That’s truth with a capital “T”, I’m not talking about “the best answer we have” or “better than that crazy scheme Lamarck came up with.”
You’ve heard of the ether right? It seemed liked a good explanation at the time. Relativity explained more, but how can we say that it is any more right?
Why is it that old science can be wrong but the new science is always right . Isn’t today’s new science just tommorow’s old science?
Yes. Er, that is, todays science is potentially tommorows Ether.
Science is an inherently self-correcting affair. With each new discovery, and with each bit of research, our view of the world gets a little less fuzzy and more clear. Is there a higher truth than what we can ascertain through observation and experimentation? I’m not sure, sorry.
Look at gravity. Originally, before there was even a name for it the basic principle of gravity was “Things fall down.” Everybody can grasp that one, and it works pretty well for everyday stuff. Then along comes Newton. Newton says “Things fall down because objects are attracted to more massive objects.” Again, good enough, and a huge leap from the original. Now Einstein will tell you “Things fall down because objects are attracted to more massive objects, because the more massive an object is the bigger ‘dip’ it makes in the rubber sheet of spacetime.” Really, that’s probably more specific than any of us will ever need. It’s more correct, and doesn’t invalidate the older models of how gravity works.
Science can find some truth, but not all truth. The purpose of science, or indeed any reason-based endeavour, is to take facts and come out with incontrovertible answers, which can then be made into incontrovertible predictions.
Humans having free will, however, we are not subject to incontrovertible predictions, which basically means (à la Noam Chomsky) that the whole idea of social “science” is b.s.
Reason and science generally are Very Good Things. But we seem to be mired in this large pit of rationalism, or what John Ralston Saul calls the dictatorship of reason, in which reason thinks it all dat and assums that anything it can’t describe doesn’t exist and that in any disagreement between reason and reality, reality is wrong. It has a pretty noble basis for saying so; after all, the rise of reason during the Renaissance and Enlightenment helped us out of the Dark Ages. But that was because the addition of reason completed a balance which was missing a counterweight. Since the other weights (i.e. the other human qualities) have been removed, reason has become a dictatorship.
The problem with reason is that when in a dictatorship position, it tries to convince you that it is right, it is the only right answer, that we cannot help but agree with it, that we should give in and let reason solve everything. Abdicating our human sentience to let reason guide us deterministically is no different than abdicating our sentience to the Bible or to any other ideology. We have to make our own decisions; to let anything else - anything - make our decisions for us is to give up on being human.
Reason is wonderful, but like everything else it has to be balanced, and like everything else it is not the panacea and the answer to everything.
Science does not traffic in truth. The currency of science is theory
Observations are made and a theory explaining the observations is devised. If the theory carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, that is, if it is easily falsifiable, and withstands scrutiny, it survives. But no scientist would call it the truth, much less the Truth.
Evolution is a theory. An excellent theory, to be sure, but in order to qualify as a Truth, the entire history of the world would have to be played out before our eyes. Anything less is educated guesswork.
Science is simply not equipped to deal with truth.
In fact, I don’t know what is.
I agree with WallyM7 for the most part. However, my experience with physicists has led me to belive that many of them actually feel that they are discovering the truth. I assume many other scientists feel this way too.
Do you think Stephen Hawking would say “Aw, that was just the best explanation I could think of”?
In response to JDeMobray:
Relativity took into explained the same things that Newtonian physics did, but it shattered the Newtonian viewpoint, it didn’t build on it.
Sorry… “relativity explained” scratch the “took into”
m3 wrote
Yes and yes. Science is the pursuit of truth. Truth is not black and white, instead the best we can do is approach truth. I think the descriptions of science given by other posters on this thread would certainly be echoed by great scientists, such as Hawking.
Sigh Okay, you caught me. I wasn’t really trying to get into the technical considerations of Relativity vs. Newtonian physics. I was just trying to illustrate a point, and only went with the explanations of observations, not the mathematics. Consider me suitably corrected.
billehunt, I can see why scientists would like to think that they are approaching the truth slowly but surely. But do they have any proof?
Maybe a mathematical/logical one wouldn’t be possible, but even if we simply used the experimental data of the history of science, could we then see what truth we’re approaching? Could we even make out the outlines?
I doubt it. We never know which theory will be proved wrong and what parts of it will be integrated with the next theory.
JDeMobray, my point wasn’t technical.I hope you don’t think I’m playing the “I know physics better than you” card. I think that relativity is a completely different explanation for similar phonomena. I don’t think it made Newtonian physics any less fuzzy. I also think this is more common in science than the scientific establishment would care to think about.
There is no such thing as THE TRUTH. No one in the history of man, not the greatest philosophers, ever made one statement that was TRUE, now and forever, unconditional, irrefutable.
Faith and Religion sometimes claim to offer THE TRUTH, but those claims are phony shams. Faith and Religion offer comforting beliefs and powerful creative ideas, but there’s no way you can separate those beliefs from our psychology, our fantasies, and, at worst, evil manipulation, without Reason.
Fie and damn! Such people wish to revert to the myths that allowed the priests to control the masses by exploiting their fears and hopes.
Reason is the counterweight to creativity and inspiration. The latter generate ideas, reason weeds out the false ones. Science, the humanities, our daily lives depend on both sides of that balance. Without creativity nothing would happen; without reason, we would have intellectual anarchy, every stupid idea on an equal footing with the brilliant.
BAH! Fie and damn again! Reason is the process by which we see if our creative ideas agree with reality. Unlike Faith, Reason accepts the reality of our senses as given, and measures our ideas against that reality.
It is the enemies of Reason who wish to call reality wrong. They want so much for their fantasies to be equally true that when Reason says, “nope, the world don’t work dat way,” they say, “well my reality, the ‘reality’ of my fantasies and beliefs is just as good as your ‘reality’ of perception and consistency.”
No matter where you go, there you are.
I hope that I haven’t made my replies too personal. Anyone is welcome to respond to my ideas even though I have addressed them to particular people.
Quote from SingleDad:" There is no such thing as THE TRUTH. No one in the history of man, not the greatest philosophers, ever made one statement that was TRUE, now and forever, unconditional, irrefutable."
Hmm… sounds nice until you apply the theory to itself (the theory self destructs). There’s a certain zen-like beauty to that, but I don’t think it’s intentional.
I don’t care whether the Truth actually exists, I just want to know why scientists think they have some monopoly on it. While there is a side to it that seems to say “well, it is just a theory.” The practices of scientists seem to indicate otherwise. Would I advocate spendings billions on a superconducting supercollider if I thought it was just a theory? No, there’s a form of radical belief operating here.
As far as SingleDad’s point about reason accepting the reality of our senses as given:what is the reality of our senses? Subatomic particles can’t be seen. They’re explanations of events that we can only see the aftermath of. There’s a lot more reasoning than seeing going on there.
I was under the impression that in most cases, you know stuff that a layman could observe in the world around him, the results of Einstein’s special theory do end up being very similar to Newtons; and that only when addressing phenomena that occurs near lightspeed do you end up with a consistent deviation.
In his general theory, all the usual Newtonian mechanisms (most notably the gravitational constant) are still in place. Ergo, the general theory of relativity can be seen as an improvement upon Newton’s work. If I’m wrong, I will apologize again, but I’m pretty sure about this one.
JDeMobray,
You’re not wrong. It’s just that relativity would blow Newton’s mind! Yes, you can still use Newton’s formulas to calculate the trajectory of a cannonball to enough accuracy to blow your opponent away. But relativity is not a logical continuation of Newton’s thought. If it was, we probably wouldn’t know Einstein’s name.
I don’t want to get trapped into the particulars of relativity. But the idea of an absolute frame of reference was demolished by relativity (not to mention the ether necessitated by this fallacious assumption)! No, Newtons discoveries were not forgotten, but it seems more accurate to me to say that they were incorporated into relativity rather than to say that relativity extended Newtonian physics. What’s the difference?
Well, there was a major shift in the operating paradigm. Nobody tried to explain things through an absolute frame of reference any more (Newton’s paradigm).
Let’s not get hung up on one theory here.
Many great discoveries in science have knocked some part of the previous ones down. Furthermore, I can’t think of any way that science could know which ones wouldn’t be knocked down in the future.
As this talk about Truth, sheesh … isn’t it a well known fact that “we can’t handle the truth”? Hey, if Jack says so it must be true. 
As to the OP, a lot depends on what is truth. According to the dictionary:
Truth:
2 a (1) : the state of being the case : FACT (2) : the body of real things, events, and facts : ACTUALITY (3) often capitalized :
a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality b : a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true <truths of thermodynamics> c : the body of true statements and propositions
3 a : the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality b chiefly British : TRUE 2 c : fidelity to an original or to a standard
So, with these definitions does science bring about truth?
I think so. Truth doesn’t imply completeness. Lets take gravity. Lets pretend that tomorrow somebody discovers that gravity is actually repulsive at large distances. Does understanding this new truth about gravity invalidate the truths we take for granted today? Not at all. The existing theories of gravity would still be consistent with reality and hence true. Objects let in a gravity field and at non-large distances still “fall” into the gravity well.
Does this reasoning apply to everything we “know” because of science? Not at all. Somethings are still new knowledge that need to stand the test of time, like gravity.
Wrongola. Such people want to escape the similar myths by which secular priests control the masses by convincing them that the results of Reason are inevitable. Reason is not a philosopher’s stone. It must be balanced.
I don’t see how this is different from what I was saying. Your mistake, I think, is believing that I and John Ralston Saul want to do away with or subjugate reason. We do not. We want to balance it with the other modes of human sentience.
Unfortunately, by its own nature it does not. “Logic does not by any means treat the totality of things; it does not treat objects at all but only our way of speaking about objects…The certainty…of a proposition of logic derives just from the fact that it says nothing about objects of any kind.” - Hans Hahn
Not only does reason only treat facts - or facts which are arbitrarily precise approximations of the real world - it also cannot have any ethical lading at all, because the physical world, the world of facts, does not. Truth includes ethics, which reason alone cannot provide. Only reason coupled with the other aspects of human sentience can provide ethical weight.
Reason does not have a monopoly on perception and consistency. Read Voltaire’s Bastards for several hundred good examples of how reason, taken to dictatorial levels and treated like a god, came up with lots of Very Bad Things.
Basically, let me put it this way. Rationalism is faith in reason, just like Christianity is faith in the teachings of Christ. And I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education, and reason is as doubtable as anything else. You don’t have to accept something as truth just because it’s reasonable, any more than because it comes from the Bible. You have to decide on the best possible versions of truth, using everything you can garner (including the results of reason) as input.
**Newtonian vs. Einsteinian Gravity: **
Einstein did introduce a paradigm shift. By accepting the constancy of the speed of light, he had to reject the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time, replacing them with the concept of absolute space-time; by themselves both space and time are relative to the reference frame of the observer.
Newton wasn’t wrong: Newton’s gravitational equations are actually excellent approximations of Einsteins at low speed and mass. And there was no way Newton could have known that the speed of light was constant in all reference frames; he had no way of measuring such a phenomenon.
So Einstein did both. He built upon Newton’s understanding, and replaced its underlying paradigm. He could do so because he had information unavailable to Newton.
IIRC, Newton tried to measure the speed of light with a lantern on one hill, a mirror on another hill at night. His conclusion was that light was very fast and immeasurably fast. I always found the conclusion remarkable because he was convinced that light did have some measure of velocity, and he was simply unable to measure it. Am I remembering this wrong (it has been a very long time since I was in university)?
m3:
I didn’t take anything personally, and I hope no one will take my replies personally. I am an impassioned advocate for Reason, but I don’t take disagreement personally.
I’m not stating a theory. I’m observing the lack of a fact. All you need to demolish the observation is a counterexample.
Science has a monopoly on determining the “truth” about empirically testable claims. Scientists are not generally metaphysicians, they’ve just learned a very effective procedure for testing the truth of hypotheses attempting to explain empirical phenomena. More effective than any other method of determining empirical truth.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics lays bare the real epistemology of Science: QM is nothing more than an elaborate mathematical fiction to predict the behavior of experimental apparatus; quarks and photons aren’t said to “exist” in the epistemological sense (indeed their properties according to the theory contradict our intuition about the existence of ordinary objects).
Everything about QM (and any other science) fundamentally rests on the results of experiments which are apprehended with the senses. Science long ago exceeded the bounds of what we can perceive with our unaided senses. But the fundamental principle of science is that if two sane people assemble their apparatus in the same way, and follow the same procedure, they will have the same sensory experience. Indeed, for a theory to have scientific meaning, it must predict such a specific sensory experience given a specific apparatus and procedure.
Balanced by what? Fantasy? Wishful thinking? superstition?
Scientists are not priests. What they say is “true” not because they have authority, but because the real world actually behaves as they describe. Scientific theory is not myth for exactly the same reason. Everything in science can be tested against reality. True, scientists are people and thus fallible. Errors do creep in, and sometimes stay for a while, but the process tends to expunge them in time.
Logic is only a part of Reason. Logic is a tool for unfolding the implications of axioms and of detecting contradiction. The other half of “Reason” is empirical testability. Empiricism is what grounds Reason to the reality of the senses.
I absolutely disagree. I believe that we will find ethics scientifically describable from the facts of psychology. That we have not yet done so merely shows the primitive nature of our understanding. However, the argument that science fails because it cannot yet explain this or that phenomenon shows the fallacy of argument from ignorance, unless you can conclusively prove (using Reason and logic :D) that science can never explain such phenomena.
As an atheist secular humanist, my ethical and moral principles are logically deduced from a set of empirical axioms derived from the examination of my own psychology and that of others. They are empirically testable because where the implications deduced from my psychological principles contradict my intuitive understanding of ethics, I have found my intuitive understanding to be deficient, either incomplete or incorrect. Additionally, since I’m not in jail and people consider me to be an ethical person, I have empirical validation of the social appropriateness of my ethics.
If you wish to argue that an ethical or moral position cannot derive from Reason, then you must prove that my ethics and morals are somehow fundamentally faulty, or that I’m fooling myself in my belief that they are rationally deduced from psychological principles.
Reason is not perfect. It doesn’t aim to be. To accept Reason is to accept that fallible human understanding is the best we can do, and seek to find the ways that we can consistently improve our understanding while avoiding contradiction and intellectual anarchy.
Free the Indianapolis 500!
The Universe is chaos upon which we exert our collective opinions in order to create comfortable beliefs we like to call facts.