Great question! Basically, it's back to the choice between a normative background (for me, critical theory has the most interesting offer here) and science as a self-referential system (yes, I would go for Luhmann here). Or: is there a truth beyond truth? As constructivist, I would go for proposition two: the only relevant truth is the fact that truth is constructed in different ways by different actors (or: systems).

Great question! Basically, it's back to the choice between a normative background (for me, critical theory has the most interesting offer here) and science as a self-referential system (yes, I would go for Luhmann here). Or: is there a truth beyond truth? As constructivist, I would go for proposition two: the only relevant truth is the fact that truth is constructed in different ways by different actors (or: systems).

I think there is the danger to fall into circular reasoning with a claim that science, particularly with the scientific method's inclusive first step of hypothesizing, cannot be truth and something pre-science has to be.  If something other than science, a pre-science, is that truth, then who or what is to verify that?

Dear Philipp Altmann,

Thank you for your inspiring contribution which gives me the opportunity to express some further considerations on Luhmann’s thought.

Even social sciences have turned their attention to the society of information, and it has done so from various viewpoints. Authors such as N. Luhmann himself, E. Morin, J. Habermas, and Karl Popper have been occupied with the communication of information as a phenomenon with the capacity to generate not only a new style of social life, but also a new culture. The concept of a “global village” is increasingly used by social scientists. For example there exists a certain circularity between anthropology and the society of information. On the one hand, an information society is based  on a certain vision of human beings , and it conveys a specific image of people: the human being as consumer, as generator of economic profit, as the subject of cultural and scientific networks.

Luhmann defines the two fundamental points that mark his departure from the traditional concept of communication.

The first reverses the setting of the classic model, conceiving communication as a type of action, takes as the primary entity the subject that communicates, that acts. The proposal of Luhmann is instead to move from "those who understand", then to ask questions about the "communicator" and "what to communicate", i.e. on the intention and content.

The second point of divergence is expressed as a rejection of the view that makes communication a transmission of information from a center to another, from one mind to another. This step always assumes a commonality, not only of code but also the scope within which the communication moves to select information

Following Luhmann (for example his note: ‘What is Communication?’, Communication Theory, 1992, vol.2,3, 251-59), communication should not be conceived as a mere "transfer" of information and data between two processing centers (such as groups), but regarded as mastership and sharing of preliminary knowledge that allow the selection and diffusion of a message. To communicate therefore implies the upcoming and activation of an interpersonal circuit in whose informative range a set of interpretative processes combines and works for the recognition and acceptance (or their refusal) of the meaning and content of proposals. (essence of culture).

I just put my book up on Amazon: Give Space My Love: An Intellectual Odyssey with Dr. Stephen Hawking. The brief book description is below.

If any of you would like a complementary copy of the book just send me an email with your physical address. bristol at isepp.org

Per your starting question it focuses of whether science and talk about science. My background is philosophy of science: Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend. The last was my honors advisor at Berkeley.

The central narrative tension uses Dewey distinction between the Spectator and the Participant representation of inquiry (and the place of inquiry in the universe). Quantum Mechanics and Relativity both force us to (toward) a Participant framework. I argue that there were two paths to complementarity (and the limits of the scientific research program) in the 20th century, one is in the new physics and the other comes from Popper's Question (about falsifiability of all meaningful theories).

Personally I have transitioned from philosophy of science to philosophy of engineering – 'a new name for an old way of thinking' (viz. James's remark about pragmatism). I have a couple of Linus Pauling Memorial Lectures on YouTube if you are curious about where all this goes beyond the book. 

Freewill and the Engineering Worldview

Bristol May 3rd, 2013  http://youtu.be/kZjJukntqHM

Life Ascendant: A Post-Darwinian Worldview

Bristol May 21st  2014  http://youtu.be/i2mwhk-6a3A

What is Engineering? What is the Value Context of Engineering?

Bristol May 28th  2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08kfPUEnpGM

http://tinyurl.com/nwa9cwr

What is the Value Context of Engineering?

Bristol July 30th 2015 (China) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc1lI8Ox7qM

http://tinyurl.com/nabu5q8

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Who is the real Dr. Stephen Hawking? Is he a detached Spectator seeking a mathematical description of a deterministic, objective reality – ‘out there’? Or is he an embodied Participant in the universe seeking to bring about a more desirable future? The timeline of the book is a four-city lecture tour the author organized for Hawking in the early 1990s (Portland, Eugene, Seattle and Vancouver BC). Hawking’s powerful meetings with students with disabilities, officially collateral events, were remarkable. However, the greater significance of these ‘stories of the road’ is better appreciated in the context of the central narrative question of the book: the nature of the universe and our place/role in it.

The author, a philosopher of science (Berkeley, London), engages Hawking, his graduate assistants and eventually his nurses in what starts as a critical review of the ‘new physics’ of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. The question of the limits of classical science expands to questions of the limits of all supposedly objectivist, ‘one right answer’ ideologies – in biological, socio-economic, and political realms. Is everyone ‘really’ selfish? Is the world objectively competitive or cooperative? In a parallel critical review of the ‘new philosophy of science’ the contributions of the author’s mentors, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Kuhn and Popper mark a parallel path to complementarity, undermining the Spectator representation of detached ‘objective’ inquiry.

Through his personal interactions Hawking reveals himself as a Participant, concerned with ‘how we should live’. He steers us toward a more desirable, moral future.

The new post-scientific Participant understanding of the universe requires a paradigm shift to a More General Theory that can both explain the successes of science and yet understand them in a new way. In the More General Theory, our embodied Participant inquiry is understood in a new way wherein the sciences and the humanities are necessarily re-unified.

Hi Sherif Mikhail,  Thank you for your clarity.  However, not entirely would I place metaphysics and logic under the same second category of principles, as logic is both deductive and inductive, inductive reasoning falling under the purview of empirical science, your first category.  Therefore, I find both categories of the empirical and metaphysical, with logic its own superceding category, are synergistically a necessary, complementary check and balance toward approaching truth, I contend as a means only, never as 'truth' itself.

Furthermore, revisions themselves point to a certain refined truth, rather than to complete error, and even if in complete error, that error intrinsically again nonetheless also points to a certain refined truth, or perceived/coalescing yardstick.  I would never and I don't think anyone can conclude that as part of the universe, we could never know that universe, however faultily.

Hi Sherif, precisely and true, the unfortunate "pure empiricist" only overstates evidence at I agree the culturally-conditioned, once too often never knowable expense of UNDERstating the importance of abstract thought that originates a truck and everything else in the first place, rather than by strictly, overly-cumbersome dumb chance, toward truth.

Thanks for the shortlived exchange anyway, Sherif.

Dear Cj Nev and Sherif Mikhail,

your interesting debate suggests to me to intervene to share with you some considerations on one aspect of your reasoning.

The need to frequently find a theoretical foundation for scientific knowledge grew out of Hume’s doctrine that had proven, with his criticism to the cause-effect relation, how it was impossibile to make statements about every reality that went beyond the limits of experience.

In the “Traume eines Geistersehers,erlautert durch die Traume der Metaphisik (The dreams of a visionary explained with dreams of metaphysics), Kant acknowledges being a debtor of Hume who took him out of the metaphysical doubt, but refuses his skepticism according to which the same empirical facts are uncertain, but are reduced to simple impressions that then translate into  ideas, pale copies of sensations that we preserve only for the usefulness of life.

Hume therefore concludes that it was impossible a scientific knowledge, stable and secure, that Kant instead takes charge of reshaping in the ‘Transcendental  Esthetics.

Ultimately, metaphysics comes down to speculation 'a priori' on issues that transcend the special sciences although they are capable of rational foundation by examining the structures of our knowledge, In this sense metaphysics loses the character of generality that distinguishes  the Aristotelian approach and instead acquires the character of ‘scientificity’ that approaches it to epistemology and the study of reason.

 Thank you for reading and Best Regards,

Gianrocco Tucci

Dear Gianrocco, Thank you for addressing one loose end left in the discussion on the relationship between metaphysical science or knowledge a priori and a posteriori the empirical sciences. True, Hume did not accept any connection, much as Sherif views them as "separate"; whereas Kant harkening on Plato's idos attempted to plant or root empirical knowledge in metaphysical knowledge transcendentally -- although somewhat nebulous and thus ultimately once again tautological.

Science today is on the verge of unifying these seemingly divergent views, non-tautologically, into a "theory of everything," i.e., rooting without supplanting the metaphysical into the physical or empirical. So the question remains open and as advanced in history by Plato, subsequently Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Russell, Husserl, topped off by the ever-influential Einstein, shall continue to advance into the future by hook or by crook, by hunch AND 

..by Sherif's evidence, i.e., faultily, toward ever-ascertaining the truth.