I am not sure that there is really a contradiction. (First, I don't think talking about "orderliness in nature in itself" is the kind of thing you can talk about, since you never see nature in itself.) There are several different meanings of "orderliness." There is "nonrandomness," and nature is definitely nonrandom. It has patterns. There is also "meaningfulness," in the sense of "this hunk of nature is this thing" and "this hunk of nature is that other thing," and "these hunks are related in this way," and "concepts" attach to these hunks. But nature is not divided into neat little hunks -- it is _fuzzy_. There are patterns, but which patterns are perceived and how they are linked together depend on the framework in which the person perceives them, what he or she thinks the world is.
I was trying to get at this a bit earlier with a post on religion in which I pointed out that intuitions, hunches, etc. are parts of the world (they are things we experience), but because of our secular "modern" framework we attach these experience-hunks to other parts of experience in a way that a "premodern" person does not (or many modern religious people do not).
--- On Wed, 6/18/08, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> A social constructionist, and you don't have to be
> pomo/poststruct/whatever to take this view, would ask to
> what extent we're
> projecting when we perceive orderliness in nature. indeed,
> I seem to
> recall that positivists no longer insist on invariable
> natural laws, but
> look for statistical probabilities. Someone with more of a
> natural
> sciences background should jump in here....
>