The Provably Ultimate Foundation of
Science
is the Universal Logic of the
Universally-Supreme Logical-Value System
This is the Ultimately-Fundamental Logical Super-Pattern
of our Necessarily Inherently Objectively-Intelligible Universe,
Which is the Progressively-Wisest Super-Qualitative Worldview
of All Genuinely-Advanced Systematic Science and Philosophy
· The ultimate scientific logic of the universe is implicit in all scientific progress. Because this logical system is both universal and reflexively self-applicable, we can decisively discern its most fundamental necessarily-invariant characteristics, despite our enormous ignorance about the universe. Universal logic is as ontologically fundamental as space, time, and energy.
· The most fundamental scientific facts of reality are the universal objective value-facts, which serve as the ultimate instrumental truth values of objective realism. This logical-value system is the ultimate foundation and greatest fundamentalist common denominator of all science. This is the magnificent master-key of genuinely scientific philosophy.
· The scientifically ultimate universal logic is an intensional logic (versus the extensional logic of set theory and common symbolic logic). This logic allows consistent full semantic closure, without the limitations of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (which Gödel also anticipated), and without arbitrary restrictive kludges to avoid conventional self-reverential paradoxes.
· Universal value logic corresponds to a family of mutually-applicable axiomatic logical value-facts. This is ultimate objectively-authoritative “scientific fundamentalism”, with intriguing corollaries that the universe is necessarily inherently-intelligible and open to evolution.
· The ultimate ontology of universal value-logic is the 1 category ontology of moderate realism with combinatorial particularism that treats polyadic relations as first-class realities (versus the false dichotomy-prone 2 category ontology of subject-predicate or attribute-containment predication). This has important implications for the biological and physical sciences, and for overcoming false mentalist-materialist dichotomies and reductions.
· Universal value logic is the ultimate scientific method that is logically senior to the other more-specialized scientific methods. It is our most powerful tool for dealing with inevitable fallibility and ignorance. The subjective value axiom of praxeology turns out to be one of the genuinely universal axioms, and provides a super-powerful scientific basis for deducing far-reaching theorems in the human sciences of economics, cognitive consciousness, and ethics.
· The universal logical value system is provably the universally-supreme objective moral priority of the scientific ethics of realistically-responsible cognition. For the supreme defining criterion of God as being the universe’s eternally-supreme ethical-value reference, universal value logic yields the ultimate scientific proof of God’s necessary objective existence—as the 100%-natural objectively-primal experiential-relational value-orientation-bias of the universe.
Last revised: Sunday, 01/14/2007 at 1:10:00 PM MST.
Copyright © 2006 and 2007 by Conrad Schneiker / AthenaLab (Arizona)—All rights reserved.
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It’s a common claim (notably made without proof) that people making claims (especially scientific claims) should be assigned “the burden of proof”. Yet (scandalously and notoriously) the major prevailing scientific methods are less-than-rigorous conventions that have not been established by proof, and it’s no wonder that their application and interpretation leads to an unseemly amount of floundering and controversy at the complex frontiers of science.
Surprisingly and counterintuitively, proving the basic nature and existence of the ultimate foundation of science (which also implicitly constitutes the grandmaster scientific method) is fairly straightforward. The very much greater difficulty and complexity arises in (1) progressively discerning and refining the many important interconnecting details of that foundation, and in (2) pursuing their very wide-ranging and far-reaching implications.
Much of our scientific and philosophical knowledge is necessarily approximate, provisional, and fallible—yet even this moderate claim exhibits another fundamental sort of knowably eternal, invariant, and permanent absolute truth of the objective knowledge of scientific philosophy. The most fundamental system of eternally true facts is implicit in realistically-inclined thinking, but discerning that system has been a highly contentious and insidiously vexing problem for scientific philosophy. The reoccurring academic and religious “science wars” highlight this previous foundational weakness of science and its cumbersome patchwork of partly divergent worldviews.
The logical pattern constituting our universe’s intelligibility and discoverability is very much more primal, profound, and pervasive than is commonly believed. Building on centuries of prior exploratory efforts, scattered advances in 20th century scientific philosophy finally attained an explicit “critical mass” of this powerful self-cross-checking scientific system and its grandmaster praxeological method. The identification and corollary elaboration of the extended family of the absolutely necessary, axiomatic, reflexive-invariants of the ultimate universal, logical-ontological order of all being reflexively maps the integral constitutive context of all objective knowledge.
The most objectively and universally fundamental lawful facts of logic, existence, value, and cognitive consciousness are provably integral aspects of this same universally primary and pervasive super-pattern. (This is initially counterintuitive due to many widespread false dichotomies and false over-generalizations.) This universally-supreme logical-value system is the necessary common core of the ultimate scientific foundations of logic, ethics, and economics—and it constitutes the ultimate mutual boundary conditions of the other physical, social, and psychological sciences. This system is also the ultimate basis of all other scientific methods.
Finally, this system is also the ultimate natural scientific basis of universal human liberty rights, and it characterizes the (one and only possibly true and natural) ethical God of science.
This work is dedicated to Liz Story for “Things With Wings”. This is an all-too-brief but very lovely, lively, and extremely delightful piece that seems like a magically soaring and radiantly sparkling amalgam of the best piano works of Beethoven, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff. This extremely elegant solo piano piece is my pick for the best musical expression of the scientific spirit of genius and God.
This work is also dedicated to Renaissance, Heart, Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Belinda Carlisle, and even Madonna—for their occasional and all-too-rare examples of wonderfully alive and enchantingly beautiful contemporary gems of the last decades of the 20th century.
Scientifically-inclined philosophy is an enormously large jumbled mess that inadvertently obscures its many scattered technical treasures. While scientific philosophy has contributed to more sophisticated understandings of the various sciences, scientific philosophy has done surprisingly little overall to actually advance science as such, let alone increase its net quality and net productivity.[1] The huge scope, immense diversity, and abundant logical tar pits of scientific philosophy have thwarted repeated attempts of a rigorously well-founded, systematic, and comprehensive synthesis. Scientific philosophy is missing it’s counterpart to the periodic table of chemistry, the Newtonian synthesis of classical mechanics, or the Darwinian synthesis of biology. Such a development would amount to turning scientific philosophy itself into a science.
This is an extraordinarily difficult challenge relative to the scope and capabilities of traditional scientific methods. The largely invisible psychological and cultural barriers to finding and recognizing such a system would inevitably seem differently counterintuitive (and especially differently “politically incorrect” and differently “religiously incorrect”) to most potential collaborators, which adds considerably to this challenge. However, given the level of scientific and philosophical sophistication at the end of the 19th century, the incredibly great 20th century academic population explosion of scientific and philosophical talent should have been more than enough to overcome even this challenge. In fact, this challenge was generally overcome—albeit in a generally unexpected and highly distributed fashion.
The collective 20th century advances in (what we now call) “universal value logic” have implications at least as profound, powerful, and pervasive as the quantum and nuclear physics revolutions. However, since these additional logical developments involved piecemeal contributions scattered across many specialized fields of study, the great magnitude of this hugely important scientific achievement is generally unrecognized. The information explosion has hidden this great development in plain sight. Moreover prevailing false dichotomies concerning science and philosophy have prevented most people from expecting (let alone seeking) a gigantic logical-value mountain beneath all the shifting disputes over forests versus trees and such.
The universally-supreme logical-value system is not a “theory of everything”, but rather involves the comparatively-minimal but absolutely necessary logical prerequisites of all possible objectively realistic scientific theories. This is a powerful diagnostic framework that goes far beyond the common stockpile of useful but faulty criteria (such as “falsifiability”, which suffers from logical “tunnel vision” and isn’t even reasonably self-applicable and self-refinable). There are great early-adapter competitive advantages for groups that correctly discern and best practically apply major advances in cognitive power tools. For example, consider that the explicit recognition and explicit application of the (reflexive, symmetric, invariant fixed-point) multiplicative identity of arithmetic—the zero—was ultimately a tremendously broad and general amplifier of commerce and technology. Seemingly insubstantial developments can counterintuitively have astounding ultimate productive power (albeit largely indirect).
Universal value logic is the common scientific hub cognitively linking all of the specialized sciences, and provides the categorically greatest possible collective means of synergistically integrating, refining, and applying them. The essentially entrepreneurial character of applied scientific development precludes reliable non-generic predictions, especially given the present world-wide political and cultural turmoil. Nevertheless, creatively capitalizing on this extraordinarily valuable 20th century scientific inheritance will almost inevitably be among the all-time greatest human success stories by the late 21st century.
Our inquiry into the ultimate scientific logic of value naturally begins with a question of value.
“Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important….”
—Charles Darwin
Question: What is the most generally important issue that science can now successfully deal with?
Answer: Determining and establishing the highest-priority, universal, objective value system of genuinely increasingly-realistic consciousness.
“Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic.”
—Pierre Boutroux
The elaboration of this supreme scientific value system will show that the ultimate universal objective values are inherently universally logical, and that this system is the common root of all genuinely scientific methods. What commonly passes for logic is a crude and fragmentary shadow of the most glorious and spectacular cathedral of all science. Parts of it were discovered in ancient times, and more of it was found in the Middle Ages and during the Scientific Revolution. By the end of the 20th century, a large number of diverse expert specialists had finally found and explored the many remaining major subsystems of this remarkable superstructure (plus they variously corrected and refined the important work of earlier discoverers).
However, a systematically comprehensive map of this structure has yet to be assembled, and so the by-far-the-greatest collective scientific achievement of the 20th century is generally unrecognized. This scientific oversight is especially ironic given that the greatest system builders of the Scientific Revolution (such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) were seeking precisely this sort of overarching scientific structure (notably as a corollary of their unrelenting faith in the ultimate scientific rationality of God and the universe). This book addresses this extremely bizarre situation by providing a very preliminary version of this missing map—which amounts to a map of the world’s greatest scientific treasure. Other experts will undoubtedly cumulatively produce vastly improved versions of this map. In any case, genuinely universal logic turns out to be a subjectively super-rich and super-interesting realm of objective human enlightenment.
“Mathematical Logic has completely deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers.”
—Wittgenstein
“I have tried to avoid long numerical computations, thereby following Riemann's postulate that proofs should be given through ideas and not voluminous computations.”
—David Hilbert
The ancient earth-centric epicycle system of astronomy was a practically valuable tool for predicting eclipses (among many other things)—but it was nevertheless a fundamentally flawed misconception of astrophysics. An analogous situation holds for most contemporary conceptions of logic, despite their indisputably superior comparative level of development and applicability.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, some sub-branches of logic underwent spectacular development in mathematically-related realms. Both the ultimate importance and limitations of these great developments in symbolic mathematical logic were wildly over-generalized, and some more generally important logical developments since then are largely unrecognized. (As a former math major, I also fell prey to the captivating spells of these earlier developments.) Ironically, it turns out that natural languages (such as English) are logically and semantically vastly superior to symbolic notations for purposes of (initially) discovering, communicating, and comprehending the fundamental issues of universal logic. Symbolism is an important and exceptionally powerful tool for various specialized tasks (including the further development and refinement of this system), but these great intellectual telescopes and microscopes have offsetting costs of “semantic tunnel vision” and “limited semantic depth of field”, among other issues. For our purposes here, English is the best available tool, and it turns out to be more than sufficient (despite its own set of issues).
Thinking of the mind in terms of computer metaphors has further warped prevailing notions of logic (although this also inspired some offsetting specialized advances in logic, and also contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology, although also with mixed results). The prevailing cultural intuitions of the ultimate character of logic have been even more dreadfully warped by the understandably-ignorant and drama-centric Hollywood portrayals of sentient robots, mad geniuses, alien scientists, and so on.
However, the genuinely scientific nature and manifestations of universal logic are radically sane, social, responsible, humane, ingenious, and cognitively entrepreneurial. In non-technical terms, logic is involved whenever you laugh at a good joke, or groan at a bad pun. Our implicit comprehension of logic not only makes us human (relative to other animals), but additionally makes it possible for us to simultaneously be deliberately realistic and genuinely humane (versus merely indulging seemingly good intentions). As the scientific master-key for more realistically comprehending our complex and tumultuous and amazing world, universal logic is the hidden heart of increasing scientific enlightenment (and increasing quality of life) in every realm of human endeavor.
Thanks to a combination of many important 20th century advances, we now show that there is a demonstrably-supreme, unitary, and universal logical-value system that transcends several common false dichotomies (such as fact/value, empirical/logical, science/religion, mind/matter, pragmatic/absolute, and certainty/realism). This ultimate foundational scientific system is inescapably implicitly-presumed in all deliberative consciousness, including everything we can discuss with each other (however aptly or ineptly). Science finally has demonstrably scientific foundations (versus conventions), and its full scope is at last demonstrably genuinely universal.
Among the many notable features of this logically fundamental and universal system are:
· Our imprecise but absolutely certain and honestly-indisputable knowledge of our (thus also limited) fallibility is an extremely powerful initial reflexive premise for discovering and demonstrating the ultimate universal logic of the universe.
· This system fundamentally and universally involves the logic of anything and everything we can honestly and meaningfully assert (on whatever purported basis), and this thus precludes the ontologically false dichotomies involving other purported realms, dimensions, and universes (while still properly accounting for our inevitable ontological ignorance and oversights—although this is also very powerfully reflexively constrained, however otherwise unbounded).
· The traditional axioms of logic are facets of a larger and richer extended family of universally-supreme logical-value axioms (laws)—so science is intrinsically value-centric, and never value-free. Universal logic is the fundamental universal ethics of reflexive cognitive consciousness that is the ultimate logical basis and precondition of all other types of ethical knowledge. (Some sciences derive generally applicable conclusions that are valid by virtue of “value-invariance” relative to all possible value orderings that can be substituted into paradigm cases. Such obviously value-centric and otherwise objectively valuable formulations are unfortunately very commonly and misleadingly called “value free”.)
· The universal logical-value system is an extended intensional logic (versus extensional logic), and so is not subject to Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems. (This of course does not preclude normal pragmatic sorts of incompleteness due to instrumental and other resource limitations—but it does mean that universal value logic is fully universally-applicable semantically and reflexively, and is not inherently self-retarded. Likewise, universal logic does not alter the continuing applicability of Gödel’s results within the much more logically-limited and ontologically narrow-minded realm of purely extensional models that abound in conventional set theory and digital computer science.)
· The most fundamental possible theories of science are not physical, but rather logical (involving ultimate objective logical-values and corollary ontological invariants). Moreover, the most fundamental theories of science cannot be conjectural and provisional, but are demonstrably-necessary, universally-reflexive invariants of all increasingly-realistic scientific theories (including the most fundamental one)
· The universal logical-value system has a corollary primal ontological structure of existence (similar to that of classical moderate realism with particularized property instances), which is another fundamental common denominator of deliberative consciousness and physics.
· The universal logical-value system is the master scientific method and ultimate scientific foundation underlying the more specialized scientific methods pertaining to scientific economics, evolutionary biology, physical cosmology, realistic deliberative consciousness, scientific ethics, and so on.
· The universal logical-value system is the demonstrably supreme objective ethical system of all science and of all scientific integrity.
· The fundamental universal liberty-right of self-ownership (for cognitive adults) is a demonstrable theorem of scientific ethics (whose foundational core is the universal logical-value system).
· The universal logical-value system is simultaneously the reflexively ultimate possible pinnacle and foundation of logic, and so will be the cognitive common denominator of all much more scientifically advanced civilizations (including extraterrestrial), including those with super-human-level intelligences (including artificial).
· The ultimate directional purpose of the universe is collectively developing personally-meaningful high-quality lives by means of voluntary social collaboration, especially with respect to promoting cumulatively-increasing scientifically-enlightened wisdom.
· While the core of this system is about what is necessarily true and is thus intrinsically impossible to empirically falsify (especially since it is the ultimate logical basis of all empirical falsification), the application of this system to physical cosmology nevertheless leads to rough predictions of what categorical sorts of phenomena should eventually be detectable at the ultimate outermost observable limits of our universe by future generations of super-large and super-powerful telescopes (and thus serves as a practical competence test of correct application).
· The universal logical-value system is the basis of the most powerful possible general defense systems (and thus far less subject to the huge Achilles’ heel of shifting relative economic and technological advantages).
· The universal logical-value system is the demonstrably absolutely-necessary fundamental-constituent of any theory of God claiming ethically-supreme objective relevance. The universal logical-value system is the provably, maximally reflexively truthful, methodological authority for arbitrating the world’s conflicting theological claims. By virtue of reflexive objective logical universality, the true ethical God of science is necessarily and intrinsically within the domain of science. This reflexively-inescapable and publicly-accessible scientific revelation is that the universal logical-value system strongly objectively characterizes the one-and-only true, fully natural, and supreme ethical God of the universe.
· By virtue of the instrumental universality of the universal logical-value system, this maximally-practical humanitarian framework promotes the more harmonious realization of our varying constellations of subjective preferences. Contrary to common anti-intellectual prejudices, genuine universal science encourages the synergistic development of the subjective characteristics of human life, including the intuitive, creative, spiritual, social, and fun-loving realms. Universal science provides safety guardrails against subjectively running amok, thereby responsibly facilitating the necessary role of creative, playful, and imaginative subjectivity in conceptually exploring the frontiers of science.
· This universally-supreme logical-value system is the long-sought “conscious of science”, which can transform science from an increasingly-dangerous, amoral genie into a humanely-progressive superpower. In terms of its universal instrumental-ethical role, this system objectively specifies the one and only true, supreme, and intrinsically natural, ethical God of science.
· As the ultimate scientific foundation for all science, this system has many intriguingly-powerful implications for many presently semi-scientific fields, ranging from economics to cosmology. This system serves as a collaborative integral focus of all science, and can help substantially amplify cross-discipline scientific productivity. This system also serves as a grandmaster ontological error checker, which can further substantially improve the net productivity of science. The world’s amazing net scientific activity is surprisingly inefficient (given its unprecedented vast resources)—but this can be powerfully improved in a few decades.
Despite many currently ominous trends, the eventual spreading recognition of the ultimate logical-value system will help first crystallize and then greatly accelerate the presently very-fragmented roots of the slowly-developing “Second Scientific Revolution”. This in turn will eventually erratically morph into a long-overdue “Second Enlightenment Era” of leading cultural worldviews. Despite the inevitable lingering and new problems, the mid-to-late 21st century will see an extraordinarily interesting psycho-socio-techno-economic “phase-transition” to a spectacularly improved net world quality of life.
This table of contents is intended to become a moderately readable synopsis of this book, which is why headings in later parts of this book tend to be a little long-winded.
1.2 The ultimate scientific value question of our era.
1.2.1 Overview—the missing map of the greatest cathedral and treasure of science.
1.2.2 Warning against prevailing “useful but faulty” misconceptions of logic.
1.3 Super-brief summary of the systematic answer.
1.4 A fun and semi-self-fulfilling meta-viral meta-meme prediction.
3.1 Standing on the shoulders of a multitude of giants.
4.1.1 Some simple notational devices for easier reading.
4.2 Extended analytical abstract.
5.1 The unfinished heart of the Scientific Revolution.
5.2 The logical relevance of {truth, value, and deliberative consciousness}.
5.3 This book is a preliminary report.
5.4 Historical note on the false science-religion (theology) dichotomy.
“If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
—Isaac Newton
I’m not nearly as brilliant or well-educated as Newton (nor Aristotle, St. Thomas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Locke, Gödel, Von Neumann, Blanshard, and so on), and I haven’t been able to devote most of my life to pursuing science. So I’ve compensated for lost time and lesser talent by using at least 10 times as many giants as Newton did (plus I’ve used a few 100 additional near-giants as well). This work is thus overwhelmingly derivative—all I’ve done is semi-systematically collect and reorganize the work of others, and follow up on some of their suggestions.
(This is partly why I frequently lapse into using “we” and “our”. This way of speaking also helps remind us of multiple relevant aims, points of view, and other contexts.)
So it seems fitting to let a few of our 100s of sources do most of the speaking in this mosaic preview of some themes that are woven throughout this book. A small sampling of their noteworthy quotes follows below.
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
—Richard Feynman
“Minds are many, nature is one.”
—Donald Davidson
“The whole is over and above its parts, and not just the sum of them all.”
—Aristotle
“To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.”
“The great barrier to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin
“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”
—Richard Feynman
“But when we return from error, it is by knowledge we return.”
—Augustine
“We can speak to each other only because we can appeal to something common to all of us, namely, the logical structure of reason.”
—Ludwig von Mises
“The important things in the world appear as the invariants of transformations.”
—Paul Dirac
“The sailor cannot see the north, but knows the needle can.”
—Emily Dickinson
“[Messier], less economical reasoning … can lead to greater insight, in the manner that statistical mechanics can offer more insight than thermodynamics. The longer road, Bell reminded us, may lead to more familiarity with the country.”
—Harvey P. Brown
“Metaphysics and theology are not, as the positivists pretend, products of an activity unworthy of Homo Sapiens, remnants of mankind’s primitive age that civilized people ought to discard. They are a manifestation of man’s unappeasable craving for knowledge.”
—Ludwig von Mises
“I had always regarded the search for the Absolute as the loftiest goal of all scientific activities.”
—Max Planck
“Order is heaven’s first law.”
—Alexander Pope
“For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear.”
—Leonhard Euler
“A problem well stated is half-solved.”
—John Dewey
“To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour….”
—William Blake
“We shall not cease from exploration, / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
—T. S. Eliot
“Simplicity lies concealed in this chaos, and it is only for use to discover it.”
—Augustin Fresnel
“Empty are the words of the philosopher who does not heal the suffering of man.”
—Epicurus
“Aim to understand the dragon, not defeat him; to understand the dragon is his defeat.”
—Vernon Howard
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”
—Buddha
“For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.”
—Murray Gell-Mann
“The gods too are fond of a joke. … The secret of humor is surprise.”
—Aristotle
“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”
—Groucho Marx
“Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.”
—W. C. Fields
Philosophy is a surprisingly difficult field that is beset by super-abundant conceptual and combinatorial complexity—especially since it has not undergone the sort of great systematizing syntheses that help make mainline physics, chemistry, biology, and geology much more readily comprehensible. Practical philosophical work typically requires keeping many factors and several contexts in mind simultaneously. Also, the jargon of philosophy is a centuries-long accumulated hodgepodge that includes lots of semi-ambiguous terms with multiple historical meanings, plus a range of perversely counterintuitive terms (relative to their everyday meanings). These conditions present great challenges for communication, which requires seemingly-endless qualifying and exemplar terms to avoid gross-oversimplification and inadvertent miscommunication.
Long sentences are hard to read—but splitting up long sentences often introduces other reading problems, such as unintended ambiguities and short-term memory overload, due to multiple extra cross-references and a substantial increase in wordiness. In other cases, we don’t have the considerable extra time and patience it takes us to do a good job of splitting up long sentences. So we resort to a notational device to make it relatively easy to visually parse long sentences. We use curly braces (“{…}”) for visually grouping lists of items like this: The remarkable scientific geniuses {Hilbert, von Neumann, and Gödel} were all exceptionally skilled at {mathematics, logic, and physics}. We also use {}-notation to visually enclose long sentence fragments so that the sentence structure (and thus intended reading) is instantly obvious.
We also use double quotes “as in this example” to visually delimit and highlight the initial use of some phrases. For easier reading on video displays, we avoid using single quotes. Scare-quotes are explicitly indicated by prefacing them with “so-called”: Here are some so-called “scare quotes”.
We sometimes add auxiliary hyphens to make {the intended tightest grammatical-binding in overly-long multi-word qualifying-phrases} visually obvious.
Finally, we tend to somewhat sparing with footnotes, since they are unfortunately somewhat inconvenient to read on present-day video displays, and since they unfortunately thwart {fast, fully-comprehensive} {reading, skimming, searching, and review}. We designate “in-line footnotes” by parentheses surrounding one or more whole sentences.
(We also tend to make multiple-sentence in-line footnotes into separate paragraphs, which make them visually easier to skip over. This paragraph is an example of such an inline footnote.)
To be completed.
Our fascination with this system is the same thing that irresistibly attracts other people (previously including ourselves) to the frontiers of {quantum physics, cosmology, mathematics, computer science, and biochemistry}—which is the quest for various scientifically fundamental “keys to the universe” (among other things). We shall show that the logical nature of universe is very much richer and much more fundamentally comprehensive than is commonly supposed—and thus logic has become (for us) the most fundamentally important and the most fascinating scientific field of all.
Our primary aim is to provide experts the resources they need to readily {refine, correct, apply, extend, and otherwise supersede} our work. However we have also tried to make this book moderately “spectator-friendly” and “publicly-accessible”—especially since the exceptionally multidisciplinary nature of this system means that most if it presently falls outside the range of most experts. We regrettably haven’t had the {time and resources} to {pursue and present} practically-oriented applications—hopefully this presentation provides a huge enabling step for others so-inclined.
One unrealized aim of the Scientific Revolution was a fully universal science that would encompass even ethics and theology. Prominent references to “natural rights” and “Nature’s God” by many leaders of the American Revolution echoed this noble Enlightenment sentiment. It turns out that attaining a sustainable “scientific critical mass” in these realms is logically much more complex (and very much more treacherously counter-intuitive and error-prone) than the great syntheses of Newton, Maxwell, Darwin, Mendeleev, and so on. Such prospects are now widely presumed to be impossible.
Fortunately, the amazing 20th century academic population explosion of brilliant scientists, logicians, and philosophers produced (or refined) all of the critical missing core pieces of fully universal science—which pieces have often helpfully turned out to be partly duplicated and partly overlapping. Unfortunately, these precious pieces were very effectively “hidden in plain sight” by the 10,000 times larger quantity of less useful academic output. This amazing dispersed treasure trove provides a wonderful, historically unprecedented data mining opportunity for industrious amateurs that don’t have to deal with demanding publication quotas. Fortunately, finding and learning parts of the resulting system is semi-infinitely easier than producing the key pieces of it.
Truth is an intrinsically logical concept—any claim of truth is (among other things) an inescapably implicitly-presumptive appeal to the universal scientific supreme court of logic. (This includes truth claims about correctly interpreting alleged revelations of truth as well.) Logic is always the most senior arbiter (among many other subsidiary arbiters) on this issue.
The objective primacy of values in logic (and vice versa) is intuitively apparent in the question of “What should we believe about logic?”—which is an inescapably evaluative question that we shall return to later.
The universal value logic of deliberative consciousness includes all thinking and all thoughtful communication, and hence all claims of truth. There are many possible points of departure for universal logic, but the axiomatically-reflexive logical-relevance of deliberative consciousness (and likewise for praxeology thereof) makes this focus an especially powerful “Archimedean fulcrum” for moving our logically-dimwitted “logical Dark Ages” worldview into orbit around the super-brilliant life-giving sun of universal value logic.
The system we present here is something of an “existence proof” and “proof of concept” prototype of the full-fledged system. The key beginning and honestly-indisputable premise is: “we know for certain that we are fallible”. Discerning, self-correcting, and otherwise circumventing often-inevitable error is an absolutely necessary crucial theme for this inherently extremely ambitious system. The logical structure of this system is like an interwoven web with a substantial amount of redundancy, which makes for an exceptionally robust sort of self-converging and self-correcting system, and which means the inevitable residual errors cannot fatally undermine the system. This features probably partly account for why evolution was able to bootstrap itself from reptilian brains to human brains, and thence from primitive to postmodern culture with astonishing rapidity, The explicit reflexive articulation of this system is likely to result in another astonishing burst of evolutionary innovation.
The next major task is to further refine and assemble these many diverse pieces of this proto-system into a scientifically rigorous and systematic synthesis. It will take many other people with a wider and greater range expertise to produce the first moderately comprehensive version of this system. The needed resources for carrying out this project have reached the threshold of “big science”. The result will be a system that can reliably serve as a user-friendly, industrial-strength “logical starship-drive” of science.
This system is the heart of the much-lamented missing “conscience of science”. It is also very much more than that. As the “ultimate foundational science” and the “master scientific method”, it will add a subtle but eventually extremely powerful exponential factor to the cumulative beneficial impact of science on the net world quality and durability of life. This system is the single greatest realistically leveraged hope for eventually achieving a vastly more desirable and secure future world.
Especially since the Darwinian Revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s, it has increasingly widely (but falsely) been presumed that theology is inherently incompatible with genuinely hard-core science. However we don’t reject all science because of the extremely wildly speculative excess of string theory and big bang inflationary cosmology. (Historically and sociologically, these incredibly bizarre, spectacular, and fascinating examples of pathological group-think makes even the most metaphysically convoluted theological systems seem exceedingly tame and sober by comparison.) So likewise, we shouldn’t dismiss all theology simply because of the abundantly apparent flaws in presently popular theologies.
To the credit of theology, a series of great religious philosophers of earlier generations have pursued many genuinely objectively-oriented theological initiatives—although unfortunately they didn’t succeed in their otherwise noble attempts. We uphold the grand conception of religion as generally being about (ethically and ontologically) “ultimate concern” and being a vitally important domain of rational inquiry (despite many bad historical regressions into irrationality). In recent times, this conception has been falsely denigrated, trivialized, and corrupted as merely being about dogmatically servile “faith-based” beliefs and “faith-based” organizations (for blatantly transparent reasons of political expediency, control, and exploitation). Needless to say, here we are concerned with the best historical examples of theology and religion, not with the many unfortunate regressions of the past and present.
Claiming that there is a universal God (of great ethical importance and causal significance) inescapably amounts to asserting a universal objective fact. This (among other things) puts the issue of the nature and identity of God directly in the objective jurisdiction of science and universal logic. This also means that God must be an explicitly primary constitutive characteristic of these fields.
Only a 100% causally lawful God involving 100% objectively universal logical-values can be objectively possible, desirable, absolutely necessary, and supreme—meaning that whatever else God may be, God in the ethical sense absolutely necessarily self-consistently involves the reflexively universal and primal pattern of all rational knowability, including all science and all ethical realism. The long series of past failed attempts to prove the existence of God failed to recognize and fully comply with this inescapable, extremely-stringent, and universal reflexive-consistency constraint. Despite repeated failures, these attempts to find a publicly accessible, repeatable, and verifiable form of logical revelation shows a remarkably great and supremely admirable faith is the ultimate rationality of the universe and God. (Note also the correctly implicitly-presumed ontological priority of rational objective intelligibility over supernaturalism as the more definitive characteristic of God.) This sort of faith (including corollary faith in the corollary power of fallible human reason to overcome stupendous human ignorance) has now been resoundingly and powerfully vindicated.
The many traditional conceptions of God are now seen as heuristic, pre-scientific stepping-stone approximations toward the true, exclusively, and supremely scientific nature of God. Since science couldn’t adequately articulate and prove its ultimate foundations until the late 20th century, it is obviously scientifically unjust to collectively dismiss its more traditional religious predecessors as merely irrational. Indeed, many of their religious proponents (and works thereof) were extremely important in bringing about this enormously wonderful scientific advance.
This fundamentally universal-scientific characterization of God does not inherently preclude all conceivable “Universal Spirit” characteristics—however such characteristics necessarily have to be perfectly-compatible counterparts of this much more powerfully logically-explicit and clear-cut scientific characterization. This is a realm ripe for delightful new discoveries and syntheses, since the explicitly-specifiable universal-scientific character of God would very likely have been discovered centuries sooner had the corollary spiritual thinking been more genuinely spiritually enlightening. In any case, the ethically-primary universal-scientific role of God is intrinsically cosmically orientational and inspirational—like a compass or a lighthouse or the North Star, “God helps those (people or groups) that help themselves (by using the natural wisdom of God)”.
To be completed. In the mean time, please see the previous edition of “The Supreme Scientific Method…”, available at (www.AthenaLab.com).
catallactics — the part of economics dealing with interpersonal exchange (versus the economics of isolated individuals, aka “Crusoe economics”).
dialectics — the art of systematic contextual analysis of {logical and relational} {differences and dichotomies}. Unfortunately, the noble discipline of dialects has been given a bad name by the (rather sophisticated, but tragically praxeologically-flawed) Marxist doctrine of “dialectical materialism”—so make “Socratic dialectics” your primary historically-associative paradigmatic-reference.
economics — the part of praxeology dealing with production, consumption, tradeoffs, and (when more than 1 person is involved) exchange.
epistemology — the cumbersome antique name for the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, and how we get it and verify it. Think “know-ology”.
extensional logic — logic that regards functions in terms of the totality of entities or sets (classes) of entities that satisfy them. Most {modern, conventional} {symbolic, mathematical} logic is extensional (versus intensional), but this appears to be changing.
impredicative specification — a specification that is (at least partly) {self-referential, or self-inclusive}. For example, in mathematical logic, some types of sets are most straightforwardly defined in terms of themselves.
intensional logic — logic that regards functions in terms of their conceptual content or meaning. Intensional logic is far more general and sophisticated than extensional logic.
intentionality — the referential aspects of logic or consciousness involving what is referred to (versus the referring symbol), for example, as in intended meanings.
logic — the scientific art of systematically {coherent and consistent} identification.
metaethics — traditionally, the study of what features valid ethical theories should have, and additionally used here to designate the logically supreme instrumental ethical framework of universal (person-invariant) common (applicable to everyone) objective values (as distinguished from person-specific and sometimes changing objective values).
mathematics — the science of (abstract) patterns. Also widely described as the science of (abstract) structure.
metacognition — the explicitly self-conscious considerations of cognitive processes—“thinking of thinking”. Seeking means to improve your thinking ability is a metacognitive activity. Logic and heuristics are quintessentially metacognitive concerns.
metalogic — the ultimately {fundamental, universal} type of logic that is the ethical-ontological science of genuine (honest and realistic) thinking. (Read “meta-” here as “more comprehensively fundamental”.)
metascience — the general science of science. (Read “meta-” here as “more comprehensively fundamental”.)
metavalue — an {objective, instrumental, and universal (person-invariant)} value. (Read “meta-” here as “more comprehensively fundamental”.)
mind-projection fallacy — to confuse our (purported, partial, or incomplete) knowledge of the world with the actual state of the world. [Also see reification error.]
modality — the aspects of logic involving necessity and possibility.
nomic — customary, ordinary.
ontic — involving real or actual existence.
ontology — the science of the most fundamental categories of the universe and the most fundamental laws relating them.
polyarchy — non-monopolistic {defense, police, and justice} systems.
praxeology — pertains to the logical structure of subjective preferences in human action, and the inevitable person-invariant patterns of dynamical consequences that can be deduced from it.
psychology — deals with why people do what they do.
reflexive — the logical property of being (inclusively, but not exclusively so) self-referring or self-aware.
reification error — to treat an (“imaginative”, hypothetical) abstract model as an actual concrete reality (or to make unwarranted concrete deductions from it). [Also see mind-projection fallacy.]
“The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.”
—Richard Feynman
Many supplemental notes and quotes are provided with the references below—these are enclosed in double square brackets (“[[…]]”).
Our approach to minimizing and correcting inevitable errors has involved relying exclusively on surveying the overlapping work of a great many other experts—so we disclaim all credit for what we report here.
Although a major theme of this book is that all essential facets of the universal logical-value system had already been discovered by the end of the 20th century (we started work on this book back in the mid-1990s), we have continued to incorporate more-recent developments and references.
We’ve tried to limit citations to a reasonable number of references that we think would be the most useful for independently {reconstructing and advancing} this work. This is a highly idiosyncratic and rushed selection, and no special significance regarding priority or importance of references should be inferred from this selection (unless explicitly stated in the supplemental notes).
There are undoubtedly some substantial gaps here, since sometimes months or years elapse before the importance of something previously read is recognized, after the specific source is forgotten. (The Web has compounded this problem.) So we’ve left the important and likely very illuminating issues of origins and priority to others. (Even moderately extensive reading will turn up many cases of parallel or partly overlapping discovery and rediscovery, within complex webs of cross-fertilization. Given our other priorities, we unfortunately don’t have the time and expertise to pursue this historically interesting realm of scientific development.)
If you think something you wrote should be referenced here, please let me know—if it looks even half-way familiar (or interesting enough to read), I’ll be happy to add it below. (Especially do so if your work is on the web. Since the late 1990s, I periodically go hog-wild with Google and link hopping (especially with the advent of Firefox and tabbed browsing), and in the course of rushing through dozens of sites and postings, it’s very likely that I’ve picked up many important ideas while being largely oblivious to their primary origins, especially for things I’ve encountered at multiple times and places.)
A great resource with abundant information on Praxeology dispersed throughout it is (www.mises.org). It contains many important papers and books that I should explicitly cite below.
Abdallah, Areski Nait (1995). The Logic of Partial Information. Springer, Berlin.
Assis, André Koch Torres (1994). Weber’s Electrodynamics. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Assis, Andre K. T. (1999). Relational Mechanics. Apeiron (redshift.vif.com), Montreal, Canada. [[An intriguing (non-crackpot) alternative to Einstein relativity for realizing (Ernst) Mach’s principles of physics. Although realistic ontology ultimately requires a field theory, an instant (or superluminal) action-at-a-distance theory seems preferable to theories that multitudes of other ontological problems. Such approaches may be the best we can do with presently available means and data (as was the case for Newton), or they may be the presently most-accessible stepping stones to discovering a much more ontologically realistic theory.]]
Bartlett, Steven J., editor (1992). Reflexivity: A Source-Book in Self-Reference. North-Holland, Amsterdam. [[This book will turn your mind inside out. Certainly lives up to its title. A little weak on future-oriented reflexivity however, since it didn’t cite the book you’re reading now.]]
Benjamin, A. Cornelius (1965). Science, Technology, and Human Values. University of Missouri Press, Columbia.
Ben-Yami, Hanoch (2004). Logic and Natural Language: On Plural Reference and Its Semantic and Logical Significance. Ashgate, Aldershot, England. [[Many good insights about why natural language (with a few notable exceptions) is vastly superior to predicate calculus for most generally expressing logic (which does not faithfully reflect actually-used logical structure, except for rather simplistic kinds of cases). Natural language and predicate calculus have substantial divergences regarding important aspects of reference, predication, and quantification. Plural reference (to common nouns), proper nouns, identity (quantification instead of predication), and referential import are among the notable specific trouble spots, and frequent expressive inefficiency and cryptic inscrutability are general problems at even moderate levels of logical sophistication. The model-theoretic semantics commonly associated with predicate calculus is also highly problematic, especially in its extensional orientation. Notes that most {mathematical and scientific} progress doesn’t use predicate calculus (and would be ill-served by it).]]
Beyleveld, Deryck (1991). The Dialectical Necessity of Morality; An analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth’s Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency. The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago. [[A very important notion. However in its present form, it still amounts to a strong plausibility argument for rights, versus being a genuine proof. A major problem is the type of rights being advanced are not genuinely person-invariant and implicitly presuppose intermediation, which is “the road to {increasing, partial, proxy} serfdom”. See Hoppe (1995) for an improved variation of this overall scheme.]]
Blanshard, Brand (1940). The Nature of Thought. MacMillan, New York. [[A classic. I didn’t read this until the 1990s, but it was still an eye-opener, despite everything else I’d read.]]
Blanshard, Brand (1961). Reason and Goodness. George Allen & Unwin, London.
Blanshard, Brand (1962). Reason and Analysis. Open Court Publishing, LaSalle, Illinois. [[Fantastic! One of the great and enduring classics of philosophy. Unlike the vast majority of philosophical authors, Blanshard is a wonderfully clear and straightforward writer. He also conscientiously refrains from the common vice of making issues seem more clear-cut than they really are. His wonderfully helpful analytical table of contents (although not unique to him) inspired my much less-elegant Descriptive Table of Contents (page 10).]]
Boettke, Peter J., editor (1994). The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics. Edward Elgar, Aldershot, England.
Bohm, David and Basil J. Hiley (1993). The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Routledge, London. [[A fully deterministic version of quantum theory that is effectively predictively identical to conventional quantum theories—thereby showing the incredible logical folly of trying to resolve fundamentally logical issues on the basis of hypothetical physical inferences.]]
BonJour, Laurence (1998). In Defense of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Account of A Priori Justification. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Bronowski, Jacob (1960). The Western Intellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel. Hutchinson, London.
Bronowski, Jacob (1964). Insight. Harper & Row, New York.
Bronowski, Jacob (1965). Science and Human Values, Revised Edition. Harper & Row, New York. [[This book was one of my earliest primary inspirations, and although I periodically returned to it, I inexpiably-stupidly didn’t fully appreciate it’s very great significance for many years. Well, better late than never. I consider it a great-grandfather of this book.]]
Bronowski, Jacob (1971). The Identity of Man. Natural History Press, Garden City, New York.
Bronowski, Jacob (1977). A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Bronowski, Jacob (1978a). The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Bronowski, Jacob (1978b). The Common Sense of Science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Bronowski, Jacob (1978c). Magic, Science, and Civilization. Columbia University Press, New York.
Bronowski, Jacob (1978d). The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Browne, Gregory (2001). Necessary Factual Truth. University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland. [[Extremely interesting. Haven’t yet had a chance to read it carefully however.]]
Buzan, Tony (1991). Speed Reading, 3rd edition. Plume / Penguin Books, New York.
Cahalan, John C. (1985). Causal Realism; An Essay on Philosophical Method and the Foundations of Knowledge. University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland.
Chubykalo, Andrew E., Viv Pope, and Roman Smirnov-Rueda, editors (1999). Instantaneous Action at a Distance in Modern Physics: “Pro” and “Contra”. Nova Science Publishers, Commack, New York.
Cohen, Jack and Ian Steward (1994). The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World. Viking / Penguin, New York. [[I think chaos theory is a great technical advance, but I think many “brilliant fools” have gone off the deep end in bogus scientific philosophizing about it. This book is something of an antidote.]]
Cohen, Sam (2005). Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, 2005 Edition. Available at (http://www.athenalab.com/Shame_Sam_Cohen_2005 Edition.pdf/). [[An empirical case for military non-interventionism (among other things). It still could use substantial professional editing, since I didn’t have sufficient time, energy, and skill.]]
Connell, Richard J. (1995). Nature’s Causes. Peter Lang Publishing, New York.
Connelly, D. K. (1990). After Em-Ped-O-Clees?: A Different View of the Universe. Merlin Books, Braunton, UK. [[Very intriguing sort of “dimensional analysis” exercise in “refactoring” elementary physics. Haven’t used it directly here, although I’ve perhaps done something analogous in the process of reformulating universal value logic.]]
Curran, Noel (1994). The Logical Universe: The Real Universe. Avebury, Aldershot, England.
Curran, Noel (1997). The Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Laws: Another Copernican Revolution. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK.
Cushing, James T., Arthur Fine, and Sheldon Goldstein (1996). Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An Appraisal. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
Dennett, Daniel C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. Penguin Putnam, New York.
Davidson, Donald (2005). Truth and Predication. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. [[I think this is mostly on the right track, but I have trouble getting a really clear-cut understanding from the hopscotch discussion and conclusion.]]
De Jasay, Anthony (1997). Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order. Routledge, London.
Diamond, Jim (2001). Mega Genius Lectures: The Genius Formula Series, The Uncommon Truth Series, and The Whole Truth Series. (http://www.mega-genius.com/). [[This is a generally very excellent but somewhat mixed bag that is nevertheless extremely valuable overall. The author notably scored off the top of the professionally administered “Wechsler adult intelligence scale—revised”. He holds that intelligence can be taught, and his lectures are oriented towards that aim. Much (but definitely not all) of what he teaches is in very substantial accord with the supreme scientific method, and his procedure (and many elaborative products thereof) could make just claim to the same “supreme scientific method” designation (although science is not its prime focus, and it’s not explicitly axiomatically formulated). See my other extensive comments in the subsection titled (“Mega Genius Lectures”, page 64). I discovered this amazing treasure in early December, 2005 (as I was finishing up the earliest preliminary draft/outline of this book), and it’s {naturally, inevitably, and unavoidably} influenced much that I’ve done since then, despite some substantial differences in perspective.]]
Dobbs, Betty Joe Teeter (1991). The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dolan, Edwin G., editor (1976). Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics. Sheed & Ward, Mission, Kansas.
Doran, Chris and Anthony Lasenby (2003). Geometric Algebra for Physicists. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [[This looks like a fantastic book, and an excellent complement to Hestenes (1986). I wish I had time to read it thoroughly. If Mathematica and these books had been available when I started college, I would have majored in applied physics instead of mathematics.]]
Dowe, Phil (2000). Physical Causation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. [[I recommend chapters 1 and especially 5. Has some good points, despite buying in to contemporary “backwards causation” lunacy.]]
Ducasse, Curt John (1969). Causation and the Types of Necessity. Dover Publications, New York.
Evans, Jonathan and David E. Over (1996). Rationality and Reasoning. Psychology Press, Hove, UK.
Feldman, David Henry (1986). Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies And The Development Of Human Potential. Basic Books, New York.
Feynman, Richard P. and Jeffrey Robbins (1999). The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: the Best Short Works of Richard Feynman. Helix Books/Perseus Books. Has reprints of “The Value of Science”, “Cargo Cult Science: Some Remarks on Science, Pseudoscience, and Learning How Not to Fool Yourself”, plus other insightful essays. [[A common theme of Feynman’s is the crucial importance of not inadvertently deceiving yourself with intuitively-plausible beliefs—especially your own. This turns out to be much easier said than done, and continual reminders to be on guard for this are always in order.]]
Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza (1998). Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Fiskin, James S. (1982). The Limits of Obligation. Yale University Press, New Haven.
FitzPatrick, William J. (2000). Teleology and the Norms of Nature. Garland Publishing, New York.
Flanagan, Owen (1991). The Science of Mind, Second Edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Floridi, Luciano (1996). Skepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology: A Study in the Metalogical Fallacies. E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Gordon, David, editor (1998). Secession, State & Liberty. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Greco, John (2000). Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and their Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [[Doesn’t irrationally dismiss skeptics as merely being irrational or commit the common “the burden of proof is on them” evasion of the vexing issues some of the more astute skeptics raise.]]
Griffin, David Ray (1998). Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Hampton, Jean E. (1998). The Authority of Reason. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Harrison, Jonathan (1995). Essays on Metaphysics and the Theory of Knowledge, Volume II. Avebury, Aldershot, England.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1948). Individualism and Economic Order. Gateway Editions, South Bend, Ind.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1969). Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. University of Simon and Schuster, New York.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1976). The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1978). New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economic and the History of Ideas. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1979). The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason. Liberty Press, Indianapolis , Ind.
Haugeland, John (1998). Having Thoughts: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hazen, Robert M. and James Trefil (1996). The Physical Sciences, An Integrated Approach. John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Hestenes, David (1986). New Foundations for Classical Mechanics. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. [[Introduces the (partly ontologically unifying) mathematical physics language of geometric calculus. Excellent! For much more advanced discussions of geometric calculus, see (http://modelingnts.la.asu.edu) and (http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~clifford/index.html).]]
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter (1975) Children Above 180 IQ. Arno Press, New York. [[Extremely interesting.]]
Hooker, Brad (2000). Ideal Code, Real World; a Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (1993). The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, Massachusetts.
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (1995). Economic Science and the Austrian Method. Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama. This “instant gratification” version (http://www.mises.org/esandtam.asp) lacks the printed version’s preface and index. [[Fantastic! This brief volume is the 20th century’s best introduction to foundational praxeology. I wish it had been available to read 30 years earlier. The logical linkage between the argumentation ethic and liberty-property rights is actually a plausibility argument, not a full-fledged proof. An important advance that rules out many conceivable contending doctrines of rights, but it’s not strong enough to exclude all but 1 possibility. Some additional conceptual lever is apparently required. Perhaps there is an ethical calculation counterpart of the socialist (impossibility of) calculation argument that would at least absolutely nail down self-ownership once and for all—after all, a purported ethical system that can’t be substantially practically instantiated in terms of a knowably moderately accurate evaluation system (calculation) isn’t really an actual ethical system. With self-ownership absolutely established, the most consistent doctrines of property wins out by extension, and there is presently only one general category of such theories, exemplified by the Rothbard-Hoppe property system.]]
Jaynes, Edwin T. (2003). Probability Theory: The Logic Of Science. Cambridge University Press. [[Warning: this generally excellent book is unfortunately marred by some substantial blunders; the author died before finishing it.]]
Johnson, Peter (1997). The Constants of Nature: A Realist Account. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK.
Joseph, H. W. B. (1916). An Introduction to Logic, Second Edition. Oxford University Press, London. [[An enduring classic of philosophical logic. I learned a lot from it.]]
Kantor, Frederick W. (1977). Information Mechanics. John Wiley & Sons, New York. [[An extremely intriguing alternate perspective for deriving physics. I haven’t made direct use of it here, but I have the nagging feeling that I should be able to, somehow.]]
Kelder, Peter (1989). Ancient Secrets of the Fountain of Youth. Harbor Press, Gig Harbor, Wash. [[Don’t be put off by the very implausible title and story. This book describes the most invigorating exercises I know of if you only have 5–10 minutes to work out. Newer versions of his book have been considerably puffed up and split into 2 volumes. They looked OK, but I’ve not read them closely.]]
Kirzner, Israel M. (1975). The Economic Point of View: An Essay in the History of Economic Thought, Second Edition. Sheed and Ward, Kansas City.
Kneale, W. and M. Kneale (1962). The Development of Logic. Oxford Clarendon Press.
Lamb, D. and S. M. Easton (1984). Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress. Avebury, UK.
Lepore, Ernie and Kirk Ludwig (2005). Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality. Clarendon Press, Oxford. [[Donald was a real genius, although a fallible one. This overview is more accessible than his often-dense papers (now at last collected together and reprinted in a series of books).]]
Long, Roderick T. (2000). Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. The Objective Center, Poughkeepsie, New York.
Long, Roderick T. (2005). What the Hell is Praxeology? (http://www.praxeology.net/praxeo.htm) [[A great resource. Sometimes his blog carries great capsule discussions on important praxeology-related issues.]]
Long, Roderick T. (2005). Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action. Here is an older draft c.2003: (http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/long.pdf). [[Haven’t seen the printed version yet, but the draft was certainly very intriguing, informative, and enlightening.]]
Lorenzen, Paul (1984). Normative Logic and Ethics, 2nd Annotated Edition. Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim, Germany. [[An important book.]]
Maher, Patrick (1993). Betting on Theories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Mead, Carver A. (2000). Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. [[Fascinating! How Einstein (and Schrödinger) could have been right about determinism (and continuity) in quantum theory after all. What if quantum theory had been initially derived from macroscopically coherent quantum phenomena such as lasers and superconductivity (which were discovered only much later), rather than from incoherent statistical phenomena? Not ontologically realistic with respect to unidirectional time and causality, but has other very important pro-realistic critiques of contemporary classical and quantum theories of electromagnetism.]]
Mercier, Charles (1912). A New Logic. Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.
Mertz, Donald W. (1996). Moderate Realism and its Logic. Yale University Press, New Haven. [[Extremely excellent! The best book I’ve found on logical ontology. The best scientific theory of concepts I’ve seen.]]
Nozick, Robert (1993) The Nature of Rationality. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. [[Looks like this has some important decision-theoretic insights (and maybe an unrecognized axiom lurking within), but I’ve not given it the close study it deserves.]]
Nozick, Robert (2001). Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. [[The title is the best part of the book—it’s a critically important notion, it’s correct (as far as it goes), and it’s elegantly brief. Too bad the rest of the book didn’t follow suit—but it still has some haphazardly dispersed insights worth teasing out.]]
Oakenshott, Michael (1978). Experience and its Modes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [[This is an extremely intriguing book that I’ve not yet gone back to and given the close study it almost certainly deserves.]]
Oliver, Harold H. (1981). A Relational Metaphysic. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague.
Oyama, Susan (1985). The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Information. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Pearl, Judea (2000). Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference. Cambridge University Press. [[The best book I’ve found on the general logical structure of causality. Excellent! One very important insight is that many sophisticated causal notions can be much more simply expressed in terms of causal graphs instead of the traditional approach of algebraic logical formulation (or the equivalent descriptive English sentences), which tends towards an inscrutably cumbersome and unintuitive mess. This is one case where “a picture is worth a thousand words” certainly applies and rings true.]]
Parsons, Stephen D. (1997). Mises, The A Priori, and the Foundations of Economics: A Qualified Defense. In: Economics and Philosophy. Volume 13, 175–196, Cambridge University Press.
Perkins, David (1995). Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable IQ. The Free Press, New York.
Perkins, John (2004). Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco. [[The jacket summary is very apt: “The inside story of how America turned from a respected republic into a feared empire. … Perkins reveals the hidden mechanisms of imperial control behind some of the most dramatic events in recent history…. This extraordinary real-life tale exposes international intrigue, corruption, and little-known government and corporate activities that have dire consequences for American democracy and the world.”]]
Phipps Jr., Thomas E. (1986). Heretical Verities : Mathematical Themes In Physical Description. Classic Non-fiction Library, Urbana, Ill. [[Wow. This certainly opened my mind (in a positive and critical sense), and was a helpful background for subsequently searching and sorting the wheat from the flakes in alternative physics.]]
Pirsig, Robert M. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Morrow, New York. [[In raising many issues, this book really crystallized the supreme importance of overcoming the logic-value dichotomy, and (indirectly) to change my appraisal of Bronowski (1965) from “that was interesting” to “that’s an extremely important key”.]]
Pirsig, Robert M. (1991). Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Bantam Books, New York. [[Pirsig has a genius for coming up with novel (pun intended) and extremely interesting insights that seem tantalizing close to being correct—and thereby just on the verge of rectifying major problems in philosophy. I think he’s on to something very important, but I’m stumped and (so far) can’t find suitable reformulations or qualifying conditions for his 4-level evolutionary hierarchy of values (among other things). I have the (often-correct) feeling that I’m overlooking something obvious (that would decisively determine whether this quest is mistaken or not). Meanwhile, I like to think of universal value logic as a very drastic revision of (and interim version of) the “Metaphysics of Quality” (a wonderful characterization) that Pirsig enigmatically unveils throughout his latest book. My guess is that Pirsig would appreciate this sentiment but reluctantly disagree with it.]] <<Still need to check out recent {explanations, developments} in MOQ conference proceedings link at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics_of_Quality)>>
Pols, Edward (1992). Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Rescher, Nicholas (1996). Priceless Knowledge?: Natural Science in Economic Perspective. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland.
Rescher, Nicholas (1997). Profitable Speculations: Essays on Current Philosophical Themes. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland. [[I bet you don’t agree with it, but I bet you’ll learn something valuable anyway.]]
Root-Bernstein, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein (1999). Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. [[I met Robert at a talk many years ago, and was extremely impressed with his intellect.]]
Rothbard, Murray N. (1998). The Ethics of Liberty: With a New Introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. New York University Press, New York. [[A masterpiece of social ethics, with an introduction to match.]]
Rothbard, Murray N. (2004). Man, Econom