In this blog post, we will examine whether scientific truth can vary depending on the era and social context, or whether it can be verified as a universal standard.
“The modern age is one that highly values science.” This is the opening line of A.F. Chalmers’ 1985 book, “The Philosophy of Modern Science.” Today, we regard science as the standard for all truth and the only reliable system of knowledge, but has science always held such great value? In fact, it has not. Science has often been excluded or undervalued for centuries under the dominance of religious and metaphysical values. For example, during the Middle Ages, theological interpretations were the standard for all truth-seeking, and scientific discoveries or theories were often regarded as heresy and even banned from discussion. However, theories such as Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, Galileo’s experimental physics, and Mendel’s genetics, which proved their value through experimentation, emerged one after another, gradually elevating the status of science. Just as the perspective on science has changed under the influence of historical background and knowledge systems, scholars’ views on science also vary depending on their experiences and values. This blog post will address two opposing perspectives on the universality of science. In particular, we will compare the positivist view that science has developed through absolute standards and the relativist view that science can vary depending on historical and cultural factors.
I will present reasons why I cannot accept the relativistic view of science and emphasize that science is a discipline that must develop through universality.
The first characteristic that comes to mind when we think of “science” is “universality.” This is because science is a discipline that seeks truths that can be applied in all situations. We need universal standards that we can understand for all scientific situations. Since science upholds objectivity as its most important value, universality becomes an essential goal that science must pursue. In fact, logical positivists such as Karl Popper regarded universality and non-historical nature as essential characteristics of science. Popper argued that scientific inquiry must seek truth in a consistent manner even in a changing reality, emphasizing that scientific truth must be valid in all situations, transcending time and space. In contrast, A.F. Chomsky refutes this positivism, arguing that truth can only be interpreted differently depending on the era and the perspective of the person. According to him, there is no such thing as an absolutely correct truth, and the criteria for truth vary depending on the framework and context in which it is judged. Chalmers argues that there are no universal standards in science and that historically successful scientific achievements were made possible by the accidental social and cultural standards of the time. However, I believe that this argument ultimately pulls science into the realm of subjective thinking, hindering the pursuit of objective and consistent truth that science strives for.
Let us consider the physics of Aristotle and Galileo as examples. If we judge the physics of these two scholars based on Chalmers’ relativism, we would conclude that it is difficult to determine which is superior because Aristotle’s physics has Aristotelian criteria and Galileo’s physics has Galilean criteria. However, as we all agree, to judge that Galileo’s physics is more advanced than Aristotle’s, we need universal criteria that can be applied to both disciplines. Without such universality, it becomes impossible to evaluate the excellence of scientific theories, and progress through failure is inevitably suppressed. Of course, the paradigm through which we view science can change over time. However, ultimately, the natural environment that science seeks to study does not change. As long as the laws of nature do not change with the times, science must explore those laws through universal standards, and relativism inevitably hinders the progress of science.
Universality also plays an important role in Popper’s falsificationism. Popper, a logical positivist and proponent of critical rationalism, viewed falsifiability as a core characteristic of science. Falsificationism is the theory that science progresses as hypotheses or theories are continuously confirmed by experimental observation, and falsified hypotheses are replaced by superior theories. For scientific falsification to be possible, there must be universally applicable criteria. For example, without universal criteria based on experimental evidence and observation, the heliocentric theory would have been nothing more than metaphysical argumentation. However, Chalmers refuted the heliocentric theory using the ‘top argument,’ arguing that scientific truth cannot always be confirmed by experimentation. 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 does fall downward, thus refuting the heliocentric theory. However, this is merely an example showing that the experiment itself had many flaws and does not prove that experimental evidence is meaningless. If such arguments had been accepted at the time, the heliocentric theory would not have been able to develop.
Of course, there are scholars who partially defend Chalmers’ relativism. Thomas Kuhn, for example, argued that scientific progress is not achieved through critical verification but through scientific revolutions brought about by paradigm shifts within the scientific community. According to Kuhn’s theory, science in a given era coexists with multiple paradigms, and new paradigms emerge to replace existing ones. As a result, scientific progress is not a convergence toward absolute truth but a change through paradigm shifts. However, this relativistic stance carries the risk that a particular paradigm, when combined with power, may hinder scientific progress. The author argues that this relativistic stance has limitations in that it makes it difficult to achieve scientific progress in reality.
