Debate: Is science the only route to knowledge?

Science is the only path

All genuine knowledge about the world comes from science, broadly understood as empirical investigation and reasoning about evidence.

Best argument

Science is just careful, systematic, self-correcting inquiry. Where other methods (tradition, revelation, intuition) have conflicted with science, science has almost always won. Alex Rosenberg argues that physics fixes all the facts, and what it cannot capture is not a fact.

Strongest objection

The claim 'only science yields knowledge' is not itself a scientific finding. No experiment could establish it. So by its own standard, it is not knowledge. The logical positivists' verification principle faced exactly this self-refutation problem.

The reply

Defenders often retreat to a broader notion of science that includes logic, mathematics and philosophy done rigorously, which avoids self-refutation but makes the thesis less striking.

Defended by

Alex Rosenberg, Rudolf Carnap

Scientific realism

Mature scientific theories are approximately true, including what they say about unobservable things like electrons and genes.

Best argument

The 'no miracles' argument, given by Hilary Putnam: realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle. If electrons did not exist, it would be inexplicable that theories about them predict so precisely and let us build working technology.

Strongest objection

The 'pessimistic meta-induction': many past theories that were very successful, like the ether theory of light and the caloric theory of heat, turned out to be false about their central unobservable entities. By induction, our current theories probably are too.

The reply

Structural realists answer that what survives theory change is the mathematical structure, not the picture of what underlies it, and that we should be realists about structure.

Defended by

Hilary Putnam, Richard Boyd, John Worrall

Anti-realism and paradigms

Science gives us useful, empirically adequate models, but we need not believe its claims about the unobservable. And what counts as good science changes with paradigms.

Best argument

Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism holds that the aim of science is to save the phenomena: to get the observable consequences right. Thomas Kuhn showed that science proceeds through paradigm shifts, in which the very standards of evidence change. Neither fits the image of steady progress toward truth.

Strongest objection

Science clearly does make progress: later theories predict everything earlier ones did and more. And the line between observable and unobservable seems arbitrary: are things seen through a microscope observed?

Defended by

Bas van Fraassen, Thomas Kuhn

Many paths to truth

Science is one powerful way of knowing among several. Mathematics, ethics, history and first-person experience yield genuine knowledge too.

Best argument

We know that 7 + 5 = 12, that slavery was wrong, and that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, without performing experiments on any of them. We know what pain feels like from the inside in a way no third-person description captures. Science is a refinement of our wider ability to reason, not its replacement.

Strongest objection

Critics worry this opens the door to unchecked claims. If intuition or tradition can count as knowledge, how do we filter out error and wishful thinking?

Defended by

Thomas Nagel, Immanuel Kant, Susan Haack

Where you stand

Do our best scientific theories describe reality?

Choose one to see how people answer.

For the full background, variations and open questions, read the entry: Is science the only path to truth?.