Скачать или смотреть What Scientists Know and How They Know It, Dr. Steven Goldman, Lehigh University

Modern science began as a method to gain knowledge of nature, but soon promoted itself as the exclusive rational path to acquiring knowledge of the true causes of experience.
Are scientific theories true because they correspond to reality? How can we know that they do, given that we have no access to reality except through experience, which scientists themselves tell us is profoundly different from the the way things "really" are?
Are theories true because they account for experience and make correct predictions? This sounds plausible, but theories that we now consider wrong once were considered true because they accounted for our experience and made successful predictions then! Should we assume that as new experiences accumulate, current theories will be replaced, as all previous theories have been? But in that case, theories are not really knowledge or truth, in the strict sense of those words, but a special case of experience-validated educated opinion.
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
http://www.isepp.org/Pages/07-08%20Pa...