Empiricism and Humility: Characterizing the Problem Space for a (Future) Science of UAP

Talk by Dr. Michael C. Cifone.

The scientific study of UAP confronts a landscape of problems that has resisted adequate characterization for nearly eight decades – and that persistent failure is itself the first datum any serious research program must address. This contribution argues that progress requires beginning not with the objects of inquiry but with the conditions under which inquiry into them has repeatedly failed to assemble into a cumulative science.

The methodological anchor is a Jamesian radical empiricism: the commitment that an adequate empiricism must neither admit any element not directly experienced nor exclude any element that is. From this standpoint, the contribution offers a preliminary characterization of the problem space, distinguishing three analytically separable domains: the institutional and political conditions that have structured UAP inquiry to date; the empirical challenges facing any serious observational program, from the purely physical frontier cases through the harder cases that resist decomposition into conventional physical or psychological categories; and the deeper formal and conceptual dimension that the most recalcitrant cases eventually demand.

Throughout, the contribution is framed by the epistemic virtue the field most requires: disciplined suspension – what the poet Keats called “negative capability” – as the condition for genuine inquiry rather than premature resolution in either direction. The contribution is offered as a sketch of an ongoing research program in the philosophical and methodological foundations of UAP Studies.

Discussant: Aaron French

All are welcome.