Predicting and Controlling Experience

Science is considered our most reliable source of knowledge. If we want to be as sure as we can be sure, we go to science. Science addresses everything from the physical to the living to the psychological to the social. It has been spectacularly successful in growing and building on itself. There has been true progress in science.

Part of science's success has been because it is very selective. In the whole range of language, experience, and desire, it has staked out just coherent texts applied to public experience. Its purpose is to create a comprehensive system of texts that are coherent internally and with each other and that are systematically tested against publicly accessible experience in order to allow us to better predict and control future publicly accessible experience.

Science thus does not include texts that cannot be reconciled and made coherent with all the other texts of the community. This leaves out all texts where there is a significant amount of individual interpretation and expression. It does not include the personal or the inner. This leaves out much of our lived, everyday experience. It does not include the fleeting or the one time, the haphazard or the episodic. This leaves out anything that cannot be reliably accessed again and again for further study by different people at different times. It does not include the purely enjoyable or skills that cannot be explained. This leaves out things that we do just because we like to or just because they work for us.

So while science can do quite a lot, it is not the be all and end all. Is it valid, for example, to limit knowledge just to scientific knowledge? In the search for the most reliable knowledge possible, science has had to limit its scope. Still all these other areas of language, experience, and desire are still there. We can still have knowledge of them.

And as we shall see, science itself is not a pristine, unchangeable, and authoritative set of truths. It evolves, adjusts itself, and sometimes parts of it need a total overhaul. Science is one of our greatest treasures, but it is not our only treasure.