Watch as I use my amazing psychic abilities to read your mind: oh no, a skeptical lesson on capitalization ... and he wonders why no one reads this thing! No worries, gentle reader; the capitalization is intentional but isn’t the main point of this week’s entry. I’m going to be discussing the loaded word “truth” and its relationship to science.
The germ of this entry comes from the Teaching Company series Science Wars by Professor Steven L. Goldman. Yes, I listen to academic lectures in my spare time. This is the single nerdiest thing about me, and that’s saying something considering the grad school and science blogging things. This “truth” issue didn’t really strike me after listening to the lectures; in fact, I found the series as a whole a bit dry and esoteric (it is philosophy, after all). But, “truth” has come up every time I’ve had a conversation with someone who could be even remotely described as dissenting from science. So, it’s turned out to be quite an important point, and I’d definitely give Science Wars another listen if I didn’t have a huge queue of other things I want to check out.
So, what do I mean by “truth,” and am I really going to keep putting it in quotes? The first question is really the crux of the matter, and, no, I’ll stop with the quotes. There are different types of truth, and different worldviews and philosophies provide different truths. Let’s go over the two main categories of truth.
Capital-T Truth
We’re quickly going to run into vocabulary limitations during this entry. What I mean by capital-T Truth is a deep, cosmic, ultimate, comprehensive understanding of absolutely everything. Words like omniscient and omnipresent come to mind. For you Douglas Adams fans, I’m talking about 42; for the uninitiated, 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Many religious people would say that their god is this Truth, or perhaps that their religion comprises or gives insight into this Truth. I imagine that philosophers get high and discuss Truth into the wee hours of the morning. Capital-T Truth is *how* and *why* reality works, in every sense of those tiny words.
Little-t truth
Little-t truth, on the other hand, makes no pretension about being *the* explanation of everything. A little-t truth is just *an* explanation of how things work. Little-t truth need not be cosmic in scale or profound in depth, nor must it answer why-type questions.
As the structure of the last paragraph implies, there can be, and indeed are, many truths (as opposed to the solitary Truth). Little-t truths can come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be contradictory or complementary to one another. Indeed, any given person can subscribe to a variety of truths, even contradictory ones.
Is Science Truth?
As I insinuated, talking about Truth immediately indicates deep philosophical and/or religious notions. But, what about science? Does science give us Truth, or is the scientific worldview merely one truth among many? The answer to this question may surprise and trouble you. Indeed, it is the basis for a variety of serious attacks levied against science from various ontological adversaries. I have seen religious people, post-modernists, and objectivists all pounce on the scientific worldview due to the answer I’m about to give you.
No, science does not provide Truth.
An example would be illustrative. Consider the “scientific consensus” on how the solar system works. First, the sun was pulled around the earth in a chariot by a sun god; we eventually lost the deity, but kept the geocentrism for some time. Copernicus and Galileo argued for a heliocentric solar system with circular orbits, and Kepler utilized Brahe’s meticulous data to demonstrate that the orbits are actually elliptical. Newton explained where these ellipses come from via the force of gravity, elegantly unifying the waltz of the heavens with the crude motion of boulders down terrestrial hills. And finally, thanks to Einstein, we now understand that the planets are merely traversing a straight line through spacetime curved by our massive sun.
Clearly, the scientific worldview has changed drastically over the past twenty-five centuries. And, hell, no one expects that science’s stance on the solar system is done changing! General relativity is fundamentally incompatible with Einstein’s other brainchild, quantum mechanics. Some physicists expect to discover virtual gravitons that pull the earth towards the sun, while others anticipate that the jiggles of the membranes predicted by string theory will eventually explain all cosmology. Many candidly admit that they just don’t know what the future holds.
In light of all this, science simply cannot be Truth. Each of these ideas about the solar system comprises a truth. Throughout this millennia-long (and counting) scientific progression of truths, the Truth about the solar system has not changed. We’re not in The Secret; Apollo didn’t stop dragging the sun around when Rome fell, nor did space and time merge into spacetime when Einstein had a brilliant flash of insight at the patent office. Our conceptions (our truths) have changed, but what the solar system is “really up to” (the Truth) has neither changed nor been discovered.
Uh-Oh …
This is bad, right? If science isn’t giving us Truth, then what the hell good is it? All these guys attacking science must be on to something; the bad guys in the Science Wars are winning, or might even have already won! The religious people are correct that science cannot provide Truth but they can. The post-modernists are correct that science is just one truth among many. The objectivists are correct that science has foolishly forsaken Truth in lieu of mere truth.
Despite my dramatic buildup, there’s actually no problem here whatsoever. This point (and indeed the entirety of the Science Wars) is much ado about nothing. Though science does not provide Truth, it is a system for determining the very best truths. Thus, the scientific consensus in a given domain is objectively the best truth we have. The scientific worldview adopts the best explanations for the best available data, and readily changes itself upon the discovery of new phenomena or the substantiation of superior theories.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the religious person, “my god provides Truth! Weren’t you listening?!”
Claiming that your personal truth is a Truth does not make it so. Each of the countless world religions maintains that it has the Truth, while every other worldview has it at least slightly wrong. None of them has evidence to support this assertion, or even definitive evidence that such a Truth exists in a meaningful way.* Take a precursory glance at Catholicism: the details of Christ’s divinity was more-or-less voted on over the years, and the church explicitly decided to accept evolution over creationism at some point in the recent past. We can argue about what Truth precisely is, but it certainly is not democratic or fluid.
*Per an epic hundred-facebook-comment and two-hours-in-person long discussion with a few of my friends, I think I now would agree with them that Truth does exist. The details will require a separate entry to cover; suffice to say here that I nevertheless don’t think their god is Truth. I’m probably ticking off the lion’s share of my current readers (translation: these two guys) by relegating our discussion to a footnote for now, but it really just doesn’t fit in this entry.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the post-modernist, “who are you to proclaim science the best truth? You’re just a prejudiced westerner who arrogantly thinks his pet truth is the best!”
Science is the best truth because it is self-correcting and ever-improving. When new or improved data is collected, we can test all our new and old hypotheses against this data. Going back to my cosmology example, you can easily demonstrate that general relativity is superior to gravity, which is superior to Copernican circles, which is superior to geocentrism.** If some group of indigenous people on an island thinks that it is turtles all the way down, we can test that truth and demonstrate its inferiority to science’s truth. No racism necessary.
**This point also might be relevant if a religious person claims that you need to have the Truth handy (which, of course, they think they do) to compare to candidate truths.
“Woah woah woah,” cries the objectivist, “we do Real Science, and it can provide Truth!”
My terminology might be on shaky ground here. I’m not terribly familiar with Ayn Rand’s work, especially the science-critiquing aspect of it. Apparently, there is a faction of her objectivist movement that really despises modern physics. To paraphrase e-reams of websites and documents someone sent to me recently, it seems that they feel science has abandoned logic and reason. For instance, they claim that wave-particle duality violates the law of non-contradiction; that is, it’s obvious that A cannot also be not-A, but that’s exactly the sort of thing quantum mechanics says.
I throw the word pseudoscience around willy-nilly, so I like to emphasize when I cover something that is literally pseudo-science. This form of objectivism is precisely fake science. Their Truth claim is no more scientific or logical or reasonable than any religion’s Truth claim. Wave-particle duality is an exhaustively experimentally established phenomenon. Thus, if your premise leads to the conclusion that wave-particle duality is impossible, you have nothing but a false premise. Theirs is simply a religious belief dressed in science’s clothing.
Truthiness, Or Would It Be truthiness
I could continue, but we’re getting pretty long and, more importantly, I’m hemorrhaging potential entry topics. (The three statements in quotes and italics above would each be plenty for an entry; my spider sense tells me that the first might cause entry-length comments if my buddies stop by and weigh in on the matter.) I definitely wanted to cover the fronts of the Science Wars, though.
To (over)extend the war analogy, the conventional fighting seems to be over but the guerrilla tactics have just begun. Science won the early battles: overt creationism isn’t in the classroom or laboratory, post-modernists are largely relegated to the fringes of the humanities, and Ayn Rand’s only recent claim to fame is a disparaging shout-out on the back of Jon Stewart’s satirical textbook. But, the fighting continues, from local school boards to college faculty meetings to internet message boards.
Science doesn’t provide the sort of capital-T Truth allegedly provided by many religions and philosophies. And that’s okay! The scientific worldview is a compilation of the very best little-t truths that we’ve come up with to explain the world around us. Though that isn’t Truth, it is the best we’ve got. Plenty of people profess to have the Truth, but I would go ahead and be skeptical of that assertion if I were you.
