Excellent piece, with a lovely sharp question at the end. Your argument for the fallibility of science is strongly made. But at a practical level, I wonder if the question for society should be put as 'what is the least fallible method for determining our understanding of the world and, consequently, our actions within it'. This, in turn, begs a question about when and where does the scientific method beat all other mechanisms (such as reason). One of the limitations of science (as you observe) is translating what is precisely observable (which temporally sits innately in the past or present and is tied to a specific set of contexts) into a guide for the future. The bridge to the future lies, as Galileo brilliantly observed, in creating a general proposition which we expect to be true at least most of the time. At a societal (and even a personal level), these propositions are definitionally uncertain as they relate to an unrevealed future - and provides another reason I suspect for humility and a decision making model that draws widely on all thinking traditions.
Excellent piece, with a lovely sharp question at the end. Your argument for the fallibility of science is strongly made. But at a practical level, I wonder if the question for society should be put as 'what is the least fallible method for determining our understanding of the world and, consequently, our actions within it'. This, in turn, begs a question about when and where does the scientific method beat all other mechanisms (such as reason). One of the limitations of science (as you observe) is translating what is precisely observable (which temporally sits innately in the past or present and is tied to a specific set of contexts) into a guide for the future. The bridge to the future lies, as Galileo brilliantly observed, in creating a general proposition which we expect to be true at least most of the time. At a societal (and even a personal level), these propositions are definitionally uncertain as they relate to an unrevealed future - and provides another reason I suspect for humility and a decision making model that draws widely on all thinking traditions.