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I'm new to philosophy and recently started reading some books on the field. I came across a statement that somehow I understood as saying the following propositions:

  1. Truth is single and indivisible.

  2. Sciences busy themselves with achieving truth concerning different subject matters or standpoints, which all have to do with reality.

  3. Findings of one science should not contradict with findings of some other.

While all these seem right, I cannot get how two findings of different sciences may contradict since they concern different aspects of reality. If their findings contradict then they must occupy the same field and consequently they are not different sciences, or the one has gone to the field of the other.

Thank you in advance.

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    1) "Truth is single and indivisible." this is very very "big" metaphysical assumption: we are "trained" since infancy to think that truth exists and we can attain it, but in real life things are not so simple... Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 10:00
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    2) "Sciences busy themselves with ..." Yes. science tries to know and understand reality, i.e. facts about the world and this is consistent with our common sense view of truth: a statement/theory is true when it "fits" with the way things are. Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 10:02
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    @RodolfoAP: Tarski showed that truth is not formally definable, although the typical restatement uses Gödel's (first) Incompleteness. We shouldn't mislead folks into thinking that truth is a simple or obvious notion. For this question, it's enough to completely ignore (1), as contradictions do not require a background notion of truth in order to be a problem as outlined in (3).
    – Corbin
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 18:44
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    Findings in economics often contradict findings in physics. Which means that one of both isn't a science after all. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 6:39
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    @JohnGordon or both of the findings are wrong.... 🙂
    – JakeRobb
    Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 17:17

11 Answers 11

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Science is intrinsically a bottom-up process. We build models that fit a data set, then try to integrate those models with other models that we fit to other data sets. That models could then contradict each other -- is actually expected of such a bottoms up process.

Most of the contradictions and conflicts within science, however, are WITHIN a particular science, as the sub-fields within a science tend to interact more than there is interaction between sciences. A good example is the age of the universe, which for many decades was estimated as ~13.7 billion years per Hubble expansion, but our stellar age models said the oldest stars were about 15 billion years old... The conflict was finally resolved after many decades by the Big Bang model changing its assumptions of a zero and unchanging cosmological constant.

A conflict between sciences was when paleontologists and geologists said that South America and Africa were once connected, but planetary physicists said this was impossible. This also took decades to resolve, when the planetary physicists eventually realized that magma was "fluid-like" and could sustain currents and continental floating.

So the presumption of a single "truth" is generally assumed, but the science of a particular day will often include a LOT of contradictions about what the details of that truth are -- and the competing models are both used for scientific work in their particular fields despite their not agreeing holistically. Science, therefore, so long as it is an active field of study, will be intrinsically logically incoherent.

There are various responses to that incoherence. One, the "top down" approach you asked about in comments, is to try to force coherence on science, to fit a global model. The last attempt to do that within the science community was with Logical Positivism, and LP failed to come up with a workable methodology for science. Several ideological movements have attempted to do this. Soviet Science for instance tried to make all science coherent with party ideology -- which led to abandoning falsification testing for the resulting theories. Creationism Science tries to do this, and then makes use of Quine-Duhem's principle that one can ALWAYS come up with another theory that fits the facts, if one is willing to go very complex and speculative. Creation Science relies upon things like varying light speeds, God pre-setting the universe to look like it had a history, etc. and also abandons falsification testing.

Another response is to try to unify the sciences through reductionism, and treat the failures so far as just potholes along the way, to eventually be overcome. Taht was the dominant paradigm in science for the 20th century. However, as the SEP article on scientific reductionism notes, we have a theory of reductionism, and it appears that our sciences do not satisfy it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/ There is just too much variance between the subjects studied at higher level sciences, and the building blocks they reduce to. If science is to be unified, we would need as a minimum a theory of emergence as well, and we don't have anything like such a theory today.

Sciences today operate on scientific pluralism -- there are multiple sciences, their models do not cohere, and one can and does get contradictions in predictions between them. Each such contradiction becomes another opportunity to add further "problems" to one or another science's evidence set they need to account for in future theorizing. But full reconciliation will remain an aspiration, never an accomplishment.

As some comments to the question note, the presumption of a single truth IS just a presumption. It is a mostly very useful one, but the peculiarities of both quantum mechanics and general relativity have pushed the envelope of what one can call "truth".

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  • Right, things can only be explained in terms of things on a another level, where all the presumptions are completely different. Objects that we see have color, but atoms and molecules do not. The only way to reconcile it would be to have one ginormous container for science, with everything fully interlinked. Some people actually try to do that, but masses of stuff gets left out.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:33
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    @ScottRowe Yes linking is an aspiration. And as you note, complete linkage requires a settled theory of emergence, which is not on any plausible horizon currently.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:50
  • @Dcleve, what would a top-down process in this context look like? Wouldn't top-down processes also ultimately attempt to come up with models that fit the data? Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 11:59
  • @SatyajitSen -- A top down process starts with a presumption of a holistic solution. Rationalism is a top down process -- it starts with presumptions of the truth of , say, classical logic being necessary, then tries to derive the entire world from there. Logical Positivism was the last gasp of Rationalism within science, and it was unable to plausibly describe how to do science.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 13:51
  • @SatyajitSen We see some more modern movements that are top down as well, that at least nominally tried to follow falsification. "Soviet Science", where the party ideology drove what science was accepted, Creation Science, and more controversially on this board, deterministic materialism. These movements have to reject much data, taking Quine to an extreme. YEC declare God created fake light that only appears to be billions a years old, Einstein declared time an illusion, and the Delusionist movements on consciousness and willing are the responses to refuting data on consciousness and will.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 14:02
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You are overlooking the fact that the subjects of sciences overlap. In chemistry, for example, we study the interactions between chemicals, and since chemicals are atoms held together by electromagnetic forces they must obey the laws of physics. Likewise, biology is the study of massively complicated collections of chemicals, so the constituent chemical parts of a plant, say, being studied in a biology lab are the same parts being studied in a chemistry lab, and the constituent parts of a chemical are also being studying in a physics lab, so we would expect consistency. To take a trivial example to make the point, it would be a cause for raised eyebrows in the physics community if a finding in biology, say, suggested that gravity on Earth acted other than downwards.

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  • First of all thank you for your respond. If i get it right you say that it is possible for one to shake some physics argument by supporting his/her case on chemistry principles or/and findings...so it is like a ladder, and while physics have arguments from bottom up, then chemistry may have from top down. Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 9:48
  • @Stephanos97 yes, something like that. The important point is that if a fact is true it is true. If gravity always acts downwards, according to physics, then it must act downwards in the physics lab, the chemistry lab, the biology lab, the neuroscience lab and so on. Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 10:17
  • @Stephanos97 That does not necessarily mean that they all use the same methodology, though. For example, chemistry tends to use easier quantum equations than physics does because they suffice to describe everything they need for their applications. GeV collisions and gloun plasma just aren't really important in chemistry so they can do without quantum fields.
    – Philip Klöcking
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 10:38
  • @PhilipKlöcking To my knowledge, the reason why simplified quantic equations are used in elementary chemistry, is that we don't know how to solve the regular (not simplified) Schrödinger equation at the level of two atoms in a covalent bound, let alone at the level of a molecule composed of many atoms. It's not that we don't need to, it's that we don't know how to.
    – Olivier5
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 17:47
  • What about in the Skylab?
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:26
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Lets look at statement 1.

1)Truth is single and indivisible. This is one of the most unscientific statements you can ever make in my opinion. If you ask me the very basis of science is to never accept anything as truth. Every statement can and should be questioned in science. If you cannot define any truth it follows that the nonexistant thing can neither be single or indivisible.

The scientific approach is instead to humbly accept that all we have right now is models or theories that currently work. They may be proven unsatisfactory tomorrow and we should be happy for that as proving things as not true is the only thing we most of the time actually can do.

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    You are confounding the truth with what we accept as truth. Truth can never contradict itself, that's its very definition. But our flawed believes about what is true can definitely contradict. And because of that, scientists know to distrust their findings. And they will change their belief about what is true the instant that contradicting data arrives. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 8:50
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    Change 'indivisible' to invisible, and we can all be happy. (and leave the addendum "under God" out)
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:39
  • @cmaster-reinstatemonica If something is utterly unattainable, does it exist? Arguably only mathematicians can reach truth, and even then only relative to a system of logic.
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 18:19
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    @wizzwizz4 Did gravitational waves pass through the earth before we built LIGO? It is utterly unattainable to know the signals that we may have missed, but does that say anything about their existence? I think that it would be pretty arrogant to claim something does not exist just because we can never gain knowledge of it. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 18:31
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@MarcoOcram's answer has already made similar points to this one, but:

I cannot get how two findings of different sciences may contradict since they concern different aspects of reality

Nature doesn't cut into pieces that neatly. The concerns of specific fields are more like slightly overlapping circles in a Venn diagram (or an Euler diagram, to be pedantic).

Historical example: Kelvin, based on a pre-nuclear guess as to how the Sun shines, underestimated its age and argued there hadn't been enough time for natural selection. Both physics and biology care about time.

Modern example: we don't know how to unify gravity (which is well-understood for large masses) and other physical forces (which are well-understood at small length scales), because "what happens if something has a lot of mass but very little size?" raises tricky questions. (Warning: that's a massive oversimplification of why there is a conflict.) Both general relativity and the Standard Model care about distance.

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"All models are wrong, some are useful"*

... no models are [true]—not even the Newtonian laws. When you construct a model you leave out all the details which you, with the knowledge at your disposal, consider inessential.... Models should not be true, but it is important that they are applicable, and whether they are applicable for any given purpose must of course be investigated. This also means that a model is never accepted finally, only on trial.

— Rasch, G. (1960), Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests.

Your second proposition ("Sciences busy themselves with achieving truth...") is not strictly accurate. Sciences work with observations, models, predictions and theories. Using the most relevant observations, a model attempting to describe aspects of reality is defined. It is then repeatedly compared to new observations, and its predictions provide leads for other relevant observations. As long as a model "survives" those, it is considered valid, and the most sturdy models are used to define scientific theories - but strictly speaking, models and theories are never proven right - they can only be proven wrong. And even when they are proven wrong, they can still be useful - for example, the Newtonian laws of motion's predictions are far less accurate than Einsteinian relativity's predictions - and in some places where these differences matter (GPS, precise prediction of planetary motion etc.), the Einsteinian model is used. But for many practical applications, the much more simple Newtonian model is good enough, and is used instead (e.g. construction and engineering, artillery, aerodynamics etc.).

Just as different types of maps may disagree (e.g. which continent looks larger, what is the length of the Nile, etc.), none of those flat projections of a single scale, for a specific point in time can accurately represent every aspect of the ever-changing, spheroidal face of the Earth. They can't be absolutely accurate and complete, but they just need to provide a correct representation of the relevant information.

Bottom line - different scientific models may disagree, but typically that's because their utility is different - this doesn't mean multiple, contradicting truths - just as even something as seemingly straightforward as the length of a road will be measured differently by using a satellite photo, an aerial photo, measuring with a step counter, measuring with a measuring wheel or from the perspective of an ant that crawls over the non-flat asphalt surface.

Which of those measurements is the truth?

*: See the Wikipedia entry for this statement.

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    Yes, one of my favorites examples is, where is the shore? As you get closer to the ground, the exact shoreline dissolves into bumps and islands. What is the real shoreline?
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 2:08
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It all depends what you mean by science.

Mathematics is arguably a science, but if it is, then it can accept statements which are contradictory to each other as long as they belong to distinct mathematical theories, where a theory is defined by a specific system of axioms.

We can formalise this with the following pair of expressions:

S₁ : (A → B) ∧ A ⊢ B

S₂ : (A → B) ∧ ¬B ⊢ ¬A

In theory S₁, the axioms are A → B and A, and the truths are A → B, A and B.

In theory S₂, the axioms are A → B and ¬B, and the truths are A → B, ¬B and ¬A.

So, S₁ and S₂ agree with each other that A → B is true, but contradict each other on whether A and B are true or false.

If mathematics is a science, it is not an empirical science. Unlike mathematical theories, empirical sciences are meant to describe, and are therefore tested against, reality. As there is presumably only one reality, and although each science has it own theory or theories, different sciences may well contradict each other as to what is really the case.

Notoriously, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics contradict each other at the origin of the universe (if I understood that right).

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  • Religions are in some cases based in science (psychology?) But they contradict each other too.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:53
  • @ScottRowe "Religions are in some cases based in science" I will assume that you are kidding. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 15:53
  • People persist in calling Buddhism a religion when it is actually Psychology. So either they are wrong in calling it that, or I am correct in my statement (which vexes me to call Buddhism 'religion').
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 16:19
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    @ScottRowe The crucial point is whether different disciplines are meant to refer to the same thing, broadly, reality, in which case they may well contradict each other. Whether Buddhism is called a science is irrelevant. Whenever Buddhism is meant to refer to reality it becomes possible that it contradicts for example psychology. Religions are usually meant to refer to reality. A Christian presumably believes that God exists in reality. So religions may well contradict science, or each other. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 16:37
  • Maybe they should all refer to different things, then there would be no contradiction? :-)
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 19:05
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"Can findings in one science contradict with ones from another?"

At least apparently, yes. A physicist would balk at the idea that a unit ball can be decomposed into five parts, and the parts rearranged by rigid motions so as to form... two unit balls. Yet this is precisely what the Banach-Tarski theorem asserts.

Of course, there are numerous ways of explaining the paradox. If you are dealing with different sciences, then they would be dealing with different subject matters, and therefore by redefining the subject matter more precisely it would typically be possible to resolve such paradoxes.

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    The Banach-Tarski theorem relies on classical logic and is not intuitionistically valid. Theorems from classical logic may not be realizable, and realizability is a prerequisite for physical instantiation.
    – Corbin
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 18:46
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    Corbin's right. Physicists have no problem accepting the Banach-Tarski theorem, but they know that it bears no meaning for physics because there are no infinities in physics. You can't squish a particle to a mathematical point, and you cannot have (un-)countably many particles as well. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 8:56
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    Mathematics is not a science. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:14
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    Mathematics operates on fundamentally different methods to Science. But this isn't a debate for the comments. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 15:53
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    @JackAidley, mathematics and physics are routinely listed as departments in a common Faculty of Exact Sciences in many universities. The claim that mathematics is not a science is an idiosyncratic one. Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 18:18
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As this is a philosophy question there are a lot of parts to this question. I start with number two:

2)Sciences busy themselves with achieving truth concerning different subject matters or standpoints, which all have to do with reality.

Achieving thruth? If you talk about, say physics, we know that it only has one kind of thing that can even approach what you might call truth: observations. In physics only well controlled observations or experiments can be relied on. Everything else is, to be a bit of blunt, speculations. Even General relativity or other very well tested theories will be changed the very second observations contradict them. But no physicist believes that we have reached "truth", only that we over time have been able to to create better models. But all models are only temporary, until better models are developed. And even if observations sort of approach truth, every observation has a degree of uncertainty. Small uncertanties in observations may be the start of better models.

Reality? Well, one of the basic tenets of physics is that there is one and only one reality which we may inspect and learn from. But this is not necessarily the case in other areas. As example, in social sciences generally we assume that what counts is how different persons perceive things, not assuming that any of perceptions has any strong connection to any objective reality. You might call this a subjectivy reality, but I guess that the statement you referr to has a higher requirement on the word.

Sciences? There are a lot of things called or recognized as sciences. Methods and subjects of study will differ partly due to the person doing the categorization. I guess you need to define which sciences you want to include, or even more important which you want to exclude. As example, personally, but this is very personal, I find the basis of religion to be outside of science (does God exist and what forms does he/she/it take?).

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  • "Man may occasionally stumble over the truth. But then he gets up, dusts himself off, and moves on." - Winston Churchill
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:43
  • "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." - Albert Einstein
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:46
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3)Findings of one science should not contradict with findings of some other.

Why not? Findings, if you by this means observations or experiments, they could very well contradict other findings. In the history of sciences in general, contradictions is often what creates progress.

From the observations or experiment we may create more or less elaborate theories or models. These may very well contradict each other - the contradictions creates an opportunity for further observations which mey allow the creation of better models.

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  • A computer isn't just a lot of transistors.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:29
  • The issue and the difficulty I face is that sciences do not occupy the same subject, so there is no possibility at all for any conflict in the first place. It is like comparing smell and taste. We use different organs to inspect each one. So we do not bother to use our ears to smell or our tongue to hear. It is totally acceptable in my mind to be conflicting theories in one and the same science. If we accept reductionism it would be fine, and science would be a totality. But if one does not embrace reductionism then he/she should avoid statements like "there are contradictions in sciences" Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 14:03
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Truth is a philosophical concept. The overlap between sciences has been addressed in previous answers. If there is ultimate truth, then science pursues it. Ultimately, there is only one science. What we currently call sciences are just convenient, human categorisations. We currently see mathematics as the foundation of science, but mathematics may have foundations. The ultimate answer to your question is no.

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Science of homeopathy, if you can call it science, contradicts traditional science. In homeopathy , something which causes an illness is used to cure the illness by diluting its molecular presence to near zero. Interestingly greater the dilution greater is the potency of medicine. Homeopathy is very popular , at least in India. I take homeopathy medicines and I can tell you it works.

In science ,apart from contradictions, there are anomalies. One famous example is water. Water has dozens of anomalies. They contradict the common sense like water expands on cooling and shrinks on heating. But those anomalies have been explained using very complex structural theories.

In my opinion, gene theory is also contradictory as the selfish genes fails to explain altruistic behaviour and sexual abstinence found in wide range of people. There are other objections as well like epigenetics but I will not go into that.

Science of psychology also has contradictory assumptions in my opinion. It says Schizophrenia is a disease. When it might not be so. There can be spiritual reasons for the behaviour. But I leave it at that because it touches the subject of religions.

Physics has wave particle duality , which in my opinion is a contradiction which has been nicely covered up by quantum mechanics.

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    Homeopathy doesn’t belong in a discussion of the sciences. And neither is schizophrenia assumed to be a disease, that’s a description of its characteristics, which one might disagree with but an axiom it is not. Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 21:46
  • I hope, you never happen to drink pure water. All those active compounds it has touched, and which have been diluted away. It must be pure poison... Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 9:06
  • Religions have contradictory assumptions.
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 12:28

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