Problems with Truth

 We can seek truth, but can we ever find it? And anyway, how can we seek truth?

One of the ways in which we believe we seek truth is through science and the scientific method. This, many people think, gives us access to truth, to the really real, to what is out there, right now, right here.

The snag here is that science does no such thing. Scientists might (although increasingly do not) think it does give access to the real, to the truth, but overall this belief is rather declining. Science is a discipline (or really, a set of disciplines) which aim to give us some predictable idea of what is going on. However, as was pointed out long ago, science has a tendency to create various, rather occult sounding, quantities or entities along the way, which are way outside the possible experience of any human.

For example, light is described by a photon, and a photon has various properties and behaviours, all of which are well explained by the theory of quantum mechanics. But no-one has, or can, see a photon, in the sense of a single particle of light. It is not just that we cannot see something that small, it is simply that the observation of a photon is theoretically impossible. If we claim that scientists have ‘seen’ a photon, what is really meant is that a set of instruments have behaved in a way which suggests that a single photon initiated a sequence of events which has been interpreted by a human as being caused by that photon.

There are other problems around as well. Humans do not simply use scientific method, or reason, to arrive at truth. As noted a while ago, you cannot expect a scientific answer to the question ‘Do you love me?’ There is no scientific method to obtain an answer to the question, we simply have to listen to the reply and bring it into the context of the relationship. Similarly, in spite of the inflated claims of some, it is impossible to predict who might fall in love with whom. There might be some general rules of thumb, formed by experience, but overall, if you think of all the relationships you know, there is no pattern.

Science views the world through the matrix of models, theories and instruments. Whether what is produced is in fact reality is a little moot. There is certainly something out there which science can predict the behaviour of, but exactly what it is cannot be said by science. However, once we start to extend science towards human behaviour it gets a little more difficult. After all, the Internet giants, such as Amazon and Google, do not strictly speaking predict our behaviour. They collect vast quantities of what we do, click on, buy or whatever, and use that to suggest that the majority of people do such a thing. This is not a scientific theory in the normal sense of the words. It is an empirical, behavioural data set which is used to predict the average activity of large numbers of people. Data collection and data mining are valid operations, but the laws are empirical, rule oft thumb things, rather than experimental – theoretical operations of the natural sciences.

This is not to say that the social sciences are invalid, of course, but to indicate that positivism, understood as the assumption that the methods of the natural sciences can be extended to social science, is. There is a lot more to human experience than the laws of natural science. A human is a great deal more than the results of physiology or psychology would suggest. A human is not simply a bunch of cells and organs working together. Nor are human minds reducible to brain wave patterns.

Human society, as studied by sociology, is, of course, another complex object. How it works is an interesting question which involves economics, history and politics, at least. Philosophy and theology also turn up. We cannot understand the past without some thought about people’s beliefs, both about the world and about religion. And we cannot understand the present without understanding the past. While many may well ignore the impact of theology today, in the past it shaped people’s world and activities.

The social sciences, along with the arts and humanities, including politics, history and theology, cannot use the scientific methods of the natural sciences. The subject matter is simply inappropriate, the approaches differ markedly and, of course, there is no such thing as an experiment. While we many (and I have) heard social scientists use the term ‘scientific’ in their discourse, they do not mean mathematical hypothetico-deductive method and controlled experiment. Such things are simply impossible in the subject. They might mean methodical, logical and careful work, and we hope they do, but that is not the same as ‘scientific’ in the natural sciences.

This is not to say that social sciences, history, philosophy and theology cannot arrive at truth, or at least a reasonable approximation to the truth (which is all natural science can aim at, after all). It is simply that the methods of these subjects are not the methods of the natural sciences. In a sense, this is blindingly obvious. Metaphysics is not physics, politics is not chemistry and so on. But the obviousness of the point does not seem to prevent some people, many of whom, it would appear, ought to know better, from asserting that, for example, science (by which they mean natural science) is the only way of arriving at the truth.

It has to be conceded, of course, that there is a lot of erroneous philosophy, theology and social science out there. But then, there is a fair bit of junk science, as well. Usually, of course, the erroneous science does not get a place in the more popular narrative of the history of science, which is seen as steady progress towards the modern, the knowledgeable and the truth. A slightly more detailed look suggests that much scientific research is a matter of plenty of blind alleys, dead ends and errors, some of which are useful in clearing away mistakes. Linear progress it is not.