00:00:00.000 David, we see principles at work in each field of science and physics and biology, and even
00:00:11.240 in the social sciences, different ways of organizing observations.
00:00:17.320 And some would say that some of these principles are very similar, so they try to build
00:00:22.760 so-called general systems theory that take observations and laws from different parts
00:00:31.480 of human knowledge and look for deep underlying principles that can be applied in each
00:00:38.880 Yes, I'm not sure that the existing approaches to general systems theory is the actual
00:00:45.800 way of integrating all sciences, but I think the idea that all sciences are integrated
00:00:50.880 by their principles at the fundamental level is correct and has to be correct.
00:00:56.200 An obvious principle that unites all science is just the principle of testability, that the truth
00:01:03.280 about nature takes the form of testable theories.
00:01:08.280 I think that the principle of testability is a special case of a much more general principle,
00:01:13.520 the principle of good explanation, a good explanation being one that is hard to vary while
00:01:19.840 still accounting for what it purports to account for.
00:01:23.160 Well, there are things that perhaps are good explanations that cannot be testable of what
00:01:30.520 I may like all the second symphony and you may like Brahms first symphony as your favorite.
00:01:37.040 Now, those are real facts about the world, but they're certainly not testable in any way,
00:01:46.640 Exactly, so this is what characterizes science within the realm of human knowledge is that
00:01:53.440 science has testable theories and the truths about the physical world consist of testable
00:02:01.240 But this idea of a good explanation reaches beyond science into even you mentioned aesthetics,
00:02:09.080 It's customary to say so and so is a matter of taste to mean there is no truth of the matter,
00:02:18.520 It really is objectively true that, for example, Mozart is better, produces better sounds,
00:02:26.000 more aesthetic sounds than cavemen banging rocks together.
00:02:31.400 And although we may not have a sophisticated enough knowledge of aesthetics, especially in
00:02:36.800 explicit form, to know which is which, we know that it is there, the distinction between
00:02:43.720 better or worse exists objectively in aesthetics as it does in the morality and in every
00:02:52.560 That's a fairly dramatic statement because to defend it by comparing Mozart to cavemen
00:02:59.680 with their rocks sounds like it makes sense, but now if you compare Mozart to Beethoven
00:03:04.960 or Mozart to Brahms, I don't think you can have an objective in it.
00:03:11.400 What's happening there is that we do not know yet what the better way of analyzing these
00:03:18.040 But in that case, is that is that analyzable even in principle?
00:03:21.800 I think it must be and for the following reason.
00:03:25.040 You cannot separate these fields, science and aesthetics and so on, totally from each other.
00:03:30.800 As Jacob Bernofsky said, for example, you can't do science, you can't make progress in
00:03:36.240 science unless you also have certain moral values such as tolerance, respect for the truth
00:03:45.520 So these things are matters of moral philosophy, but they are essential to science as well
00:03:51.280 and therefore they are essential to how the physical world is put together.
00:03:55.840 So these different fields are only separated from each other for pragmatic reasons.
00:04:04.000 If you look in sufficiently fine detail at the boundary between all these different fields
00:04:09.320 of philosophy and between philosophy and science, you find they merge into each other and
00:04:15.240 So we have a number of ideas that we can classify as the principles that you feel really
00:04:24.360 Are there any others that are fundamentally can be used to unify the science?
00:04:30.160 Well, I think that good explanation is the fundamental one as far as it is known at present.
00:04:35.040 I mean, I don't believe that there is ever an absolute foundation to be found to knowledge,
00:04:43.160 but I think the deepest thing we know at the moment is the principle of good explanation,
00:04:48.320 which implies all sorts of things about science, it implies the principle of testability.
00:04:56.200 In politics, it implies proper criterion that governments, the institutions should be constructed
00:05:03.640 in such a way that governments and policies can be removed without violence and so on.
00:05:08.880 So basically you are saying that general systems theory is correct, but it's only correct
00:05:14.800 if we have one general systems theory principle and that's good explanation and within
00:05:20.960 that broad category, there are various subsets, including testability and science.
00:05:27.120 Now, an explanation would not have to have a quantitative comparison as a requirement.
00:05:36.280 Galileo said that the laws of physics are written in the language of mathematics, but
00:05:47.200 We don't know much about the laws of aesthetics.
00:05:49.400 And about human society, whether it's politics or sociology, some of that may be absolute,
00:05:56.960 and some of it may not, but even that which is not subject to quantitative analysis is
00:06:03.080 subject to rational analysis, which is part of a good explanation.
00:06:08.280 Rational analysis and objective truth, whether or not it's quantitative.
00:06:12.400 The aspiration of general system theory is definitely right.
00:06:16.720 And in all these fields, there is such a thing as objective truth to be found.
00:06:22.920 And that is part of what will link them, but whether the actual ideas in general systems
