Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2010 4:38 pm
interesting article, and it details something that scientists tend to forget: we don't know what we're describing.
We feel around in the dark, trying to make out our surroundings, but when we turn on the lights, we often get a very different picture of the room we are in. What if we can't turn on the lights? We may end up with a permanently distorted, but highly functional, view of the room. We end up becoming experts on navigating it, on it's contents, and so on, but there are things we miss, sometimes profound things. We make do with theories that allow us to function in the room, but those theories are often just partial understandings of what is really going on, and sometimes they are largely wrong, though they allow us to work in a narrow range of conditions accurately.
Scientists, perhaps more than others ironically, forget that their data describes not the whole picture, but merely a small part of the totality of a complex interactive system we think of collectively as reality.