ABSTRACT
Seeking scientific truth is an exercise in moral realism, and so in author's view scientists are implicitly committed to belief in an objective moral order. This chapter explains language in a most fundamental kind of way shortly, but it bears emphasising again that the argument of Mind and Cosmos and, even more, of The View from Nowhere that the powers of understanding are unjustified is the key claim being made by Thomas Nagel. It is the power to understand the capacity to reason and to know about the world, or the powers to comprehend moral truths. Nagel is led to argue that mind is a basic aspect of nature because he rejects the existence of God, a priori – and this leads him to propose a natural teleology, a natural goal-directing law of the world that is impersonal but that makes knowledge, mind and ethical value fundamental aspects of reality to which the world are gradually waking up.
