A reminder: every scientific method is valid in its present time

Discussing on these pages why the use of the verb “believe” referred to science is not appropriate, I necessarily had to mention what science is, or how it works that method we call scientificwhich allows us, through the mathematical analysis of experimental data, to obtain a type of knowledge useful for describing the past, present and future state of the world with an accuracy superior to that of any other system of thought.

It goes without saying that the knowledge obtained is only as good as the obtainable data and usable methods of investigation permitso as to allow the broadest checks of consistency of a theory with respect to the aspects of interest of the physical world, and it is all the more robust the more its internal logical-mathematical structure and its integration with the rest of the available scientific theories .

Of course, this implies that there are also theories that have had some success in the past, which today can no longer be considered scientific; the phlogiston hypothesis, to follow the example mentioned by a reader of mine, could have been considered scientific centuries ago, but today we know unequivocally that not only was it not valid, but not even scientific, given that it lacked certain characteristics which, although identified in epistemology after its formulation, they are now considered indispensable for a theory to be considered as such. Today, that is, we know that phlogiston was not a science, and no matter what appeared during the eighteenth century: the judgment of what is scientific is necessarily devolved to the present, because knowledge progresses and scientific thinking corrects its mistakes. In other words, science is exclusively presentist in this sense, regardless of the usefulness of the historical method for analyzing its roots.

From this fact, however, it by no means follows that our present scientific theory of the world will be completely abandoned in the future, as was the case with the ancient ideas concerning the nature of heat.

There are at least three possibilities: the first and most frequently mentioned is that future theories broaden the domain of applicability of the current scientific description of the world or resolve some of the internal fractures still present, such as the one that still separates gravity and quantum mechanics. In this case, which has already occurred for example for geometric optics or for Newton’s mechanics, what will happen is that the previous theories will see their validity maintained for those domains in which they are a sufficient approximation to describe the physical world , so how can we measure it. We don’t calculate the trajectory of a cannonball with relativistic physics, but we still use the formulas of classical mechanics; this for the good reason that they are sufficient for our purposes, and their solution, in the ordinary conditions in which we operate, is coincident.

Then there is a second possibility, never verified so far but which cannot be completely excluded: the one that a pinnacle of knowledge has been reached, and that we enter a phase of stalemate, of work on the detail. In the past, many have even declared that this state has been reached, and they said it with satisfaction, only to be resoundingly denied by subsequent developments, as happened for example with the development of the aforementioned quantum mechanics.

There is a third possibility, the one most loved by conspiracists and relativists with inferiority complexes towards scientific thought, the one that all of our current science can be invalidated and proven fallacious such as geocentrism, phlogiston theory or Aristotelian physics. This is a very unlikely eventuality, due to the simple fact that the number of predictions of our theory of the current world, verified every day in a multitude of different ways – first of all by constantly verifying the functioning of technological products designed on the basis of that view – is so astronomically broad, that simple Bayesian reasoning almost eliminates the possibility that we will be completely and utterly wrong in applying our current scientific view to make predictions with the achieved degree of accuracy. From this point of view, our current science is the most robust of all time and is at less risk of outright falsification than in the past, for the simple reason that it has been tested much more extensively from an experimental point of view thanks to the applications we make of it, and it has been examined by many more scientists than was possible in the past, thanks to the type of society in which we live.

Now, regardless of which of these three hypotheses we will see come true in the future, i.e. regardless of what our current scientific description of the world turns out to be confirmed or denied in the future, I would like to underline a point, which depends on the incremental nature of scientific progress.

If our science proves no further perfectible, or if it is found to be flawed and abandoned for a better one, or if it is expanded by integrating the bulk of previous views into a broader theory, in all cases the science of a random instant of time will be better or equally powerful than that which preceded it.

So even today, and in all future “todays”, we will be able to identify what is science and what is not, including what is or is not scientifically solid in previous knowledge; it doesn’t matter what was called science in the past, only what we call science in the present.
What happened in the past may have determined more or less long stasis, more or less useful detours, errors and more or less sensational illuminations; he may have been the child of paradigms, socio-cultural conditions and more or less conditioning metaphysical systems, which have limited what has been investigated more and what less; but, in the end, it doesn’t count to establish what and how solid is in scientific knowledge, neither of the past times, nor of the present ones.

To attack the scientific method as the best way of acquiring knowledge of the physical world, it does not help to invoke the demonstrated fragility of certain hypotheses of the past, because precisely their rejection demonstrates instead the power of the same method that one would like to attack.

Our problem is not that current scientific knowledge can turn out to be fallacious or incomplete, but another one: to make sure that the conditions of life allow science to exist, or that there is the possibility of handing down, expanding and verifying our knowledge of the world with the scientific method, in the widest and most widespread way possible.

The danger is not a supposed epistemological fragility of science, but the fragility of that social, institutional, political and market systemborn for the first time in the West, but now well beyond its borders, which allows its development and guarantees its conservation.