Synopsis
(1) Our scientific picture of nature is the product of an interaction to which both parties — we investigators and nature herself — make a crucial and inseparable contribution. (2) The inquiring intelligences of an extraterrestrial civilization might also develop a science. (3) But it would not necessarily be anything like our science. For while it unquestionably deals with the same world, it would doubtless differ in mode of formulation, subject-matter orientiation, and in conceptualization. (4) The one-world one-science argument is ultimately untenable. (5) Natural science as we have it is a human artifact that is bound to be limited in crucial respects by the very fact of it being our science. (6) The world-as-we-know-it is our world — the projection on the screen of mind of a world-picture devised in characteristically human terms of reference. It is not that natural science cannot underwrite valid claims to realism, but rather that the reality of our science is a characteristically human reality.
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Notes to Chapter Seven
Gosta Ehrensvard, Man on Another World, Chicago and London, 1965, pp. 146–148.
‘Language and Logic’, in Language, Thought, Reality, edited by J. B. Carroll, Cambridge, Mass., 1956, pp. 240–241.
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Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962
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Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud, New York, 1965.
I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, 1966, p. 350.
Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge, Mass., 1978, p. 152.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Rescher, N. (1987). The Anthropomorphic Character of Human Science. In: Scientific Realism. Scientific Realism, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3905-9_7
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