This course discusses whether scientific truth can be established as an objective, universal standard or whether it is subject to relative change depending on society and time. Focusing on A.F. Charmus’s relativistic view and Karl Popper’s theories of positivism and disprovability, the author discusses the absoluteness of scientific truth and argues that universal standards are essential for the advancement of science.
“The modern age is an age of high esteem for science,” opens the preface to A.F. Charmus’s Modern Philosophy of Science, published in 1985. Today, we consider science to be the standard of all truth and the only reliable body of knowledge, but has it always held such great value? In fact, it didn’t. For many centuries, science was often excluded or undervalued in the face of dominant religious and metaphysical values. During the Middle Ages, for example, theological interpretations were the standard for all truth-seeking, and scientific discoveries or theories were often considered heretical and taboo to even discuss. However, as Copernicus’s theory of geocentricity, Galileo’s experimental physics, and Mendel’s genetics all proved their value experimentally, the stature of science slowly rose. Just as the way we view science has changed over time and under the influence of different systems of knowledge, the way we view science has also changed over time, depending on our own experiences and values.
In this article, we will discuss two opposing views on the universality of science. Specifically, I will compare the positivist view that science has been developed using absolute standards with the relativist view that science is subject to change depending on time and cultural factors. I will show why the relativistic view of science is unacceptable and emphasize that science is a discipline that cannot but develop through universals.
When we think of “science”, the first characteristic that comes to mind is “universality”. This is because science is the search for truths that can be applied equally in all situations. Since science touts objectivity as its most important value, universality is an essential goal for science to strive for. In fact, logical positivists, including Karl Popper, saw universality and non-historicality as essential characteristics of science. Popper argued that scientific inquiry should be a consistent search for truth in the face of changing reality, emphasizing that scientific truths should transcend time and space and be valid in all situations. A.F. Charmus, on the other hand, refutes this positivism, arguing that truth is subject to different interpretations at different times and from different perspectives. His position is that there is no absolute truth, and that the standard of truth depends on the framework and context in which it is judged. Chamus argues that there are no universal standards in science, and that successful scientific achievements throughout history have been made possible by the social and cultural standards that happened to be in place at the time. However, in my opinion, this argument ultimately relegates science to the realm of subjective thought, which hinders the objective and consistent search for truth that science is meant to pursue.
Take Aristotle’s physics and Galileo’s physics, for example. If we were to judge their physics based on Charmus’s relativism, we would conclude that Aristotle’s physics is Aristotelian and Galileo’s physics is Galilean. However, if we are to agree that Galileo’s physics is more advanced than Aristotle’s, we need universal criteria that can be applied to both disciplines. Without this universality, the evaluation of the superiority of scientific theories becomes impossible, and progress through failure is stifled. Of course, the paradigm through which we view science can change over time. Ultimately, however, the natural environment that science seeks to study remains constant. As long as the laws of nature do not change over time, science must explore them through universal standards, and a relativistic perspective will inevitably hinder this progress.
Universality also plays an important role in Popper’s anti-proofism. As a logical positivist and advocate of critical rationalism, Popper saw disprovability as a key feature of science. Disprovabilism is the theory that science progresses because hypotheses or theories are continually confirmed by experimental observation, and disproved hypotheses are replaced by better theories. In order for scientific disprovals to be possible, there needs to be a common set of criteria that can be applied. For example, in the case of geodynamics and celestial mechanics, without a universal standard of experimental evidence and observation, geodynamics would have been nothing more than a metaphysical argument. However, Charmus refuted the geodynamic theory with what he called the “tower argument,” arguing that scientific truths cannot always be confirmed by experiment. The idea is that if the earth is moving when a stone is dropped from the top of a tower, it shouldn’t fall directly to the bottom of the tower, but it does, so the theory of geostationarity can be disproved. However, this is an example of the many flaws in the experiment itself, and does not prove that experimental evidence is meaningless. If these arguments had been accepted at the time, the theory would not have been able to develop.
Of course, there are scholars who partially defend Charmus’s relativism. Thomas Kuhn, for example, argued that scientific progress is not driven by critical verification, but by scientific revolutions, which are paradigm shifts in the community of scientists. According to Kuhn’s theory, the science of an era is characterized by the coexistence of multiple paradigms, with new paradigms emerging and replacing old ones. This leads to the idea that scientific progress is not a convergence to an absolute truth, but a change through paradigm shifts. However, this relativistic position also carries the risk of certain paradigms becoming entrenched in power and hindering scientific progress. In my view, this relativistic position is limited by the difficulty of achieving scientific progress in the real world.
