Scientific truth is reproducible, falsifiable, and has predictive power.

Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science.

Science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid — and merits universal acceptance — only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It's verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don't.

It should be clear by now that there are people who can, in fact, be reasonably considered experts; that it is rational to rely, within limits, on expert opinion; and that it is possible, by exercising relatively simple criteria, to gain insight into whether a particular expert is reliable or not. It is also true that experts, of course, do make mistakes, and that even the agreement of a large majority of experts in a field does not guarantee that they got it right. That’s the nature of scientific truth, as we have seen throughout this book: it is tentative, because it is the result of a human endeavor that is limited both by the type and amount of available evidence and by humans’ finite mental powers and emotional reactions. But the examples above show how you can, with a little bit of practice, tell science from bunk!

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

How many times did we hear statements along the lines of: "Scientific research showed that ..." or "It has been scientifically proven that ..." In doing so, people assume that science is always true. But how reliable is science? A lot of what we call science, and we accept as true, is neither true nor false, and belongs to metaphysics. For a short time (following the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus), it looked like we could make a razor-sharp distinction between reliable scientific statements and unreliable metaphysical statements. But Wittgenstein himself challenged that distinction with the posthumous publication of his Philosophical Investigations. Still later, (predominantly French) postmodern philosophy picked up the proposition that there is less truth contained in general science than in a simple literary poem. The days of reliable general theories seemed hopelessly over. Is that so? Has cognitive thinking become impossible? The following is a reflection. The era we live in, at least in the Western world, is called postmodernity. It is characterised by great uncertainty and a sense of increasing insecurity. Uncertainty surrounds unanswered questions related to the future of the planet, to the sustainability of energy supplies, to job security, to family stability, to declining social control, to the increase in the number of asylum seekers, to the existence of a god, and so on. Insecurity is linked to war, to terrorism, to crime. The idea is to study all these phenomena scientifically. But how sure am I that science is still reliable?

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete--By Truth I mean the Universal.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.

Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity.

For the value of these teachings will perhaps be most fully realized when we clearly perceive that they are scientific in their character rather than controversial... Spiritual truths, if they are truths, may evidently be dealt with in a no less scientific spirit than chemical reactions. And no religious feeling, of whatever colour it may be, need be disturbed by the importation into the general stock of knowledge of new discoveries about the constitution and nature of man on the plane of his higher activities.

Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.