In this blog post, we will look at whether the truth of science can change with the times and social background, or whether it can be verified with universal standards.
“Modern times are an era that highly values science.” This is the opening sentence of the preface to A.F. Chalmers’ ‘Modern Philosophy of Science,’ published in 1985. Today, we think of science as the standard of all truth and the only reliable system of knowledge, but has science always had such great value? In fact, it has not. Science has often been excluded or undervalued for many years under the control of religious and metaphysical values. For example, in the Middle Ages, theological interpretation was the standard for all truth-seeking, and scientific discoveries or theories were often considered heresy and were even taboo to discuss. However, theories that proved their value experimentally, such as Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, Galileo’s experimental physics, and Mendel’s genetics, were successively introduced, and the status of science gradually increased. Just as the perspective on science has changed under the influence of the background of the times and the knowledge system, the perspective on science varies depending on the experience and values of each scholar.
In this article, I will address two opposing views on the universality of science. In particular, I will compare the positivist view that science has developed through absolute standards with the relativist view that it can vary according to temporal and cultural factors. I will present reasons why I cannot accept the relativist view of science and emphasize that science is a discipline that can only develop through universality.
When we think of “science,” the first characteristic that comes to mind is “universality.” This is because science is a discipline that explores truths that can be applied in all situations. We need universal standards that we can understand for all scientific situations. Since science puts objectivity as the most important value, universality becomes an essential goal that science should aim for. In fact, logical positivists, including Karl Popper, saw universality and non-historical nature as essential characteristics of science. Popper argued that scientific inquiry should seek truth in a consistent manner even in the midst of ever-changing reality, and emphasized that scientific truth should be valid in all situations, transcending time and space. In contrast, A.F. Chalmers refutes this positivism, arguing that truth is inevitably interpreted differently depending on the era and the perspective of the person. There is no truth that is absolutely right, and his position is that the standard of truth varies depending on the framework and background by which it is judged. Chamath argues that there is no universal standard in science, and that historically successful scientific achievements were made possible thanks to accidental social and cultural standards at the time. However, I believe that this argument ultimately leads science into the realm of subjective thought, hindering the search for objective and consistent truth that science pursues.
Take Aristotle’s physics and Galileo’s physics as examples. If we judge the two scholars’ physics based on the relativity of Charmers, we come to the conclusion that it is difficult to determine the superiority of either because Aristotle’s physics has Aristotelian standards and Galileo’s physics has Galilean standards. However, as we all agree, to determine that Galileo’s physics is more advanced than Aristotle’s physics, we need a universal standard that can be applied to both disciplines. Without this universality, it is impossible to evaluate the superiority of scientific theories, and progress through failure is inevitably inhibited. Of course, the paradigm for looking at science can change over time. However, the natural environment that science ultimately seeks to study does not change. As long as the laws of nature do not change with the times, science must explore them through universal standards, and a relativistic perspective will only hinder the progress of science.
Universality also plays an important role in Popper’s theory of falsification. Popper, a logical positivist and a proponent of critical rationalism, saw the possibility of refutation as a key feature of science. The theory of falsification holds that science advances as hypotheses and theories are continuously confirmed by experimental observations, and that refuted hypotheses are replaced by better theories. For scientific refutation to be possible, standards that can be applied universally are needed. For example, if there had been no experimental evidence and universal standards through observation, the heliocentric theory would have been nothing more than a metaphysical argument. However, Chalmers refuted the heliocentric theory with the “tower argument” at the time, arguing that scientific truth cannot always be verified through experiments. The argument is that if the Earth moves when a stone is dropped from the top of a tower, the stone should not fall directly below the tower, but in reality, it falls below, which can disprove the theory of the Earth’s motion. However, this is just an example of the many flaws in the experiment itself, and does not prove that experimental evidence is meaningless. If these arguments had been accepted at the time, the theory of the Earth’s motion would not have been able to develop.
Of course, there are some scholars who partially defend Chomsky’s relativism. Thomas Kuhn, for example, argued that scientific progress is not achieved through critical verification, but through scientific revolutions caused by paradigm shifts in the scientific community. According to Kuhn’s theory, science of an era is characterized by the coexistence of multiple paradigms, and a new paradigm replaces an existing paradigm through a process of emergence. This means that scientific progress is not a convergence toward absolute truth, but a change through a paradigm shift. However, this relativistic position poses the risk that a certain paradigm will be combined with power and hinder scientific progress. I believe that this relativistic position has its limitations in that it makes it difficult to achieve scientific progress in reality.
