ABSTRACT
or unproblematic: to fully ground it requires some knowledge about optics and about the mechanisms of human vision.) As all practicing scientists and historians of science well know, the reasoning from scientific observations to scientific theories is far more indirect, and typically involves a vast web of empirical evidence rather than a single observation. My point is simply that in all of these cases-Newtonian mechanics, Darwinian evolution, or elephants-it is absurd to try to explain the “causes” of people’s beliefs without including the natural (non-social) world as one of those causes.
