Introduction

Richard writes about exactness: Let's see if you did better with the contents of your paper. 'Exactness is one of the conceptual building blocks of the S-O approach.' "A hypothesis is exact if it has precise mathematical form." C=a+bU is the exact form of 'unemployment is related to criminality.' This particular example, you tell us, "is well enough confirmed for many societies to the point that one can call it a 'law statement'". How much 'well' does it take to be 'well enough'? How 'many' does it take to be enough manies to turn a hypothesis into a law statement? Answers to these questions are indeterminate. Chucking in a phrase like "bounded universality" is a cop-out. Arguing by naming is not an argument. 'Law statement' is a name for something whose description can not be adequately specified. It is more agreeable to call a hypothesis that does not hold well enough at many times in many places an invalid hypothesis. That's what the rest of the world calls them.

Keith responds to Richard's remarks about hypothesis testing ... I am asked how well confirmed my example exact hypothesis is. At the 5% confidence level, from what I understand. This raises another large area I skirted, hoping to discuss it later as it is a sufficiently technical matter that it will require a lot of patience on the part of the reader to follow. It is very important, however, and Richard is right to stress it. Determining the warrant for any hypothesis is not an easy matter. My particular example is called a law statement because it is included in some theories of criminality and seems to be sufficiently true. (As I said, at the 5%.) So, the answer to Richard's remark "How many?" is not at all indeterminate, but well characterized by the statistical procedures I will discuss elsewhere.

Keith responds to Richard's remarks about bounded universal statements ... The question of bounded universality is also important but I am afraid Richard has not understood it, as far as I can tell. "Bounded universality" is a name applied to the quantifiers in virtually every branch of science. For example, in chemistry, we are implicitly bounding the universal quantifier in "hydrogen reacts with oxygen to form water" to a specific (if perhaps unknown) temperature range. It is known that chemical reactions do not occur below a certain temperature (as molecular motion is too slow) or above a certain amount (for example in stars) where the electrons are unable to be bound to atomic nuclei and cannot thus cannot take place in reactions. That the laws of chemistry are not thereby spatiotemporally universal does not bound their universality within the appropriate range. Moreover, the law statement about hydrogen and oxygen is still applicable to an indefinite number of other cases. This too makes it universal in that sense. (I do not want to be taken as claiming all scientific hypotheses are of this form, though; there are some that are not. For example, "There is a planetoid in our solar system beyond Pluto" is one of a different form one that has been debated recently.) And Richard is quite right to say that if a hypothesis does not hold well enough, it is falsified. This is right, but irrelevant, as I trust the discussion above makes clearer.

Richard writes about systematicity: All this effort spent on one aspect [See also his comments on paper 2 for more on the previous topic - K.D.] of the S-O Approach is not excessive. While I have already shown, I believe, that that Approach, as presented, simply does not fly, we can use what we've learned on another aspect. You call it Systematicity. "Science research tells us that the world is a system of system of systems ...This extends to the social world as well ...". If we allow the first, must we accept the extention? Better not. In the first place we have causal ideas that apply exclusively to the social world. Motives and emotions are causes. Secondly people, and nothing but people, live with futures in view. Their ambitions, projects, plans, hopes, and so on all have that sooner and later quality. Today's activity is in anticipation of some near or further future. Thirdly only people accumulate and lose resources they need and use to try to realize their futures. Fourthly only people enter into and drop out of groupings with others in pursuit of their interests. Fifthly, only people have interests. Sixthly only people can and do change their minds. It's stretching to call or include this indeterminate future a system. Speculate about your next year, about next month. Do you 'see' a system? You are not alone. You give one purported example of a system within a system in the social world. Your example is "a simple occurence of a marriage" (sic!). Yet no frosh sociology text calls marriage a system; everyone of them calls it an institution. I'll tell you that without even looking. While a social institution may be studied systematically, the thing studied does not thereby become a system. I could ask you to explain why you chose to extend the systems of the natural world to the social world. You would, I am sure, given reasons. That's the easy part. The hard part would be to convince me, and first to convince yourself, whether your reasons are derived from scientific knowledge and not from ordinary knowledge. Are your reasons scientifically sound? It's something to think about seriously . And so is this - The natural world is a system of systems within systems. Is it? Some scientists know that it is not. They know their science and they know about reality. Before quantum mechanics physicists and billiard players could tell us about the quantities that causally fix the path of a particle after another particle crashes into it. Hit it this way and it ends up here. Since quantum mechanics (1925) only billiard players can still tell us. The other guys and gals have observed that electrons aren't actual things located at specific points in space and time. They are probability events. While the episodes of the events can be predicted, the outcomes (which path ends up where?) cannot. Out go those litter solar-like systems with the nucleus in the middle surrounded by electrons in fixed orbits one quantum apart. In fact nobody ever observed them. That was an image Niels Bohr developed. It served well for a while. Until the findings and conclusion, "the only thing that can be predicted is the probability of events". It's a view of reality without cause and effect and which snubs space and time based on observation. Einstein, who participated importantly in the development of quantum mechanics, after he finished bending light and time, grew not to like it, grew to rage against it. But the only reasons he ultimately had against it he drew from ordinary knowledge. He joined the billiard players. Probabilities cannot be described as or transformed into systems. Or systems within systems. Where have all the systems gone? Where has Systematicity gone? A label in search of a victim. You have some important work to do. As indicated, neither the ordinary meaning of 'system' nor a scientific meaning, which comes to the same meaning, describes social relaity. (Sometimes we speak of behaviour patterns, but patterns are not systems.) And even if 'systems of systems' is a figure useful in some areas of science it is not so in most. What exactly is 'scientific' about your 'systems'? What is it you have in mind concerning it that is not ordinary knowledge? These questions are important. Why? Because 'ordinary' and 'scientific' are more than classification headings for you. They are bearerss of messages. They are claim-making words. You showed your hand with the 'science skewers non-science viewpoints' assertion. Science is trump knowledge. So the importance of the explanation is, what happens to Systematicity if you can't raise it out of the slime of ordinary knowledge? And what happens to the pretended superior status of the S-O Approach if one of its founding concepts is an ordinary mole?

Richard writes more about ethics: A final word on ethics and science which will get us around to the first phrase in my title. C=a+bU cannot be morally neutral, at least not until we know who's who. For the criminals and those who risk becoming criminals, their victims and those who risk becoming victims, and the unemployed and those at risk of unemployment are all people with lives, but not all people with the same lives. The effects of impacts on the various people consequent to policies according to the "neutral" equation cannot be ascertained from the variables and parameters of the equation. Nor can the evaluation of the total outcomes. The equation does not care a hoot for who the criminals and potential criminals, the unemployed and near-unemployed are, nor for who, out of the larger population and of the labour force, will join the ranks. C=c+dR is a more direct illustration. You say the emperor is neutral; I am telling you he wears no clothes. We have seen that the U and R equations may be equal as statements of the 'reason for doing something' kind. But they cannot simultaneously be equal in consequences on lives. It may easily happen that (from a science view) the stronger equation is the less morally acceptable. We can look backward over our actions and conclude we did wrong, or we can look forward before our acts to try to do right. With this thought in mind, it is clear that science cannot be the starting point for policy decisions. We can decide on the ethics and then evaluate various possible alternative actions to get the best results. We may conclude, after reviewing alternatives, that ordinary-knowledge technology may bring more commendable results than the other kind. (We saw a likely example of that.) In any event this is not a Science-Oriented Approach. Here the weighing scale is not what wins most scientific support but what most reduces daily frustration, broken hopes and broken lives. Science is adapted, bent, and if need be abandoned in favour of ethical living. There is no scientific way to make atom bombs. Science, like marriage, is a social institution. Whatever else it is, it's something people do within social settings. Science is a society 'is' and a societal 'does'. You can subject it to the 'BPEC schema'. That's not such a bad idea. You'll soon see it's not all purity and light. How does a society choose between the U and the R equations (to stick to those two)? Well, to say something trivial but true, the choice is made in context. Here's one such context. "In a civilized world," wrote the historian Trevor-Roper, "such men [as H] are seldom tolerated; but if we look back at the cataclysmic periods of society, at periods of revolution and violent social change, H's prototype is there. It is the Grand Inquisitor, ... the man who is prepared to sacrifice humanity to an abstract ideal. The Grand Inquisitors of history were not cruel or self-indulgent men. They were often painfully conscientious and austere in their personal lives. They were often scrupulously kind to animals ...". A good neighbour and respected member of the community. That is the setting: time and place, or rather many times and many places. What, in those settings, do scientists do? They do research, discover, invent whatever serves the needs of the day. (That's where the funding goes.) Public and private investors set up new laboratories to try to isolate pure Aryan blood; the scientific institute Ahnenerbe made expensive researchers into Aryan origins; an explorer was sent to Tibet to discover traces of a pure German race; chemists successfully developed Cylon B to replace inefficent carbon monoxide; professors at the Reichsuniversity at Strassbourg studied comparitive skull anatomy. Such commotion in the sciences. Dr. Philipp Lenord, Nobel laureate in physics, announced to colleagues throughout the world, "Natural science, properly so called, is of completely Aryan origin, and Germans must today also find their way into the unknown". That was back in 1933. The more efficent extermination gas came ten years later. It was indeed an age of science. At the day would they have chosen the U or the R equation? No question about it. And after that had run its course they would have concocted the bounded universal law statement D=e+fR where R is still race and D is Degeneracy. Would have? In fact they did.