The previous post (What About Truth?) brought to the fore difficulties we might encounter ascertaining what is true or not.  We are all familiar with such difficulties, and we may find them somewhat unsettling, yet we typically accept them as a manifestation of the unreliability of our common, everyday ways of finding out about the world.  But there must be, we think, a reliable, unequivocal way of establishing what is true or not, whether something is a scorpion or a lobster, of green or red color, the reason why the antibiotics did not cure me, and so on.

And we do feel we have such a way of generating reliable knowledge about the world, an obvious way, Science!  Science is the dominant authority of our times on knowledge.  It employs powerful ways, we feel, scientific ways, with which we find out about the world, and provides us with scientific truth.  Not the unreliable, the everyman’s kind of truth I described in the previous post, which can lead to all kinds of disagreements and difficulties.

We describe knowledge as “scientific” to indicate value and reliability, our confidence in it, and that other people should share that confidence, should trust it.  We read on labels that this or that supplement has been scientifically proven to help us lose weight or protect us from disease, we expect that our water and food supply are safe on the basis of scientific tests, we want politicians to base their decisions on scientific findings instead of the heeding of powerful interests…  Such is the authority of Science, that even those who try to confront mainstream scientific views claim that their own positions are scientific – they rush to occupy the scientific high ground, or to the very least suggest that the matter is still not scientifically settled.  So, resistance to the teaching of Evolution in schools in some US States for example, has led to the emergence of “Creation Science”.  And to lend credence to non-mainstream positions on climate change, genetically modified organisms, or the safety of vaccinations, scientific experts are found, ready to articulate the requisite views.

Our everyday life provides overwhelming support for the authoritative position we accord to Science.  Our world is full of objects whose origins can be traced to the sciences, such as physics, chemistry, or biology: electronic devices (including the computer I am typing this on), telecommunication, transportation, food, medicine, clothing, weaponry…  Science, through new objects it gives rise to, or even just as a way of understanding the world, permeates virtually all aspects of our everyday lives.  In this regard, we also have the strong sense that the knowledge that Science furnishes us with, the scientific truth, is independent of our socialization.  After all, our world is full of objects, hard, material objects, that have arisen from scientific knowledge.  What possible influence could our socialization have?

So, how does Science manage to provide us with what we consider reliable, authoritative knowledge?  We typically attribute this to Science using a uniquely powerful way, the Scientific Method, to reveal the true nature of the world.  If indeed there is such a reliable way for finding out about the world, a way independent of our socialization, this way would also provide the answer to the question about a superior understanding of the world that I posited in the opening post of this blog, Two Basic Observations: Science would provide the superior understanding of the world that would inform the way to lead one’s life.

In the following post, I will directly address the question of whether there is indeed any special way to obtain such a superior understanding of the world, an understanding independent of our socialization.