368 THE REAL WORLD 



We make ourselves subjective pictures or symbols of external objects. 

 We construct these in such a manner that the logically necessary 

 sequences of these pictures are always symbols for the physical series 

 of represented objects. In order that this be possible, there must be 

 certain concordances between nature and our intellect. Experience 

 teaches us that this process is indeed possible, and so that such con- 

 cordances do in fact exist. 



The concordance so discovered (and uniquely associated with the 

 "myth of physical objects") is neither mentioned nor explained by 

 Quine. Such concordance is of course just what I postulate, just the 

 "congruity" demanded by the principle of intelligibility. 



The word "science" derives from the Latin scire, "to know." Sci- 

 ence abundantly establishes its claim to know in the sense of Comte's 

 maxim: "savoir, cest prevoir." Perhaps too it makes some claim to 

 know in the much deeper but intimately related (and surely not 

 then "vulgarly pragmatic") sense of Jesus' "by their works ye shall 

 know them." The picture of nature that supports our search for sci- 

 entific laws is, says Schrodinger, "not only a permissible tool, but also 

 a goal." 



Foretelling, predicting, obsei-vation is only a means for us to ascer- 

 tain whether or not the picture that we have formed is correct. 



THEORIES 



Scientific laws are accommodated in scientific theories the postulates 

 of which limn some picture of the world. Are not all such pictures 

 obviously meaningless? Viewing the succession of "revolutionary" 

 advances in scientific theory, we may well seem to pass through a 

 gallery of pictures no two of which are at all alike. And, insofar as 

 they suggested any pictures at all, even such coeval theories as 

 Schrodinger's wave mechanics and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics 

 seemed to represent fundamentally irreconcilable conceptions. Yet 

 ultimately we find that these two theories, each in its own way, depict 

 what we can regard as the "same situation." And, especially when the 

 correspondence principle applies to the historical succession of 

 theories, we find that the highest and progressively more subordinate 

 theories also represent— each in its own way, and with its own degree 

 of generality— the "same situation." 



In parrying the first allegation of meaninglessness do we not leave 



