Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 5. 1962.
Expedient or Real
Expedient or Real
Mr Heine's masterly introduction to "Are scientific constructs expedient or do they have real existence?" is largely summed up in his own words: "Any abstraction inferred from sense-data can be termed a scientific construct, it doesn't really matter which constructs you use to derive hypotheses which are testable." As may be expected, when the meeting an a whole took up the discussion, problems of existence soon reduced it almost to "cogito ergo sum," though Mr Coleridge's remark that "an electron Ls a scientific construct, but little hard bails are an aid to understanding" contains much compressed wisdom.