ABSTRACT
Even a superficial scrutiny of the terrestrial situation suffices to show that the development of natural science is certainly not inevitable for cognitive beings but is closely linked to their internal constitution and their cultural orientation. Sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists talk in much the same terms, and philosophers of science have also come to say the same sorts of things. The constitution of alien inquirers—physical, biological, and social—thus emerges as crucial for science. Like the science of the remote future, the science of remote aliens must be presumed to be such that we really could not achieve intellectual access to it on the basis of our own position in the cognitive scheme of things. Science is always the result of inquiry into nature, and this is inevitably a matter of a transaction or interaction in which nature is but one party and the inquiry beings another. The developmental path from intelligence to science is strewn with substantial obstacles.
