Science And Truth
Posted: Tue Oct 09, 2007 9:37 am
A couple of quotes:
So how much should we rely on science to give us truth?Karl Popper, one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers of science, wrote:
First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it.... We know that our scientific theories always remain hypotheses.... In science there is no "knowledge in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth.... Einstein declared that his theory was false: he said that it would be a better approximation to the truth than Newton's, but he gave reasons why he would not, even if all predictions came out right, regard it as a true theory.... Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement:...our knowledge, our doctrine is conjectural;...it consist of guesses, of hypotheses rather than of final and certain truths.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959
Bertrand Russell:
"the general principles of science . . . are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed."
The Problems of Philosophy', ch. 6.