To answer this question about whether science
equals truth, we need to first investigate
what is science and then what is truth.
So, What is science?
Well, Oxford dictionaries defines it as the
intellectual and practical activity encompassing
the systematics study of the structure and
behavior of physical and natural world through
observation and experiment.
So, it's using experiments to discover things
about our natural world, about the physical
world, it's structure.
But it's limited to the physical world.
Ok, what is truth?
Aristotle defined it as to say of what is
that it is and of what is not that it is not
is true.
So, truth is really just a correspondence
between thought and reality.
If there's something real in the world and
my thought or statement about it accurately
reflects that thing as it is in the real world,
that makes it true.
So, now, does science equal truth?
Well, science does tell us true things about
the world, but it only tells us about some
of the things in the world.
Science is not all of truth, but it certainly
is a piece of truth.
So, it's not true that science equals truth.
Here's another way of thinking about it.
Let's draw a couple of circles.
One circle represents science and everything
that goes into science and the way that science
works.
The other circle will represent philosophy
and if we were doing this bigger we could
include the other subjects, too, like history,
math, et cetera.
This statement, "science equals truth," is
actually a philosophical statement about science.
It's not a scientific statement because it's
not something about the physical world.
It's not about the natural world.
It's not something that can be tested by experiment
and observation and verification.
And so that means that its saying that philosophy
is not truth.
The statement says that only science is truth
so philosophy is not truth.
But since this statement is in the realm of
philosophy that means this statement, also,
is not part of what is true.
And so, really, what we end up with is that
this statement is self-refuting.
"Science equals truth" is actually an irrational
statement.
To finish up, here is a quote from Richard
Feynman about the domain of science and its
limits.
