The Language Expansion Required to Make Progress in Science

Abstract

Positivists introduced the differentiation between theoretical and observational language statements to emphasize the difference between what we observe and how we explain those observations. This differentiation is inadequate to describe the processing phases one executes in order to know the world. The collapse of multiple meanings into identical symbols has obscured the subjective reality we actually experience within an objective framework. It is the fusion of observation and theory that produces the objects we see. Once fused, we think objects are fundamental and forget our own role in making them appear. The multiple-meaning collapse of words we use to describe reality has prevented science from properly integrating mind and body in an event-oriented world view that grasps both aspects of the reality in which we exist. Expanding our language to allow independent identification of mental versus physical phenomena is the prerequisite for allowing scientific theory to advance our understanding of the total reality in which we live.