Quote of the Week
(February 2, 2026)

A new kind of attention to the senses was the glory of the Scientific Revolution — a revolution that was felt to be, in part, a reaction against the empirically untethered intellectual flights of the medieval doctors. The pioneers of modern science sought to bring their thinking into disciplined connection with careful observation and manipulation of the world around them. Thus was born the ideal of an empirical science — a science of practical experience rather than speculation. To this day the ideal remains sacrosanct among scientists.

But here a curious contradiction emerges. For, the ideal is directly belied by an entrenched conviction that human sense experience is irreducibly subjective and illusory. If this is true, how is an empirical science supposed to give us an objective understanding of the world? Doubt on this score has been met by an ever greater reliance on the extremely thin “experience” of instrument dials, gauges, and read-outs.

The idea behind this reliance is that the quantitative rigor and sensitivity of the instruments can compensate for the limitations of the human senses. But whatever those limitations might be, the senses are what give us access to the world. Numbers are not material entities. We must apply the mathematics to sensible experience if we want it to tell us something about material reality. Where are we to gain that experience (so as to have actual things to talk scientifically about), if not through our supposedly unreliable senses?

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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