Conversations with a Specter

(Sometimes Called Bunter)

SCIENCE

I came across a quote I rather like: *”Science is the study of things that we can study." Rather like the old joke, punchlined "....the light is better over here.”

                      [*Philip Ball, How Life Works]

Yes. Same epistemological joke, with the punchline made respectable.

The old joke, of course: someone is searching under a streetlamp for a lost key. “Did you lose it here?” “No, over there—but the light is better here.” The joke even has a name in discussions of research methodology: the streetlight effect.

“Science is the study of things that we can study” catches the same problem without being simply anti-science. Science has extraordinarily powerful ways of knowing—but what can be operationalized, measured, isolated, replicated, counted, imaged, etc., naturally becomes what science is best able to talk about. And then there is the temptation to make the illicit little move:

what we can study → what we can know → what is real.

That seems particularly pertinent to what you're doing with orthobionomy. You don't need to argue that the stuff outside the streetlight is supernatural, quantum, or inaccessible to science in principle. Only to notice that the reach of the lamp and the extent of the world are not the same thing.

It also makes a nice companion to Hitchcock's “Logic is boring.” Neither rejects the instrument. They object to mistaking the instrument's limits for the limits of things.

And your *wanton bitch, naturally, has already wandered out of the pool of light.

                                              [*I sometimes lovingly refer to

                                                 Life as a wanton bitch.]