The Meaning of It All
The Uncertainty of Science
...it is not always a good idea to be too precise. Science means, sometimes, a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it means the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It may also mean the new things you can do when you have found something out, or the actual doing of new things. This last field is usually called technology... And so the popular definition of science is partly technology, too.
A power to do something is of value, whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, the power is a value.
You do not know what is going to happen, so you take a guess. The laws are guessed laws, extrapolations into the unknown, not something that the observations insist upon, but rather good guesses that have gone through the sieve so far.
You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right, otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Live without knowing, that is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.
The Uncertainty of Values
There is perhaps some progress of dictational government toward the confusion of democracy and the confusion of democracy toward somewhat more dictatorial government. Uncertainty apparently means no conflict. How nice... The human machine is not allowed to develop its potentialities, its surprise, its varieties, its new solutions for difficult problems, its new points of view.
No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead. it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
This Unscientific Age
"Tricks of the trade" in trying to judge an idea:
- ask intelligent questions-- that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, no trick questions
- gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it
How to deal with uncertainty:
- allow for alternative theories
- do enough experiments
The only way that you can never be convinced that a man is a mind reader is one of two things:
- if you are limited to a finite number of experiments, and he won't let you do any more;
- if you are infinitely prejudiced at the beginning that it's absolutely impossible.
Attitudes toward ideas:
- If something is true, if you continue observations and improve the effectiveness of the observations, the effects stand out more obviously
- Prejudices have a tendency to make it harder to prove something, but when something exists, it can nevertheless often lift itself out, then you could change your mind
- The effect we are describing has to have a certain permanence or constancy of some kine, that if a phenomenon is difficult to experiment with, if seen from many sides, it has to have some aspects which are more or less the same
- The problem is not what is possible -- that is not the problem! The problem is not what is probable, what is happening.
General principles in physics theories:
- no matter what a guy thinks of, it is almost always false. (But that does not mean that everything's false)
- there is no sense in calculating the probability or the chance that something happens after it happens
Many people believe things from anecdotes in which there is only one case instead of a large number of cases. There are stories of different kinds of influences. Things that happened to people, and they all remember, and how do you explain that, they say. I can remember things in my life, too. ... So in short, you cannot prove anything by one occurrence, or two occurrences, and so on. Everything has to be checked out very carefully. Nobody understands the world they are in, but some people are better off at it than others.
By honest I don't mean that you only tell what is true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up the mind.
People ask why go to the moon?
- because it is a great adventure in science, it also develops technology, it makes scientists happy;
- because it is good to be able to try to get that face back as we've lost some face in front of the world by letting the other guys get ahead in technology.
I believe, however, that if you put them all together, plus all the other reasons which I can't think of, it's worth it. Well, I gotcha.
How do you get new ideas:
- do by analogy
- write commentaries
- tradition is very important
- point out the errors of reasoning by analogy
You see we need some kind of a mechanism, something like the trick we have to make an observation and believe it, a scheme for choosing moral values.
And I recognize this encyclical as the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately in the end, as far as action is concerned, believe the same thing.