ABSTRACT
Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists — worse, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them. Much of the paraphernalia of science, whether of experiments, sampling, or statistical testing, can be thought of as a kind of ritual designed to protect the scientist against wishful thinking and perception. Science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment; it has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.”
