As is said, "Not all (things) are known (or likely ever will be)...BUT if anything CAN be known, Science alone is that which permits us to know them."

Hi Bernie. Not that I disagree with the above assertion, but don't you think it a bit strongly stated and in need of clarification. The strong programme in epistemology would certainly agree---let's throw the correspondence theory of truth out the window.

A prominent neuropsychologist, R. L. Gregory, has considered just this subject lately in an article titled "Perceptions of knowledge" (Nature, V 140 1 Mar 01) in which he points out the curious fact that vision and hearing (unlike taste and smell) give only indirect knowledge of affairs: we must "interpret" their 'images' - whereas those of taste and smell are frontline, battleground hands-on affairs as they are actually occurring.

I haven't read this article but something smells fishy here. Is Gregory implying that object/sensori propinquity determine the degree of ontological certainty of the world? Does my tasting the peach give me a better knowledge of affairs than if I regard the peach by viewing it from across the room? I doubt it. It is absurd to suppose that the receptor end-organs of taste or of smell are supposed to give us a better report of states of affairs that those of hearing and sight just because the objects under scrutiny are usually closer to our sense organs of smell and taste. Be they conveyed by photons or pheromone, ultimately all stimuli are reported to the interpretive centers in the brain where the hegemony of one sense over the other depends on the context of the organism, not the presumed rank of the sense organ. Ever tried to play baseball when limited to the first and eighth cranial nerves? I'd get beaned right on the old noggin for sure.

Illusions are not tied to object reality - the author says. Perceptions are guesses - really, predictive hypotheses - of what may be out there. But they may be wrong (ultimately) hence the never-ending quest for refinement.

Isn't it interesting that he tacitly embraces the myth of objectivism here in announcing that perceptions may be "wrong" and invoking "the quest for refinement". Refinement toward what? The myth of objectivism claims that there is an objective reality and we can say things that are absolutely and unconditionally true and false about it without worrying that our words are not the same as the things they refer to. It assumes that words have fixed meanings, that metaphor is to be avoided, and that objectivity means to be rational.