Right - so you would say that A & H were referring to something innate in the whole concept of enlightenment (which is of course the title of the chapter from which that comes, Begriff der Aufklärung), rather than a (later?) stage in its development (which of these they refer to of course affects quite significantly how one interprets the whole thesis)?

Popper uses the term "non-science" which will do me very nicely . Mind you, he is famous for arguing that Marxism, or Marx's account of human history anyway, falls into that category too which may, ahem, not go down well with some Members here.

On Richard's point about the possibility of embedding 'science' in something wider or deeper, I don't know whether this is the same point or a different one, but I think it is true that there has been a broad development over human history whereby areas of inquiry that had previously been seen as 'metaphysics' have been chipped away at and from time to time great lumps of them have been transferred across to what now counts more as 'science' i.e. as open to testability and falsifiability. I reckon there is plenty more of that still to be done, and still do-able, and that, for example, we may be on the edge of getting a handle on questions (previously seen as 'meta-scientific') such as, how is it that science is possible at all?, why is it that the universe seem to work in a lawlike way? and so on. I'm not saying that there won't be an irreducible core that will always remain 'metaphysical' but I do think there is considerably more, and substantive, chipping away to be done.

Whether the result of that radical process (which I have to say I greatly prefer as a way of looking at it to the Hegelian/Marxian 'historical unfolding of consciousness' model) is best described as the expansion of science or moving into a further stage of post-science is perhaps a matter of language?

Oh, and Richard's recommendation of David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality strongly seconded. Beautifully written as well as head-explodingly challenging and, in places, infuriating. Quite apart from anything else, it's a wonderfully cheering example of how very complex scientific/philosophical ideas can still be written about for the rest of us to read on the Clapham omnibus.   

In that context, the following may be of interest:
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr179/callinicos.htm
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/19740502.htm
The second is interesting in its refutation of Popper's view of Marxism as a deterministic philosophy. Popper rejected economic planning on grounds of non-falsifiablity as well, aligning himself with Thatcherism and other forms of neo-liberalism.

Do you think there's any way of reconciling Popper's wider ideas on falsifiability, verifiability, etc., with Marxism (I'm sceptical, and don't find what Callinicos has to say above very convincing)? For Deutsch's politics, try this blog which he runs together with Alan Forrester.

My word. He gets off to a great start:

What happens now is that we (by which I mean the West) eradicate state-sponsored terrorism. And we can achieve that only by replacing all political systems that perpetrate or collaborate with terrorism, by systems that respect human rights both domestically and internationally.

That would already exclude the USA and Israel, two of the countries he holds in high esteem. But he really takes the cake later:

The Western stance — and even Western mistakes, including appeasement and moral relativism — are driven fundamentally by respect for human beings, human choices and human life. Western values are life-affirming and life-seeking.

I think this guy needs to read a history of the CIA, get some background on multinational corporations and many other things. Respect for certain human beings, but not for others! This stuff makes me sick. It's no great surprise that he nods to his fellow positivist Dawkins, though at least he recognises the latter's mistake by pointing out that people don't need religion to do evil things.

Admittedly, this strikes me as slightly off-topic. Though one could, of course, refer to neo-con positivism as a religion, in which case it certainly is evil...

Re Penrose, I think it's all tied up with his Platonic cast of mind, which he sums up in one of his books with a startling image that goes something like this:

If we start out with physical reality, we can think of human minds as a subset of that reality. We can then think of mathematics as a subset of what's in human minds. But physical reality, in seeming to be underpinned by mathematical laws, seems also to be an embodiment of a subset of the possibilities of mathematics. So we have these three worlds, each of which is a part of one of the others, which I think Penrose sees as a central mystery and which links human minds into physical reality at a fundamental level. This is rather similar to what Deutsch says when he talks about minds as parts of the universe which are self-similar to the whole in so far as they generate "virtual-reality" images of reality by processing sensory data. I have the feeling that there's some enormous truth hiding behind Penrose and Deutsch's attempts to understand the relationship between mind and matter, which Penrose says needs some fundamentally new physics in order to be understood, whereas Deutsch, with a little help from the smoke and mirrors of sophistry (is my impression, but I wouldn't want to debate it with him!), thinks we already have the basic answer.

I (sort of) follow his argument up to there, and his related arguments about Godel-type incompleteness, and very persuasive it is too IMHO. It's the bit where he goes on to make a specific identification between quantum computation, collapsing wave-functions, quantum effects in microtubules and certain features of consciousness where I get lost. I must have another read, and also get round to some of the literature that has grown up around that particular suggestion. It's all on the 'to do' list....<sigh>

While on the subject of things I haven't read yet has anyone here read Douglas Hofstadter's (he of Godel, Escher, Bach) new book  I am A Strange Loop?  Irresistible title. I assume it goes into this same general area? Undoubtedly worth reading. It's just that I haven't yet.   

I don't think he thinks the microtubule business is any more convincing than you or I might think it is, but it's the only show in town just at the moment and could spark discussion and/or investigation towards coming up with something more plausible. Some people seem to think that his failure to come up with anything testable calls his whole project into question: curiously, these are often the same people who will swallow any amount of string theory...

I didn't know of its existence, but I was recently thinking of going through GEB again, not having read it since it came out (and having subsequently come to the opinion that it wasn't much good, though I can't even remember why).