Dear Dr. Bill,
Goddam philosophers snow me under. I had not thought of the "engines" writer
as a philosophy enthusiast. I don't think you need to be a philosophy enthusiast to try and find a reliable criterion to distinguish science from other products of the human mind. Popper is often quoted as having found the definitive solution. Yet even to accept a falsification of a given hypothesis, you need to believe certain premises, e.g. about causality. Furthermore, many fall into the trap of believing that there is a finite number of alternative hypotheses: so if all but one are falsified, the remaining one would have to be true..