Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

14 tion, discard the main point in favor of arguing semantics and definitions. That was always safe and didn’t require one to think. But I didn’t let him escape that easily. ‘“"Now suppose, within that frame- work, a biologist fished a minnow out of a stream, carried it dry to his laboratory and proceeded to analyze it. You and I know the minnow would die in transit. Now he observes that it does not breathe air, and could not have breathed air down in the water, therefore it does not represent a life form at all. That is his real world condition, isn’t it?” “Yes,” he agreed hesitantly. “But there would be so many other evid- ences that it does represent life. He would have to be extremely stupid not to recognize that his basic rules defining life were wrong.” “Let us concede,” I said dryly, “that he is very stupid. But let us be kind. Let us say that it is the entire framework of thought in which he finds himself which is stupid. All his life, he has been educated to this framework. Science and society have weighted him down with immutable, laws. To question them would repre- sent nothing less than chaos.” “Yes,” he urged me now to go on. “We come along, you and I, and we operate in a different framework of thought. In our world condition, fish obtain oxygen directly from water. But we could not prove that to him.” “IT don’t see—” “Look,” I said patiently, “since his base law requires life to breathe air, he would demand, as proof of our contention, that we show it breathing air. We couldn’t do it. He will not give up the foundation of his science. We can’t prove our claim until he does.” “Stalemate,’’ Auerbach agreed. “But where does that leave us?” ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION “It leaves us with the conception that there may be any number of frameworks, separated from one an- other by perhaps the thinnest of partitions, each containing its own set of real world conditions, natural laws, consistent within itself, obeying its own logic, having its own peculiar cause-eflect-sequences.”’ ‘‘And one of these substitutes down for up?” he asked skeptically. “Some of the most noted thinkers the world has ever produced contend that the mind is the only reality,” I said slowly. ““Now suppose we have a child of an ignorant parent. The child has been neglected, left to vegetate alone in its room, never COMicoOoOkS.CO© fan ees.