What If Our Theories Are Shaped by the Way We Think?
What If Our Theories Are Shaped by the Way We Think? Perception, Human Cognition, and the Possibility That Science Is Only One Way of Describing Reality There is a deeply unsettling possibility hidden beneath the extraordinary success of human science: What if our theories about reality are partly determined by the way human beings are capable of thinking about reality? We often imagine science as a transparent window through which we observe the universe exactly as it is. We observe. We measure. We formulate hypotheses. We develop mathematical theories. We test predictions. We reject what fails and retain what survives. This process has given humanity an astonishing understanding of nature. Yet there is a deeper philosophical question that science itself cannot easily escape: > Are we discovering reality as it objectively exists, or are we constructing the best possible descriptions of reality that our particular minds, senses, mathematics, language, instruments, and conceptual fra...