One of the principal reasons for the confusion in which recent technological developments, and developments in the physical, chemical and biological sciences generally, have plunged us, consists in our inability to harmonise our means and our ends, to subordinate the former to the latter, to verify constantly their appropriateness or their incompatibility, and to evaluate their overall relation to man's final ends.

Innovative understanding or explanation stems almost exclusively from analogical reasoning. Induction systematizes the familiar; deduction casts it into formal relationship. Reasoning by analogy brings to bear on the familiar a new perspective derived from another realm of inquiry. Models are fruits from the tree of analogical knowledge.

Terms of address are the words we use when we speak to someone. The circumstances in which they are used are the same everywhere: when we call to someone; when we meet someone; when we want to attract someone's attention; when we speak to one person in a group—to ask a question or to give an order; at the beginning of a discourse; on an envelope; and at the beginning of a letter. Nevertheless, it depends on a particular society whether the use of these terms, in a given circumstance, is necessary or not. In Chinese, for example, when one meets someone he knows, he is not obliged to call him by name, title or any other term. The most normal attitude is to ask a question about what he is doing, a question whose objective depends on the circumstances and whose form depends on the degree of familiarity one has with the person addressed.

Science and the humanities share the same kit of working tools, called the world's literature. While the author of this article deals mainly with the scientific and mathematical literature, the reader probably gravitates towards some other branches, but such distinctions were hardly made in the Middle Ages. The American philosopher, Wallace Stevens, in his book The Necessary Angel remarks that at the time of Aristotle, the Greek language had no word to signify literature. The reason is surely that literature had long since been too universal an element in Greece to require a name. We have no name for the smell of air. This all-pervading power of literature is apparent already two generations before Aristotle, when Socrates made his defence against leading the youth of Athens towards atheism. Plato's Apology tells us how Socrates taunted his accuser: “Have you such a low opinion of the judges, that you fancy them so illiterate as not to know these doctrines are found in the books of Anaxagoras which are full of them? And so, my word, the youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when they can be bought in the book-market for one drachma at most…” (a coin today worth 1.4 pence!).

This paper is about the reference or denotation of the concepts and descriptions of modern physics in contrast to Galilean-Newtonian physics and some reflections therein of some widely influential misunderstandings of Einstein's empiricism.

According to Karl Popper, who is the latest link in the chain of Western rationalist-empiricist debate, knowledge does not have any infallible base in either senses or reason. Taking modern science as the paradigm of human knowledge, he argues that the process of growth of scientic knowledge involves imaginative proposals of hypotheses or conjectures and their refutation on empirical grounds in a continuing series of steps. Thus, scientific knowledge continuously evolves in a series of revolutions whereby the accepted theoretic constructs are falsified, therefore destroyed, and new ones accepted in their place. Experiment, as provoked and controlled stimulation of the senses, plays a critical role in this process of growth and so long as it fails to falsify the hypotheses these are provisionally accepted by the scientists.