Can all truths be scientifically verified?

Question

My question arises from the growing concern that many people seem to overlook the vast amount still left to discover in science, leading to an overestimation of its achievements. Increasingly, there is a tendency to assume that anything not scientifically proven is inherently false.

According to the scientific method, a phenomenon is not considered scientific unless it is testable through empirical experimentation, which then determines its truth or falsity. However, this raises an important question: if a phenomenon cannot be tested, does that make it false? Why is it that so many people believe science to be the ultimate arbiter of truth, when in reality, science is still in its relative infancy?

What I find particularly troubling is the authority that science has seemingly acquired —the belief that it can eventually explain everything. Yet, it seems possible that certain truths may exist that science is inherently unable to validate. Why, then, is there a prevalent perception that truth must always align with scientific verification?

Answer 1

No, some propositions are not susceptible to the tests of science. For example:

• Propositions that do not predict any particular detectable effect in the world are not testable.
• Historical propositions may no longer be testable.
• Propositions about what my beliefs or desires were at a particular time are not amenable to scientific testing.
• As @cmaster notes below, mathematics (provably) contains true but unprovable claims. (Also, empirical evidence does not suffice for mathematical truth.)

That a proposition has not been tested or cannot be falsified does not imply that it is false.

You say:

According to the scientific method, a phenomenon is not considered scientific unless it is testable through empirical experimentation, which then determines its truth or falsity

That is not true. The scientific method tests theories not phenomena. And science does not produce truth in the sense that you seem to be using the word. It eliminates theories inconsistent with our observations.

Certainly, theories that make numerous specific predictions that have survived many attempts to falsify them are often spoken of as "truth" colloquially and can be considered "true" under confirmationalist conceptions of science. But this is not some absolute final assertion about what the state of the world really is (as I take you to be using the word).

Answer 2

Roughly speaking, science can verify anything that's consistently and repeatedly observable.

It's trivially the case that anything outside of what we can observe (directly or indirectly) cannot be verified by science.

Unless you prescribe to e.g. some form of idealism where only what's observed exists, it's also fairly trivially the case that there are bounds to human observation (even if those may change in future), such that there are truths outside of what we can observe at this point in time. The exact composition and geography of a planet orbiting a distant star in a distant galaxy might be one such example.

We could also suppose that there might be things humans will never be able to observe, but such speculation doesn't seem all that useful.

The better question is whether we can have justified belief in things we can't verify. People have proposed potential justifications, but those almost always lead different people to contradictory conclusions, which I'd say is a pretty bad sign. If your method is unreliable, what's it even good for and why should we use it?

* If you want to take a step back and ask how we can even know that the world we observe exists (solipsism): Some people say we can't know that, one way or the other, so it's not worth concerning ourselves with. Others say the existence of the observed world can be concluded via Occam's razor and coherence, which are also pretty fundamental to science, and we could say those things are reliable thanks to the countless correct predictions they led to.

science is still in its relative infancy

Excuse me? Relative to what?

Science is a behemoth of discovery and knowledge that played a pretty fundamental role in just about every part of modern society, from computers to medicine to clothes to buildings to cars and even to food, including the production of fruits and vegetables. Apart from math and logic (which integrates well and coexists with science), nothing else has even been able to hold a candle to that in those domains.

Maybe a thousand years from now, people would dismissively look back at what we know today, given their far more advanced knowledge, as we look back at what people of the past believed. But "infancy" is still not a word one can reasonably associate with modern science from the present-day perspective.

Answer 3

Hietanen, et al.[20] is a detailed and recent investigation of scientism and its opponents. The title of the essay is "How Not to Criticize Scientism" and its point-of-departure is that claims about "science explaining everything, to the exclusion of anything else" are rather ambiguous. Their taxonomy of scientisms turns on (A) a broad/narrow distinction and (B) a strong/weak distinction:

1. Broad, weak scientism: all sciences, not just the hard sciences, can be appealed to, and this appeal is only to a priority, not an exclusion. The broad-weak scientism-minded analyst thinks that science is the best, but not necessarily the absolutely only, source of knowledge (or truth or whatever).
2. Broad, strong scientism: all sciences are useful, and only sciences are useful.
3. Narrow, weak scientism: some sciences, the ones typically called "hard," are the major source of knowledge.
4. Narrow, strong scientism: the stereotype of the person who thinks that only things like physics and chemistry are "real" science and who countenances only judgments in terms of this solely "real" science.

And then, as they explain, someone like Dawkins, who from the outside would seem like an example of (4), is actually an example of (2).

So the first objection to scientism in general, that they discuss in the essay, is the argument from non-scientific sources of knowledge:

The way this sub-dialectic proceeds ends up not with a disjunction between scientism being true or being false, but being trivial or not. They remark:

Some might still object: if this sort of methodological position on allowed sources of beliefs is endorsed, then scientism will become trivial and uninteresting (de Ridder 2016a, 26:10–28:19; Peels 2017b, 172). Such an opposition would be based on the view that scientism is not an informative position, since it does not exclude any possible sources of belief.

We disagree. Even the broad varieties of scientism exclude some sources. There are, for instance, non-evaluable sources like pure intuitions or divine revelations.¹⁹ In addition, since some sources are evaluable, there will be differences in how good they are as sources. There are also sources of belief that have turned out to be epistemically worthless, and, hence, they are not considered to be part of good science. So, it’s not “anything goes.”

19. One can, of course, study what the claimed revelations are like, but their divine nature seems to be inscrutable. The same is true concerning intuitions. To see this, assume that someone claims to know that something is the case purely on the basis of her intuitions. Moreover, assume that there is no way, independent of these intuitions, to check whether she is right. Here we have no means to determine whether the intuitions are reliable or not in the case in question.

I will leave off my quotations from this paper now. By way of summary (and with an eye towards the rest of the paper), I will say again that it is not clear (i) what kind of scientism the OP is concerned about and (ii) what non-scientific means of acquiring knowledge have going for them (especially when the methodology of science is broadly construed as including, like Dawkins says, "armchair" analysis).

Answer 4

Of course not.

You don't even need to deep dive into metaphysics or science philosophy or whatever that alleged caricature of science folks in the question do for fun and giggles.

When me and anonymised scientist number two split the last two pieces of pizza yesterday evening...

• Did I get the larger piece?
• Did they get the larger piece?

Science has no way to test either scenario now, even though two bona fide scientists were present. Still, only one of the scenarios can be false* - and therefore there are phenomena that science cannot check that are not false.

The people you think about are men of straw, not science. Real scientists have no trouble saying they do not know something. It's what makes them do science in the first place.

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* We did check that I am not able to cut pieces evenly, incidentally.

Answer 5

Even in pure math, the answer is a firm "no".

This is proven since around 1930 by Kurt Gödel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems). The gist of the theorem is, that within any sufficiently complex system of axioms, there are some propositions which are true, but cannot be proven to be true.

The other sciences also add more opportunity for unprovable truths due to the possible lack of observability, but other answers have already elaborated on that. Yet I believe that it is important to point out, how fundamentaly strong the "no" to your question is: Forget about the observability at the base of all inductive sciences, the answer is still "no". And it is not just a "no, we cannot hope to do it", it is actually "no, we have proved that this is impossible".

This prove is in the same vein as other important proofs from the field of computability, especially the result that the halting problem is undecidable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem).

Answer 6

Science is a methodology such that scientific propositions need to be put forward in falsifiable terms.

So, if you want to verify a proposition with science you have to formulate it, such that, other things would have to be true to provide evidence. You have to make predictions that could be observed to be false.

So, any possible truth that can't be formulated with falsifiable predictions isn't verifiable through the scientific method.

Answer 7

Increasingly, there is a tendency to assume that anything not scientifically proven is inherently false.

Citations critically needed here! Without this being generally true, your question falls apart.

In general, you can group scientific unknowns into four basic categories:

1. Not supported directly by tests, but is strongly supported by hypotheses which are logically consistent and has significant agreement from experts, and is derived from a basis which is supported by tests.

2. No tests, and multiple hypotheses are currently under active development with significant disagreement, but these hypotheses do at least all fit observed data.

3. Hypotheses do not fit observed data well, but at least are physically plausible.

4. Mechanisms suggested by hypotheses are actively disproven.

In reverse order then...

Case 4 is the situation for chi, magnets for health, crystals for health, and homeopathy, to give a few examples. Their proposed mechanisms are impossible under known physics, and what studies exist have shown that they don't have any effect. For sure we could put a lot of effort into producing more negative evidence, but it wouldn't contribute to human knowledge, and for people who have faith in it (where faith is defined as "believing it is true without evidence") it would not change their views. There's no point wasting time on it.

Cases 3 and 2 are generally where the action is. Normally someone spots something unexpected and an explanation needs to be figured out. Mostly it's straightforward (often equipment or technician error) but occasionally it's something genuinely new. No-one comes up with the right idea first time, so there's a process of refinement of "well it might fit this case but not that one"; and that's assuming you're on the right track anyway, which is not assured. The key part here though is that they're all trying to find something which matches real-world data, and they all agree on that real-world data.

There's a common misconception amongst the "alternative" community that if scientists disagree, then anything could be true. (Plenty of citations on request if you like; Jesus on a dinosaur might be the most amusing.) This is false - in fact the phrase "wronger than wrong" was invented to describe this category of ideas, where the wrongness is not just the idea but the failed system of reasoning which would allow anyone to seriously consider that idea.

Case 1 is generally assumed to be true, and most work will go into finding evidence to support it. A good example would be CERN looking for evidence of the Higgs boson. Even there though, all experts will acknowledge that this is an assumption which could be wrong. And it can still be wrong, as demonstrated by scientists proving that gut ulcers were caused by bacteria, in defiance of the best hypotheses at the time. But generally there's a lot of evidence pointing in the same direction by this point, so you need exceptional evidence if you want to push for something else.

You'll notice throughout this that I'm talking about the reasoning processes of experts in the field. Every expert in their field, without exception, will acknowledge that there will always be more to learn, no matter how far we get.

Your question does not limit your claimed faith in science to experts in the various fields. In that case, I have to say that the opinion of non-experts is moot. Not only is it irrelevant, it is less than relevant because it should be actively ignored. Unless you know enough to understand the concepts, you literally cannot form a valid opinion yourself.

Answer 8

1. In mathematics a proposition is considered to be true if it has been proved. A proof of falseness is mostly done by a counter example or showing contraditions to an accepted truth. There are some proposition which until now neither have been proved true or false. And also some indecidable propostions which require a stronger system of axioms. Mathematics is the special case that statements can be proved.

2. Science develops general theories to explain observed phenomena. According to Popper’s falsificationism each general theory is a hypothesis. Even if it has been confirmed by several observations. If it contradicts the observations then it has to be rejected.

   IMO the success and the reliability of science is obvious - I am prepared to provide arguments if required. But each scientific theory has only a limited range of validity. Hence the limit of scientific results has to be kept in mind. Also theories which have often been confirmed lose their validity at a certain point. There is no theory of everything.

I agree with some of your reservations against blind confidence in science. But it is the best method we have to explain nature.

Answer 9

No, not all truths can be scientifically verified. Take a self evident truth that is universally intuitively accepted as true like that it is wrong to lie and steal. What scientific verification is there for that? Take a historical event that is universally believed to have happened, what scientific verification is there that it took place? Science usually does not accept anecdotal evidence. Take something you know as true based on inference and life experience. e.g. Say you are walking on a trail in a forest and hear two people who you do not see walking and talking loudly behind you . You would know as a true fact afterwards that people were behind you even though there would be no way science could verify that for you. etc.

Answer 10

I'll respond to your assertions and questions one by one, in order.

• Many people seem to overlook the vast amount still left to discover in science. Perhaps; people have all kinds of wrong ideas. Most scientists though would not say that. Sometimes it needs a certain minimal expertise to realize one's own limits, not only in science.

• There is a tendency to assume that anything not scientifically proven is inherently false. Certainly not among scientists. It is, in fact, impossible to prove anything in science (with the exception of mathematics where proofs are bread and butter). Science

  • establishes theories from observations and reasoning; one may casually refer to theories which have stood the test of time as "true", but no true scotsman scientist would refer to a scientific theory as an absolute truth;
  • eliminates false theories through counter-observations and reasoning;
  • and recognizes contradictions between theories which are therefore competing. This is typical in areas of ongoing research — which is probably more wide-spread than one might think.

• Empirical experimentation [...] determines [a theory's] truth or falsity. Well, as I said, science does not really prove any truths. Rather, it establishes some theories as good predictors; those some people may call "true", but that is a simplification. Other theories are established as bad predictors; the latter are indeed false in a scientific sense. "False" theories may still be good predictors within a restricted parameter space, like Newtonian physics which is entirely consistent with all observations and delivers beautiful predictions in in our daily lives (sans GPS, admittedly). We only begin to see contradicting evidence when we look at time intervals, distances and forces outside of our immediate experience. I like to think of relativity theory as an "amendment" to rather than a replacement of Newtonian physics.

• If a phenomenon cannot be tested, does that make it false? Of course not. We can make a lot of assertions which may or may not be true, especially given that the universe is probably infinite (in particular, extends beyond our light cone) and thus bound to have some very strange things in it, for example another Peter Schneider who is going to type the next letter in this answer differently. Some people may say that such assertions are not scientific though. For example, things outside our light cone are by definition utterly inaccessible; in a very real sense they do not exist (for us). More serious discussions are going on in cosmology (multiverse) and particle theory (strings) where some theories cannot (easily) be tested.

• Why is it that so many people believe science to be the ultimate arbiter of truth? Because its principles, if properly observed and applied, make its results inter-subjective and reproducible. That means they will work for anybody who properly recreates the necessary preconditions. Engineering is applied science: Put enough steel in the concrete and the house does not collapse; use a 16-gauge wire for 15 amps to avoid a house fire; etc. Works every time. Things that do not work every time are Voodoo, prayers by Christians, homeopathic medications and dream catchers. They have been observed to work more than occasionally; but they don't work reliably for all people. They are not inter-subjective and reproducible. Science has sorted them in the basket labeled "bad predictors" or, less diplomatic, "falsehoods". To be sure, there is a plethora of such theories within established science as well, much too many. Eat margarine or vitamin pills to improve your health? Probably not. When we talk about "science" in the context of this answer we talk about an ideal. Reality is often messy and dirty and corrupt and biased and political. Still: This ideal is what we strive for.

• What I find particularly troubling is the authority that science has seemingly acquired—the belief that it can eventually explain everything. Science's authority is based on the inter-subjectivity and reproducibility of its results, as discussed in the last paragraph. Good science knows what it cannot talk about; what it does talk about can ideally be trusted. To think that science can explain "everything" implies that there is nothing that is not inter-subjective and reproducible. That is circular reasoning though. Very important things like faith, love and emotions in general are highly subjective and cannot arbitrarily be shared or reproduced. Still they are central to the human condition. These subjective, non-reproducible phenomena are outside the reach of science: We can measure heart rates and swelling glands and establish inter-subjective and reproducible theories — but we miss the essence completely. One might generally argue that science misses the essence of being human.

• Why, then, is there a prevalent perception that truth must always align with scientific verification? As discussed, science is not so much concerned with establishing "truth" than with sorting between good and bad predictors. Theories surviving scientific scrutiny are good predictors. We know for certain that are "less false". We sometimes call them "true" but that's, as I said, a simplification.

  A theory not surviving scientific scrutiny though makes wrong predictions. It is entirely adequate to call it false. Your statement, therefore, must be put on its feet by inverting it:

  A theory rejected by science cannot be inter-subjectively, reproducibly true.

  But because science is concerned with a specific, limited realm of the human experience and condition, we must add:

  Science which by definition tries to make inter-subjective, reproducible predictions is categorically unable to grasp the essence of being human (or frog, or grass, for that matter). People who think that science "explains everything" employ circular reasoning because they exclude all that is not inter-subjective and not reproducible from "everything".

Answer 11

My question arises from the growing concern that many people seem to overlook the vast amount still left to discover in science,

True

leading to an overestimation of its achievements.

Who overestimates? Not the scientists for sure.

Increasingly, there is a tendency to assume that anything not scientifically proven is inherently false.

This is not increasing - this is the basis of science. Either you follow it and you are a rational person, or you don't and you are not rational. Both are OK, we agree to disagree.

However, this raises an important question: if a phenomenon cannot be tested, does that make it false?

To a scientist, this "phenomenon" does not exist. You may believe that on the other side of the Moon there is a chakra factory but until it is measured it simply does not exist to a scientist.

We are not saying that this is false, just that since we do not see it, well, we do not worry about that too much (very roughly speaking)

Why is it that so many people believe science to be the ultimate arbiter of truth,

Because this is how science works if you believe in it

when in reality, science is still in its relative infancy?

Relative to what? It's 2M years old which is a lot to me.

Of course the quality of "science" during this time varied a lot but the first person who saw someone else eating a berry, saw the eater (a.k.a called "experimentalist") dying, and concluding "not gonna eat that" made a scientific discovery (they experimented (well, witnessed someone experimenting) and draw correct conclusions from observation).

What I find particularly troubling is the authority that science has seemingly acquired—the belief that it can eventually explain everything.

We certainly hope that we can explain everything we discover. There are plenty of things we discovered that we cannot explain, though, because we do not have the knowledge to do that yet (and we may never have, if we are too dumb or if there is a fundamental flaw in the way we perceive science).

The thing is that these unknown/unexplained areas are at the border of our knowledge. When someone says "ghosts" or "telekinetics" then we sure can measure it and this has been done many many times.

Yet, it seems possible that certain truths may exist that science is inherently unable to validate.

Such as? It is either something tangible we will measure and push into our theories (possibly modifying them) or it is not (god created the universe) and we do not care.

Why, then, is there a prevalent perception that truth must always align with scientific verification?

Not sure what you mean by truth. There is no truth on not-truth in science, there is a theory, a model, measurements of things happening and either the measurements fit or they do not fit.

At least physicists dream of things that do not fit. I publicly stated that I would switch my PhD thesis overnight if someone could show me a tangible event that is outside our view of physics (ghosts, tele-stuff, ...). Because, you know, Nobel Prize. I unfortunately ended up with my boring thesis about particle physics.

Answer 12

Increasingly, there is a tendency to assume that anything not scientifically proven is inherently false.

Yes, because of social media people are flooded with fake news and lies. There is no other external source of information that can provide philosophically knowable truths. And there are many sources of non-truths that are scarily successful at winning over gullible victims.

If one does not want to become a victim of misinformation, then there is no alternative to science for philosophically knowable truth.

To illustrate, some other sources:

• Religions could provide divinely revealed truths, but since religions contradict each other, we know most of them must lie (or all)
• Social media is optimized to serve what makes people spend more time on a channel, not truths.
• Esoterics could provide truths, but has failed to demonstrate this convincingly, while showing in many instances to be plain fraud that worked surprisingly well at convincing victims

Answer 13

However, this raises an important question: if a phenomenon cannot be tested, does that make it false?

Not necessarily.

Consider a current area of research: What is the "dark matter" made of (this happens to be the topic of an article in this month's Scientific American)? There are several current hypotheses, along with some proposed tests for confirming each of them. But it's quite possible that none of the tests are technically feasible in the foreseeable future, due to the energy required to carry them out.

Does that mean that all the theories are false? No, it just means we don't know which (if any) is true.

The problem with your premise is that it's wrong to conflate "we don't know" with "false". They're two separate statuses for hypotheses that have not been confirmed. We say something is false when we've actually falsified it, or when prior knowledge makes it extremely unlikely and attempts to confirm it have failed (there theoretically could be a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but we consider it false until it shows up).

Answer 14

when in reality, science is still in its relative infancy?

Much like your age, science only increases. Unless we're dealing with an unrelated loss of physical records, which I'm sidestepping here.

Just like you are now the oldest you've ever been, science is now the most expansive it's ever been. This statement will remain true at all point in time where you (and/or science) exist.

Furthermore, things that science has not yet expanded into fall into a Dunning-Kruger-like gap, where we inherently don't understand the things that science does not yet rigorously cover, by the very definition of what it means to for science to rigorously cover something.

What I find particularly troubling is the authority that science has seemingly acquired—the belief that it can eventually explain everything.

Breaking down this assumption into its constituent components:

• Science is only going up.
• There is a finite amount of things in existence.
• We have no evidence of a glass ceiling that science will reach before it covers everything in existence.

Acting imprecisely (as humans do), these three facts, all individually correct, do seem to lead to the conclusion that science will eventually cover everything in existence.

The issue here is that the third bullet point is trying to prove a negative. This is where the imprecision comes from. If we were to conclusively prove that there is no such ceiling, then the conclusion that science will eventually cover everything (or at least is able to, even if we do not do so) is relatively correct.

So, the core of your question here is asking us to conclusively prove whether such a ceiling exists or not. The unsatisfying answer here is the one listed in the bullet point: we have no conclusive proof of it existing.

Yet, it seems possible that certain truths may exist that science is inherently unable to validate.

This is effectively just stating that it's still possible the glass ceiling exists, even if we don't conclusively know about it yet. That's correct, but it's anyone's guess at this point.

Why, then, is there a prevalent perception that truth must always align with scientific verification?

This question jumps from a logical thesis to a psychological one, which plays by very different rules.

The short answer is: because perception is skewed by bias, and Dunning-Kruger leads people to wrongly believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Logically, this is not sound. However, in day to day life, these kinds of logical leaps are common when they indicate a heightened statistical probability.

From the perspective of humans in natural evolution, it wouldn't make sense for our minds to refuse to engage in an action before we rigorously prove that it's universally and empirically ironclad. Instead, our brains operate on more of a "monkey has an idea, monkey acts on idea" basis. Coupling that with a tendency to engage more frequently in things that have historically panned out, this leads to humans (and other creatures) to invest their belief into things that might not be rigorously and conclusively proven, but seem to have statistically panned out so far.

From a logical perspective, it's pointless trying to divine why people believe something, at least in the pursuit of establishing actual universal truths. Opinions are not rooted in reality, nor can they only exist in a rigorously enforced framework; making them unconstrained by the constraints of reality.

Answer 15

Can All Truths Be Scientifically Verified?

In the first place, scientific theories can be falsified but they cannot be verified. There can always be something more going on than meets the eye, or the parameters of the experiment.

This missing detail is the type of concealment Heidegger points to in The Origin of the Work of Art, (1935-1936) p. 31. He describes a clearing where, in relation to Being-in-the-world, the unseen reality ('truth') of the world is waiting to be discovered. But as we uncover it we may be misled, or not look closely enough. These misreadings are referred to as the twofold concealment: The 'truth' may be disguised or elusive, and this predicament of inaccessibility to the truth is called the "primal strife":

the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the twofold form of refusal and obstructing. ...

Truth presences as itself only because the concealing denial, as refusal, is the continuing origin of all clearing but yet, as obstructing, metes out to all clearing the rigorous severity of error. "Concealing denial" is intended to denote that opposition which exists within the essence of truth between clearing and concealment. It is the conflict of the primal strife. The essence of truth is in itself the ur-strife [Urstreit] in which is won that open center within which beings stand, and from out of which they withdraw into themselves.

By 1968 Heidegger seems to have clarified that this unconcealment (Truth presencing) is not truth itself; it makes truth possible, i.e. from The End of Philosophy, p. 69:

Insofar as truth is understood in the traditional "natural" sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings, demonstrated in beings, but also insofar as truth is interpreted as the certainty of the knowledge of Being; aletheia, unconcealment in the sense of the opening, may not be equated with truth. Rather, aletheia, unconcealment thought as opening, first grants the possibility of truth. For truth itself, just as Being and thinking, can be what it is only in the element of the opening.

The opening makes truth discoverable, but due to the twofold concealment it is not verifiable.

This makes the question "Can All Truths Be Scientifically Verified?" stumble on the very notion of truths, for who can truly know one?

Answer 16

I am surprised that so many users propose that science could verify anything. The scientific method cannot verify anything. It can, at most, either falsify an alternative or say that something cannot be rejected, with a particular confidence, ie. science can say that some given hypothesis is probably not wrong because we found data that works with it better than a tested alternative.

Now, what about hypotheses that cannot be tested? I think we have to distinguish here. For example, the Higgs boson could not be tested for for decades because we lacked the technological means. But we knew how it could be tested for in principle. There are also hypotheses out there that we do not even know how we could test them in principle, like what caused the Big Bang or the existence of ghosts. Endeavours dealing with hypotheses like that are commonly either called "fringe science" or worse.

That does not mean that only evidence-supported scientific hypotheses should be considered "truth". It is true that I felt a bit tired after work today or it may be true that some random guy gulped in his house around the corner here 400 years ago, which is hardly scientifically testable. If we are speaking about how things are in the shared world around us, science gives us the best tool for finding shared or common truth, though, which is something that has practical impact on how we should act if we want to achieve a given goal, ie. successful activity. In a way, science can testify for the effectiveness of a certain method to bring about a particular state of the world. That is not the same as verifying a fact, though.

That is how Dewey wrote about "nature" and "experience" and I do not think his writings have lost any of their importance on thinking about these matters.

Answer 17

People believe in science. Whenever people believe in something strong enough, the words get slippery. Words like "phenomenon," "verify," and "determine" can be thrown around very loosely. There will always be individuals who use these words in terrifying ways.

I think science becomes the final arbiter of truth when we define those words above in a way which aligns with science's strengths. Take "phenomenon." Science is certainly not the final arbiter regarding any individual fact. It doesn't even try to do so except in the most liberal reading of science. Science is interested in things which can be repeated. If we define "phenomenon" in a way that can be repeated, such as isolating the phenomena from the environment, that plays into Science's "repeat it a bunch of times, just to make sure" mentality.

The funny thing about "verify" is that the one thing science doesn't do is verify anything to be true. When scientists declared they had "found the Higgs Boson," that was really just an approximation. They were only 99.9999% sure they found it. Modeling their measurement uncertainties as random variables, there was a 0.00001% chance that they'd have gotten the same results if the Higgs Boson didn't exist and they merely had gotten unlucky on their measurement errors.

Those levels of certainty are rather astonishing, all being said and done. And we humans really don't know what to do with it. Our brains have been shown to work in a very Bayesian way, and that kind of certainty is so high that our mental capacities to deal with uncertainty shut down. So we just say "The Higgs Boson exists. The theory is verified." Anyone whose definition of "verify" permits these statistical inferences (not deduction, but abduction) play to the strengths of science.

Science doesn't actually "determine" anything either. Science models. Science doesn't say electrons exist (unless you subscribe to scientific realism). What it says is that if you model a system under the assumption that electrons to exist, you're statistically likely to find the result you expect. On more than one occasion we've had to refine these models, the jump from Newtonian physics to Quantum Mechanics and Relativity being one of the ultimate examples. So if you permit "determine" to mean it models something very effectively, you play into science's strengths.

All of these are certainly used to describe science, but when the experts talk of science, they are more careful. This is not unique to science. Every belief system I am aware of has this property. The experts use the more precise words which hold up better than the layman's words.

I find it effective to consider the semantics of such words and phrases. What is intended by using such words? What is expected when one believes these words are true? If these intents and expectations line up well with science's strengths, it is not unreasonable to look to science to be a final arbiter. So perhaps science's status as king has less to do with its ability to verify all truths, but merely stems from the fact that we are interested in the class of truths that science is so very good at.

I practice a Chinese martial art which speaks of chi. This is the energy used to complete the motions we do. This is, of course, not the same as the energy you learned in science class. Science has so far demonstrated that these are not the same thing with great ferocity. And yet, I observe there is a phenomena to be studied.

Some schools teach the use of chi as something intimately tied to each individual self. Each finds their own way. In this sense, it is a phenomena science cannot touch. The basic statistical assumptions of science fall short so quickly in this sense. But should a school teach that chi as something repeatable, that can be conveyed to any and everyone who uses it, they quickly fall into the domain of science. As such, the current Western position on chi is that it is pseudoscience - no attempt to make it fit into the mold of science has succeeded.

To declare that all truths can be scientifically verified would be to declare that chi is not a real phenomenon. There are certainly those who agree with that statement. But it does seem like hubris for something that cannot fully define the reality of a conscious being -- 7 billion holes in a theory, each close enough to reach out and touch someone!