Preface

Two things set science apart from other ways of arriving at the truth about a thing or concept or activity or process. One is epistemological: the humility needed to admit that there is something worth knowing that we do not in fact know. Science must be written from a position of ignorance; when we write what we know, or think we know, that is pedagogy, or religion, rather than scholarship in the true sense.
The second distinctive feature of science is methodological: developing the means of breaking down what we want to understand into its component elements. A further effort is then required to reconstitute the object of analysis into a whole, lest we fall into the trap of forgetting that the atomistic elements are the artefact of their analysis, and imagine instead that the elements alone are real, with the totality relegated to being the secondary, even marginal result of a process of composition.