91bjbml thln the "explanatory power" of the method

~ THE EXTRAORDINARY LEVEL OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN THEORY AND EXPERIMENT FOR WHATEVER UNDERLYING REASON ~ IS UN-QUESTIONABLE, as is our ability to exploit this power through technology.

And yet the euphoria this power induces, and our continuing search for unifying simplification, can lead to a kind of tunnel vision.

Just as children learning to speak attempt to reduce the scale of that daunting task by imposing regularity on irregular cases ~ "I goed" instead of "I went" ~ we seen to push the regulizing power of science beyond its proper domain of application, until we find ourselves thinking ~ consciously or not ~ that whatever is not clearly reducible to known science simply cannot be.

Despite the broad variety of experiences that cannot be subject to controlled and repeatable experimentation, the success of the scientific method has encouraged a totally and thoroughly unscientific proposition to grow up around it ~ a foundational conception of our universe as assembled entirely from pieces that can be completely understood by one or another reductionist model.

In its extreme form, this conception outdoes the reductionism of the old mechanistic social theories by converting renaissance-era pre-scriptions for scientific model-building into a general framework for epistemology & ontology, until only experimentally verifiable ex-perience may be legitimately discussed, and consideration of anything else is deemed superstition, magic, religion, supernatural, and ultimately t,he preoccupation of inferior minds.

This scientist, which converts experience (in the words of The Communst Manifesto) to a "commodity, like every other article of commerce," serves to modernize our rituals for coping with fear of the unknown by replacing "superstitious" belief in supernatural events with an equally superstitious belief in a world devoid of supernatural events.