Abstract

The Reality Club is an informal group of adventurous intellectuals whose by-invitation-only membership roster reads like a Who's Who of American arts, science, politics, and business—particle physicist Gerald Feinberg, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, linguist Vitaly Shevoroshkin, cyberneticist and video artist Paul Ryan. Theirs are the cutting-edge minds of our time, whose ideas are creating the reality of tomorrow. The Reality Club has been meeting once or twice a month, in private sessions in New York City, since 1981. Now it's going public in a series of thematic books, of which WAYS OF KNOWING—thirteen provocative essays on the theme of how we learn, think, and process information—is the third volume. Like its predecessors, SPECULATIONS and DOING SCIENCE, it is required reading for anyone who appreciates the life of the mind, the unflinching search for truth, and reading for sheer intellectual pleasure.