myths for political ends, linguistic artifacts produced in response to internal or external social pressures, as they are portrayed by some influential and vocal intellectual commentators today. Science stands or falls on the validity rather than the origins of its large structure of ideas. Those who, in light of the turbulent social currents in which we are all immersed, claim that the content of these ideas is of little rational relevance can be fairly accused of engaging in what the philosopher Larry Laudan calls ‘the most prominent and pernicious… anti-intellectualism in our times.’"

p. 4: “While arguing against this portrayal of science as myth, we should not assume that the scientific method that has evolved and flourished over the last 400 years was an inevitable development – it was valued consistently, after all, in only one culture.”

RESPONSE: I disagree with the above conclusion. In my mind experimental science was inevitable. If Western culture that built on the foundation of early Greek thinking hadn’t happened, I’ve got to believe that somehow experimental science, I’ve got to believe that somehow an experimental science would have been invented by others since it seems to be an essential part of the “wisdom” potential. But where and how seems impossible to answer since imagining the effects of an altered history becomes too speculative to provide useful conclusions (at least for me).

p. 8: Chapter 1 -- Conventions

“Evidence obtained by experimentation for all to see, and general proofs sturdy enough to withstand scrutiny – requirements neither obvious nor congenial to other cultures – were the foundation stones on which the ancient Greeks grounded our understanding of Nature and our knowledge of mathematical relations. The kind of mathematics pursued by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Indus, and the Chinese led to many insights but never contained the idea of a proof as we know it. And while all these civilizations developed important technological advances through trial and error – watching and testing rather than simply following tradition – they did not arrive at general propositions about Nature grounded on observation and experiments that could be replicated, analyzed, and argued over. Rather, their views of Nature depended more on sacred books, the authority of prophets, private experience, or pure thought alone…. the biologist Lewis Wolpert is convinced that ‘it is almost universal among belief systems not influenced by the Greeks that humanity and nature are inextricably linked, and such philosophies provide a basis for human behavior rather than explanations about the external world.’”

RESPONSE: I think Wolpert exaggerates the differences between Western culture and others. All cultures live in the real world and have to deal with that reality even when their religion makes that difficult.

p. 9: “This modern science, Einstein, Wolpert, Cromer, and others argue persuasively, is not a natural way of looking at the world, bound to emerge among civilized people, but a very special, enormously productive methodology that historically arose only once and was fortunate to survive a long and perilous dormancy. Its emergence was neither inevitable nor its value immediately obvious. In fact, from the beginning it was strongly resisted, and it is resisted to this day, not only by religious fundamentalists but also by fashionable political groups. Opposition comes, for example, from New Age adherents and from radical feminists, whose science projects, the philosopher Sandra Harding declares, ‘emphasize personal experience as a source of knowledge.’ But personal experience that cannot be publicly replicated is precisely the kind of evidence that has no place in modern science.”

RESPONSE: Certainly science has enemies and opponents everywhere in the world. But in Western societies those opponents lack the clout they had in Galileo’s day. And for me the very reason these opponents have any power today is because science has resisted taking the final step and absorbing the religious concern for meaning of human life into science.

As a result all persons are forced to live their life in some kind of an accommodation with the supernatural world of folk religions. Until Science of Ethics is developed to the point that it can begin to influence the lives of individuals, science itself will continue to misfocus its energies while continuing to be unable to incorporate the energies and yearnings of fundamentalists and help them live their life constructively rather than destructively.

p. 10: “Robert Boyle is generally credited not only with specific discoveries… but with the development of the whole notion of laboratory science, the idea that experiments were not simply demonstrations performed by well-dressed gentlemen in front of an audience for the purpose of persuasion but were procedures for generating answers to questions about Nature…. This important new line of argumentation had the additional virtue of being less personal.”

p. 10: “The novel procedures of answering “philosophical” questions by resorting to witnessed and repeatable experimental tests was strongly attacked by Thomas Hobbes, to whom the vacuum was a metaphysical concept. In his view, what Boyle was doing had no philosophical relevance – his methods were not only wrong, they were actually dangerous. Instead of depending upon rational thought, Boyle’s experiments had to be done with an expertly constructed piece of apparatus and witnessed by members of the Royal Society…. In Hobbes’s way of thinking, only rational argument mattered, and empirical data were regarded as ephemeral: ‘Hobbesian philosophy did not seek the foundations of knowledge in witnessed and testified matters of fact: one did not ground philosophy in “dreams.”’ The clash between Boyle and Hobbes had, of course, been foreshadowed long before by that between Aristotle and Plato.”

p. 10-11: “What such controversies show is that the method of science as we apply it now does not force itself upon the human mind as either logically necessary or inevitable. Therefore it would be fair to call it a convention. Science demands that ‘its standardized procedures be adhered to,’ David Bloor writes. ‘These procedures declare that experience is admissible only in as far as it is repeatable, public and impersonal. That it is possible to locate experience that has this character is undeniable. That knowledge should be crucially linked to this facet of our experience is, however, a social norm…. Other activities and other forms of knowledge have other norms.’ Indeed, in many cultures, both old and contemporary, knowledge is not assumed to be based on scientific procedures.”

p. 11: “If we can agree that the adoption of the scientific method is a convention, must we conclude that the results obtained by this method – the laws and theories of science – are also conventions? This is the fundamental question raised by the school of conventionalism, called nominalism in its extreme form, which has sprouted malignant variants among some influential contemporary thinkers. All scientific results and theories are conventions, they contend, with the implication, at least in the minds of some, either that these results say nothing about the real world at all or that Nature and reality are simply defined by these conventions.”

p. 15: “I conclude that Poincare was right, both in saying that scientific laws contain conventional elements and in denying that, as a consequence, all the results of science are conventional.”

“The principal opportunity for conventions to enter into our conception of the world is the fact that all theories are based on a simplification of Nature: no theory fits Nature with perfect accuracy…. Newton’s formulation derives from an idealized world that is very much simpler than reality. Such simplifications, which other sciences have not met and may never be able to duplicate, make physics the powerful tool it is. But clearly, simplification requires omission, and the selection of what remains contains an element of convention. The Aristotelian view that a force was necessary to sustain motion proves to have been another convention, closer to everyday experience but much less productive; the corrections that would be necessary to calculate a ball’s actual trajectory, if we started with an Aristotelian idealization, would be very large and much harder to apply.”

p. 16: “There is, however, an aspect of conventionalism that has more disturbing consequences. What happens when reliable experimental observations seem to contradict an established theory?”

“Adopting an attitude that the laws of physics are, after all, only conventions makes it easy to evade conflicts between theory and experiment by ‘tinkering’ with the theory. Karl Popper recognized this as the principal danger of conventionalism, which he regarded as impossible to refute. However, since such tinkering gets us nowhere, his advice is simply to reject it. ‘The only way to avoid conventionalism is by making a decision: the decision not to apply its methods. We decide that, in the case of a threat to our system, we will not save it by any kind of conventionalist stratagem’”

RESPONSE: It seems to me Popper missed the boat on this one. In my mind the goal of any theory is to make it as consistent with reality as possible. We know that it is not perfect now. However, if we discard a theory just because it isn’t perfect we would be left with no theories at all.

The goal is to alter the theory to fit the relevant facts. When that no longer becomes possible then we do indeed need to replace it with a theory which does a better job of accounting for what is known, and leading us toward recognizing the things not yet known.

This is actually the process of science (no theory is discarded until it can be replaced by a better one) and trying to follow Popper’s advice would not be helpful. However, for me it seems important that there are always some scientists exploring alternatives for every theory. And if they can find a more productive way to organize what is known and provide a way to focus productive energy on what is not known that should always be encouraged

p. 19: “Any… construction of a distinct logic for a special purpose seems to me quite artificial and cannot be regarded as any indication that the two-valued logic we normally employ is merely a convention.”

RESPONSE: B.S.!! Two-valued logic is not only an obvious convention, it is a convention that hampers thinking. The sooner it is replaced by fuzzy logic the better for all of science in my mind.

p. 19-20: “Within mathematics, the intuitionists, to be discussed further in Chapter 7, effectively employed in their argumentation a system of three-valued logic. One of the powerful devices sometimes used to prove a theorem is the reductio ad absurdum -- assuming the theorem to be false leads to a contradiction: therefore we have no choice but to conclude the theorem is correct. The intuitionists deny that we have no choice and regard such proofs as invalid.”

RESPONSE: Good for them. As fuzzy logic demonstrates reductio ad absurdum is a fallacious process. It is true only when there are indeed just two ways to understand the issue under examination. And that is rare.

p. 20: “There are sociologists of science who go further and regard all mathematical proofs as conventions.”

RESPONSE: It seems clear to me that these sociologists are correct in the bigger sense, but probably not in the sense they pursue their argument. Mathematics is a powerful and essential tool when it is recognized that it applies only within some limited realm of the issue under examination. And, that realm can only be discerned by empirical study.

p. 20: “To the Greeks, Bloor points out, Aristotle’s argument (which, incidentally, relies on the techniques of reductio ad absurdum) proved that the square root of 2 is not a number, while to us it proves that it is an irrational number. This is, of course, correct, but the successive enlargements of the number system, which grew from the natural numbers to include the rationals, then irrationals, then negatives, then transcendental numbers, and finally imaginary numbers, made up a chain of creative steps that led to an enormous enrichment of mathematics. The system of classifying numbers may be called conventional because it was creative, but there is no evidence whatever that it could just as well have been done differently. Each of these steps might not have been taken, but then large parts of mathematics would never have come into being. In fact, a Platonist would surely call them discoveries of new kinds of numbers, and they would lose their conventional character altogether.”

p. 22: “It is quite wrong to call mathematical proofs conventions.”

RESPONSE: Whether or not the above is true depends on the definition of convention. In the bigger sense any mathematical proof is a convention. In a particular case it, like all explanations or descriptions of the universe, might be very useful and helpful. And that is the criterion that from my perspective must be used to assess its merits. The issue of convention, or not is irrelevant in any practical sense.

p. 22: “There is no plausible argument or credible evidence for a far-reaching claim that either logic or mathematics is a matter of convention…. The nature of these proofs and the reasoning employed in them, however, are conventional only to a very limited extent. To accept methods of proof ruled out of bounds by the intuitionists is a convention, and an extremely beneficial one. But there is no reason to expect that future contact with alien scientists and mathematicians might find them using a different logic and reasoning, accepting theorems which we regard as false or claiming some of our theorems to be incorrect.”

RESPONSE: Logic and mathematics are human constructs. They have great usefulness, but they can only be applied to the universe empirically; i.e., by searching for parts of the universe where a match is found. Surely, any intelligent entity having symbolic language, seeking to survive in this universe in which we find ourselves would have to behave in many similar ways. But I think we demonstrate the limits of our imaginations when we think our way is the only way this can be done.

p. 23: Chapter 2 – Science As A Social Construct

“Since the adoption of the scientific method and the formulation of its results are to a certain extend arbitrary, and since both sometimes play enormously important roles in shaping society’s view of the world, it can come as no great surprise that they would be subject to criticism and assault on political grounds. Those groups and forces in society that rely on a Weltanschauung with which the procedures of science or its conclusions are in conflict will attempt to discredit scientists intellectually or silence them altogether. That, of course, has happened before in the course of history – Galileo Galilei was tried and convicted in the seventeenth century because his scientific views were considered dangerous to the established beliefs of the Church. As Shapin and Schaffer argue, the conflict between Hobbes and Boyle, played out on an intellectual level, also contained a strong political element determined by the struggles during the Restoration of the English monarchy.”

p. 24: “We can readily find more recent examples, beginning with the political and religious attacks on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which are continuing today.”

“More specifically relevant are the vicious attacks leveled at Einstein and his theory of relativity in Germany in the 1920s, which became state policy under the Hitler government. This theory… was regarded as an outgrowth of the ‘Jewish mind’….”

“The view taken in the Soviet Union, where the situation was quite different from the one in Nazi Germany, offers another instance of political contamination. There, the a priori assumption was very much in favor of science, since Marxism, after all, was regarded as a ‘scientific’ view of the world. Since the philosophy underlying Marxism was ‘materialistic,’ anything that deviated, or was thought to deviate, from ‘materialism’ was suppressed. When the interpretation of quantum mechanics became a controversial topic – and Bohr’s ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ was regarded by many as tinged with the philosophy of ‘idealism,’ anathema to materialists – it was not allowed to be published and taught in the Soviet Union…. Soviet chemists also rejected some of Linus Pauling’s ideas on ideological grounds, but, because of the Marxist predilection in favor of Lamarckian evolution (enhanced by the personal power of Lysenko), the biological sciences, and especially genetics, were subject to the most severe political pressures.”

“In this country and in other Western democracies, of course, we have not had any government-sanctioned attacks on science or scientists qua scientists, but politically motivated attacks have been mounted by groups of people with a variety of ideologies.”

RESPONSE: Of course the above points out the danger of combining political power with science and art in the absence of an Enlightened Community made up of Enlightened Persons. Censoring unpopular ideas is a consistent event throughout recorded history. Such censoring even in places thought to prevent it – such as the U.S. – is always lurking in the wings especially during times of social stress.

p. 29: “If the sociologists’ claims for the existence of extrinsic influences on the thoughts of scientists have some limited validity, the arguments put forward more recently are of a different variety altogether. The last twenty years have seen the rise of the ‘strong program’ in the sociology of science. Here the contention is not only that social or political conditions lead scientists to their ideas, to the specific questions they ask, or to the metaphors they employ, but that all reports of science, both the experimental results and the theories, are conventions that are entirely determined by the scientists themselves: they are all social constructs. In Shapin’s words, ‘it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions.’ And since we are largely products of society in one sense or another – whether under the influence of society at large or society in the narrower sense of the scientific community – ‘scientific theories, methods and acceptable results are social conventions.’”

RESPONSE: And, it is the position of Science of Ethics that the above kind of thinking results because it has not yet been recognized that human beings have an underlying nature coming out of our genetic heritage, that Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System, and what each of these means.

p. 30: “They are falsehoods that are all the more dangerous for having a small kernel of truth in them – social conditions and psychological states undoubtedly do have some impact on the motivations and thought processes of scientists – and therefore appear plausible to the uninformed. Not only are these views without merit, but in the way they are advanced and tolerated they tend to discourage bright young students at universities from being attracted to science. Since, for a great variety of reasons, our society suffers from a shortage of such students, it is important that these arguments be answered and criticized.”

RESPONSE: If Science of Ethics were to accomplish its aim and in the process liberate fundamentalists and post-modernists from their boxes and obtain their support in helping humanity move toward the light at the end of the tunnel rather than prevent it humanity would then be able to create a utopia where each person could achieve their full positive potential.

p. 32-33: “In his book KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIAL IMAGERY, Bloor introduced the term ‘strong program in the sociology of science’ (or of knowledge), and Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and Andrew Pickering more or less follow that program. None of them acknowledges any intention of being anti-science, though the result of their deconstruction and their attack on its ‘privileging’ is certainly detrimental to any acceptance of science as an activity aimed at an objective investigation of the world. As will become clear from later remarks, Pickering’s protest that he had no wish ‘to deny reality—in the shape of experimental data – a role in the development of scientific knowledge’ has to be regarded as somewhat disingenuous. In fact, these books induce a strange sense of unreality in the reader: words and phrases appear to mean one thing but are intended to mean something entirely different.”

RESPONSE: Until the meaning of human life becomes clear to all people we must expect that some of us will divert all or at least part of our creative energy toward standing in the way of progress of our species toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Science of Ethics should be promoted by all who recognize the serious condition that now exists in the world.

p. 33-34: “At the beginning of his book, Bloor boldly announces that ‘knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge.’ He also attacks the notion that only erroneous beliefs need to be explained in some extraneous way and that correct knowledge and true beliefs require no explanation. Indeed, he regards the relegating of the ‘externalist’ historian to the irrational aspects of science as ‘humiliating.’ The ‘strong program’ replaces the ‘teleological model’ (in which knowledge acquisition is directed toward the truth) by a ‘causal model.’ To say a belief is socially determined does not imply that it is false, he insists, and he rejects the empirical model, in which there is empirical justification for true belief: all belief, including the most rational, needs a sociological explanation. As he puts it, ‘What I [am] taking issue with [is] every approach that makes “logic, rationality, and truth appear to be their own explanations.”’ Treating true or rational beliefs on an equal footing with false or irrational ones is embodied in Bloor’s ‘principle of symmetry.’ ‘The strong programme enjoins sociologists to disregard [truth] in the sense of treating both true and false beliefs alike for the purpose of explanation.’ Nevertheless, there ‘is little doubt about what we mean when we talk of truth. We mean that some belief, judgment or affirmation corresponds to reality and that it captures and portrays how things stand in the world.’”

RESPONSE: Such definitions of knowledge as proposed by Bloor does help us see the value in Reichenbach’s definition of knowledge as the ability to predict.

Because sociology has lacked an organizing principle tied to the natural world it has been able to drift aimlessly wherever anyone with a personal agenda has desired to push it. Tying it to congruency and meaning of human life would focus it on its job of gathering, and analyzing data about societies to help us understand this important problem.

p. 44: “Let me, then, leave the sociologists and turn to a physicist’s substantive consideration of the physical sciences.”

p. 45: Chapter 3 – The Aim of Science is Understanding

“’Science seeks to exert power over Nature!’ some proclaim, either in anger or admiration; others insist that the purpose of science is, or ought to be, to improve the human condition. For the vast majority of basic scientists, however, the ultimate purpose of their calling is to understand the world around them and to explain its workings.”

RESPONSE: Certainly understanding is a highly motivating goal. The difficulty comes when we attempt to decide whether we have achieved it. In our everyday life it is often very clear whether or not we understand something. However, in the world of science today’s understanding may be tomorrow’s rejected hypothesis. In terms of the growth of knowledge and the advance of science a rejected hypothesis may be more useful than one that still remains possible. However, if one’s justification for what they are doing is to understand and it turns out that they didn’t understand, was their effort justified for them personally? In other words does it matter that their feeling of understanding resulted from a mistake?

Now if their goal is to help humanity understand that’s a whole different issue. Regardless of the outcome of their efforts it’s almost certain that they promoted human understanding particularly if this is measured in terms of improving the human condition. Obviously each person must choose and/or determine their own motivations and justification for the things they do. However, Science of Ethics must study those choices and the beliefs that cause them in order to determine how well they hold up and whether or not they are sustainable in some relevant range. In the absence of such study one can only speculate.

It is my speculation that any desire to understand and explain separated from a desire to “improve the human condition” is actually a psychological statement of motivation.

There is no question in my mind that it is the rare person who recognizes that the meaning of their life comes out of the fact that they are a member of the human species. As a result they fall back on the motivations provided by their “tribal” propensities. Curiosity certainly exists within the bosom of the normal person and scientists have been favored with a big dose of it. But any person who fails to move in the direction of their “wisdom” potential and recognize their essential tie to our species and to its survival, is not a model to emulate. We may thank them for the gifts they make available for our use, but their beliefs would not earn the “sustainable” rating in my opinion.

In what sense could one “understand” and explain anything independent of “improving the human condition”? Any understanding and explaining by definition improves the human condition. Even though the fact or information may not have any obvious application when it is discovered, at a minimum it provides us an additional clue about the nature of the universe and such information seems essential if we are to live within it in ways most likely to maintain and develop our species. The very act of such study has to help the person in developing their full positive potential. But until they recognize that the only sustainable beliefs must include a desire “to improve the human condition,” and the fact that every choice we make needs this as the underlying motivation, then they are just one more person who missed the opportunity to become an Enlightened Person.

“It is that powerful offspring of science, technology, which can ameliorate human misery by tempering and harnessing the destructive might of Nature, wielded in the form of pestilences, famines, and other disasters.”

RESPONSE: In my mind scientists, especially physicists, are misled by their own rhetoric on the difference between “science” and technology. They have an image that science deals with Platonic ideals – i.e., Truth – and any empirical process must be exactly tied to perfecting these Platonic images, “theories,” otherwise it is technology.

It seems to me there is in fact no clear distinction between science and technology especially if one removes the Platonic justification used by these scientists to make it appear that there is such a division. Science has a critical tie to the real world, the empirically known world. When that tie is ignored, hidden, or confused the scientists becomes a member of the clergy of one dogma or another.

p. 46: “A mature science goes beyond the acquisition, description, and tabulation of facts and makes understanding its primary aim.”

RESPONSE: What understanding means in the above context defies my ability to understand. As I’ve said before I take the purpose of science to be the search for congruency. I think “understanding” falls short as a primary aim of a mature science. Where’s the understanding in quantum phenomena? It is widely written by quantum physicists that one can write the equations for quantum behavior, but attempting to understand what the equations represent defies human ability. Further, Bohr has told us physics does not tell us what the universe is like, it tells us what we can know about the universe.

When this is examined closely it makes clear – at least in my mind – that Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System. And, it is the understanding of what the good life is and how to achieve it that is important. And that includes improving the human condition.

p. 46: “Insisting that understanding and elucidation are the principal goals of science, however, is not, by itself, saying very much.

RESPONSE: My point exactly!

p. 46: "There are other human activities with similar purposes. Moreover, the meaning of these words is not a priori obvious. In many cultures and periods of history, myths and tales have served to unravel the mysteries of Nature. In our culture, as well, some explications – most prominently in religion – are far removed from science. Indeed, it is precisely this partial commonality of the aims of science and religion that often leads to clashes, disputes that can be resolved only by clarifying what scientists mean by understanding.”

RESPONSE: And, it is for the above reasons that science must be defined so it can take on the tasks of religion and do it in a way that does not destroy the science paradigm that has been developed and used so effectively over the past 400 years.

p. 47:

“Scientific explanations must be part of an intellectual structure that is ultimately justified by objective, public evidence obtained by observation and experimentation on Nature, rather than by divine revelation, scripture, individual personal experience, or authority.”

“When we want an explanation we ask ‘Why?’ – why does a baseball move the way it does when thrown as a curve ball? Why do earthquakes take place where and when they do?…. Sometimes, of course, such questions begin with ‘How?’ There are historians of science, like I. Bernard Cohen, who regard ‘how’ questions as more characteristic of science than ‘why’ questions because ‘why’ seems to ask for a purpose and ‘how’ for a mechanism or simple description.”

“Modern science does not provide explanations in terms of purposes; teleological accounts of natural phenomena that reduce them to final causes are not part of its methodology, because objective answers to such questions cannot be obtained or tested by observation and experimentation. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt many questions that arise in science appropriately start with ‘why” rather than ‘how,’ and it is the answers given by science to these ‘why’ questions that some people, especially philosophers with an Aristotelian bent, find unsatisfactory. If we explain the motion of the planets by means of Newton’s laws of motion together with his universal law of gravitation, further queries -- Why does the gravitational force fall off as the square of the distance? Why are the laws of motion just the way they are? – are left unanswered.”

RESPONSE: Very possibly a deep exploration of the nature of language using why and how as problems might turn up some useful insights about human nature. Seems worth pondering. Is it possible to ask a why question about the human species that is inherently not able to be answered?

p. 47-48: “In his influential book THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, Kuhn introduced the notion of the ‘paradigm,’ which may be roughly paraphrased as a ‘research program.’ The paradigm goes beyond a specific formulation of a theory; it includes a way of thinking about Nature, about problems and how to attack them most fruitfully. It encompasses such things as what questions arise naturally, what experiments ought to be performed and are likely to yield interesting results, what can be taken for granted, etc. While this notion is very useful for many purposes, it has sometimes been applied far beyond its proper domain, with the implication that scientists using different paradigms in their work have no way of meaningfully communicating with one another (their paradigms are ‘incommensurable’). In Kuhn’s view, scientific revolutions are ‘paradigm shifts,’ the acceptance of a new paradigm to replace one discredited. While I agree that a shift of this type occasionally happens, I do not believe the progress of science depends on it to the extent envisioned by Kuhn, and I will use it sparingly.”

p. 49: “The freedom of scientists to decide what does and what does not need an explanation helps to make science much more than a collection of propositions simply determined by Nature.”

“Before approaching the question of what is an explanation, we should finally ask why we want one at all. There are, of course, many different answers. For some, the purpose of understanding Nature is to exert power, for others it is to relieve human suffering, often these two ends are intertwined…. From the point of view of basic scientists, however, there can be little question that understanding Nature is its own end and brings its own satisfaction. No external pressure is stronger than the internal force of curiosity.”

RESPONSE: As indicated earlier understanding only has some meaning within the context of Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System. Once that is truly understood than it seems obvious to me that we automatically recognize that the only sense in which understanding has meaning is that this understanding is being applied somehow, even if only to bring pleasure, or excitement to the person who found it.

p. 49-50: “What, then, is an explanation? It is clear that when we try to explain a state of affairs or a course of events, the words, the metaphors, and the ideas we employ have to be tailored to the vocabulary and the prior fund of knowledge of the listener…. In order to come to grips with the meaning of explanation and understanding, we have to take into account the prior knowledge and the expectation of the recipient, as well as the complexity of what is being offered.”

p. 50: “When we say that we understand an explanation, clearly we intend to say that we are able to incorporate it comfortably into the rest of our knowledge, not only without feeling a contradiction but in such a way that we could reproduce the explanation logically from that knowledge.”

RESPONSE: OK. Now Newton and I are in agreement. Understanding means congruency of all knowledge.

p. 51: “An explanation is satisfactory if we are able to reconstruct it logically from our previous knowledge and apply that understanding to circumstance different from those in which it was originally offered…. Neither memorizing nor reproducing what one has seen working in some special instances means understanding.”

RESPONSE: To me the above only works when one accepts Kuhn’s insight of the importance of paradigm shifts in science. This takes us back to the critical role of empirical verification. Unless all aspects of scientific knowledge are open to and continuously tweaked to be congruent with empirical experience there can be no such satisfactory explanations. And more important when knowledge fails this test requires a re-examination of theory and or data.

p. 52: “Theories are scientists’ main tools to explain the workings of Nature, but the word theory here does not carry the connotation of a conjecture, a connotation that leads many nonscientists to dismiss some part of science by saying ‘that is only a theory.’… Some tentative explanations offered by scientists are no more than educated guesses, but these are usually not dignified by the name theory until they have acquired at least a reasonable amount of support from factual evidence.”

p. 54: “Most theories in science are of the circumscribed kind, that is, they have a restricted range of applicability and are either unconnected to other theories or specific consequences of more general theories.”

RESPONSE: And this is where Science of Ethics would impact all of science by making clear how all local theories are tied together, and this brings us back to the goal of improving the human condition.

p. 54-55: “Local theories based on general laws or principles are usually the ones that allow the most direct confrontation of these principles with observation or experiment…. Nevertheless, it is the general theory that in turn explains the local one.”

RESPONSE: And, so it would be with Science of Ethics. Science of Ethics would provide the most general law possible for human science that would unify and tie together all the vast elements of science.

p. 55: “Large-scale systems subject to well-established general laws and principles often give rise to structures that are subject to intricate new local laws; these are sometimes referred to as emergent properties.”

p. 58: “The fact that being able to make predictions based on large-scale calculations is not sufficient for our understanding of a phenomenon shows the limitation of the utility of computers in science. There can be no question that large and fast computers now play a very important and extremely useful role in science; they allow us to find the numerical consequences of theories with complicated equations, which in many instances would otherwise be practically impossible to solve.”

RESPONSE: And if Science of Ethics does make it off the launching pad it will probably be only after this mathematical component has been developed and shows the validity of the basic assumptions.

p. 59: “Most sub-areas of physics are, in fact, nothing but local theories whose laws are consequences of larger ones, with the addition of specific simplifying assumptions and approximations.”

p. 60: “The hunches of today’s scientists are, of course, very much influenced by today’s theories and level of knowledge.”

“In its essence, intuition is a very thorough internalization and digestion of current scientific knowledge.”

p. 61: “The great importance that scientists assign to intuition is justified by the fact that advances always come from new ideas rather than simply from the assemblage of masses of facts.”

“That the relation between areas of a single science and between various sciences is analogous to the relation between general and local theories implies the existence of a certain hierarchical relationship between scientific disciplines.”

RESPONSE: Very true. But recognizing that it is biology rather than physics that provides the foundation for science and the overarching unifying principles will require quite a stretch for most scientists.

p. 62: “There is a mystique about… ‘emergent properties’ among enthusiasts for the study of complex systems that far transcends what is justified by the actual situation.”

RESPONSE: My conclusion exactly.

p. 63: “My arguments above constitute what is often referred as reductionism, which in some circles has a bad reputation. Its opponents urge that phenomena be understood in their own terms and with their own explanatory tools; they should not be reduced to parts of other disciplines and modes of understanding. Social phenomena and life, in this view, are sui generis, and any attempt to understand them in terms of more fundamental concepts is not only futile but wrongheaded. Many of this persuasion accuse all scientists of being reductionists who are leading us in the wrong direction, where true knowledge cannot be found.”

RESPONSE: And it is just because such persons lack a fundamental organizing principle that they are able to engage themselves in this bizarre and pointless behavior. They represent fallout from the fact that science has resisted taking the next logical steps and accepting human nature as fitting totally within the natural realm and requiring naturalistic approaches to understand and satisfy.

p. 63-64: “It is indeed the case that science is, in its essence, reductionist – it cannot be otherwise. The simplest way to understand a complicated phenomenon is to reduce its explanation to that of something simpler and already understood. Ultimately, this method cannot be avoided without constantly introducing new ad hoc concepts and explanatory tools…. Reduction illustrates directly the intimate relatedness of all parts of Nature, which many of those who oppose reductionism also wish to stress but which they implicitly repudiate. The important thing to recognize, however, is that reductionism does not imply the absence of emergent properties in Nature…. If we reject these hierarchical relationships, we deny that Nature is whole and interconnected.”

RESPONSE: Any who speak against the reductionist modality speaks only to divert thinking and understanding. No other approach can lead to anything but unsubstantiated generalizations and interpretations.

.

.

.