Miller argues that David Hume showed that, "reports from the past provide not the slightest reason to suppose that any one thing rather than another will occur in the future." Thus, "Science offers no security. Science has no authority."

I suspect that part of what Miller is doing is trying to shock the scientists who will be reading this essay. Most of the world lives daily with the security and authority of science:
will the airplane I am in crash?
will this medicine cure my ills?
As Miller puts it, "science, unlike witchcraft, works."

If you read between the lines and wait until the end of the essay, it becomes clear that Miller, had he not been trying to shock scientists, should have more accurately written, "Science offers no absolute security. Science has no absolute authority." This is a credo that scientists live by. No hypothesis, no theory, no prediction is so sure that we completely stop doubting it. We always are on the lookout for a better theory, a better way to understand things. In this sense, scientists might view themselves as "Practical Skeptics". Miller likes terms such as "Absolute Skeptic" and "Genuine Truth". These are not terms that scientists tend to use.

In this essay, Miller is trying to perform some therapy on science in order to help in the war of words that has grown between scientists and postmodern relativists. Each side, exasperated by the stupidity of the other, is tempted to assume extreme positions:
Relativism: science is just one perspective among many, there is no good philosophical justification for calling the scientific view of the world "correct"
and
Science: the results of science are justified in ways that most other beliefs are not, so we can call the scientific view of reality the best view, verging on the indubitable.

When scientists and non-scientists assume these stances, there is little room for constructive progress......all the we have is a war between two cultures. How do we end this war?

Miller tries to distinguish between skepticism and relativism. He charts the historical course from the ancient skeptics to the postmodern relativists' rejection of science. It is a brief history, dominated by Hume who introduced two new ideas into skepticism. apparently in response to the new type of science which had appeared in the 1600's. Hume's first idea was that even if you collect reproducible evidence that the sun rises each morning, there must always be some doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. For example, the sun might explode tonight. Hume's second idea, according to Miller, is that, "there exist no grounds whatever for anything we know".

It is at this point that things get murky. If you run with Hume's second idea you get postmodern relativism in all of its glory. As an alternative, Miller suggests what I take to be an approach that only people living after Darwin would be able to imagine and use. �The level-headed skeptic, the critical rationalist, does not doubt that there is truth to be had, but thinks that it may only be had by making a lucky guess.� I would call this �evolutionary epistemology�. Miller says that Science is a good source of knowledge because of its method of searching for errors.

It interests me that Wittgenstein seemed to decide on a type of philosophy that was concerned with identifying the errors of human thought. Wittgenstein�s method was not the exactly same as that usually favored in science, but I would call it a �selectionistic� method in the same family as Natural Selection and the system science uses to test hypotheses.

BTW.......Miller finally concludes his essay by suggesting that in order to improve relations between scientists and non-scientists (including philosophers), scientists should be quicker to admit ignorance. Since I am all in favor of THAT for both scientists and philosophers, it was of interest to me to see MIller�s line of reasoning which is one that never would have occurred to me.