Some things truth can't do . . .
. . . for everything else, there’s science
JEFF VALDIVIA
We live in world where the products of science are everywhere: computers, MRI machines, and space shuttles are just a few clear examples of the accomplishments of science. It’s obvious that science is doing something right.
Although few people would argue against the value or importance of science in our lives, it seems, however, that most people are unaware of the actual role of science. For instance, how often do we hear people say, “That’s just a theory,” when arguing against global warming or evolution? It is apparent that people, in general, have a serious misconception about what science does and what it is supposed to do.
The Houghton Mifflin Canadian Dictionary defines “science” as “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena.” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, on the other hand, defines “science” as “knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method.” These definitions differ in one very important way: the latter links science with truth, while the former does not.
So, which definition is closer to the truth?
First of all, science does not deal with “truth”; rather, science deals with “falsification” and “confirmation.” Scientific theories can be disproved by showing that their predictions are false. The theory of gravity, for instance, would be disproved if we wake up tomorrow and everything’s falling up.
So, science is falsifiable, which means it can be proven to be wrong. However, the opposite does not hold: theories cannot be proven to be true. Einstein stated correctly, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Science seeks truth, it aspires to truth, but it can never attain the truth.
To comprehend why this is so, one must understand the scientific method, which is the process through which science is conducted. Essentially, scientists form hypotheses about how the world might be and then test those hypotheses by gathering relevant observable and measurable evidence. While this is a simplification, the point remains that hypotheses, theories, and laws, can only be confirmed by more experiments. A theory is confirmed when it is found consistent with its own predictions, which is accomplished by experimentation. Yet the crux of the matter is that the same theory that has been confirmed countless times can be falsified, or proven to be wrong, by merely a single experiment showing how the theory makes a false prediction.
The reason why we can never be absolutely certain of the truth of a theory is because there are an infinite number of experiments that could be conducted to test a theory. For instance, we can never be absolutely certain that tomorrow everything will not, in fact, fall up. Although this may seem trivial, this is the very reason why science cannot be said to “prove” anything.
Yet just because science does not have the ability to “prove” anything does not mean that science is useless or less valuable. Remember all of those useful things that science has helped produce? Anyone who scrutinizes science because it cannot prove anything would do well to remember them.
But why then does it seem that scientists are skeptical about their own research findings? Chances are they are not; instead, they’re just speaking like scientists. Scientists will not generally assert that something either will or will not happen. They will stick in a “probably” here or a “maybe” there, because they recognize that there is a chance that their results may be wrong, even if that chance is small.
In other words, science is humble. Science recognizes its own limitations. Scientists should never claim that they have found real “truth”; and if one does, it is probably safe to ignore him or her. Remember, too, that it is very likely that all the scientific theories we have today are false, or at least incomplete. That’s not to say that they’re not useful, it’s just to say that they probably do not precisely describe reality — they’re “approximations.”
Science is really a work in progress.
Wikipedia.com, which is sometimes very insightful, claims that the goal of science “is to produce ‘useful models of reality.’” Notice that this goal states nothing about the “truth” of those models. Science has produced a theoretical model for gravity that is useful, but most scientists would admit that it is nonetheless false.
An important distinction, then, is between truth and usefulness. Scientific theories do not need to be true to be useful, although usefulness implies an approximation to truth. The role of science is not to produce truths. No credible scientist should ever assert that. The role of science is simply to make our lives better by forming theories than can be useful.
Jeff Valdivia is a U of M grad student at the Natural Resources Institute.
