Rather, it means that when one argues for a policy in the public sphere, one should offer arguments that could in principle be understood and accepted by citizens who aren't members of one's own confession.
This constituted the broad intellectual background for most educated people throughout the Roman Empire, functioning in a way comparable to the pervasive contemporary Western secular view of the universe as an autonomous system within which everything can in principle be understood scientifically.
How should the harm principle be understood?
A necessarily private language, one which is such that it can, in principle, be understood by only one person, is (logically) impossible.
Meanwhile, the relativity principle was understood as the equivalence of uniform states of motion, but any systems in such a state was implicitly understood to have a definite, though unknown and unknowable, velocity in absolute space.
Crick explains in (Crick 1994) that: "The scientific meaning of emergent, or at least the one I use, assumes that, while the whole may not be the simple sum of its separate parts, its behavior can, at least in principle, be understood from the nature and behavior of its parts plus the knowledge of how all these parts interact".
David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.
The key principles of awareness are understood by the public better than any other natural disaster threat.
Moreover, there is also a fundamental need to ensure that key concepts and principles in epidemiology are understood clearly and communicated accurately, particularly with the further blurring of boundaries between scientific disciplines in recent years.
The peace process has subtly shifted from bilateral negotiations, in which envoys hammer out principles for agreement and bring these to the international community, to one in which the principles and possible impediments are understood and Western states other than the U.S. may choose to put pressure on the parties.
