J Why Try to Attain Truth If We Can Never Reach It?
Consideration of fallibilism gives rise to another conundrum for anyone trying to understand science: If attaining Truth is the goal, but reaching the goal is impossible, then why bother? Or, if for some reason we were to bother, how should we proceed?
The answer to the first question goes roughly along these lines: we have to.
Humans are innately driven to try to understand; the urge is present even in children who have not yet learned to talk.36 Our primate ancestors evidently found it useful to comprehend and control nature as much as they could, and they produced more offspring than those who couldn't comprehend and control as well, and those offspring produced more offspring, etc.—fast-forward a few million years, and here we are.37,38 The drive to understand nature enabled our ancestors to find food, mates, and shelter and stave off death long enough to procreate. As time went on, the drive became generalized, was exapted, and people figured out how to control fire, develop agriculture, forge metals, form civilizations, and, eventually, invent cell phones. Whatever the precise details are, the fundamental need to comprehend nature is built into the genome of Homo sapiens, a conclusion with numerous implications for science and philosophy.If we assume that understanding for its own sake is now an intrinsic drive, then it is apparent that the success of our species has not depended on a perfect grasp of nature's mysteries. It hasn't mattered that we haven't achieved Truth, because we have gotten countless practical benefits from discovering partial, provisional, small “t” truths. Thus, there are at least two answers to the question of why we try to achieve the unreachable ideal of Truth: “we have to” and “incomplete knowledge is still useful.”
The second question is thornier than the first: How to proceed rationally to search for Truth if we're not sure where to find it? For millennia two answers have commanded the most attention in the Western philosophic tradition: deductive, reasoning and inductive reasoning— deduction and induction, for short. Both of these concepts are key to understanding scientific reasoning, especially the hypothesis and its proposed alternatives, and so I want to go into them in greater depth than science students ordinarily encounter.
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