Can science explain everything?
Method, truth, limits and scientific revolutions
Can science explain everything? Philosophers give 3 main answers: it can explain everything, true, but not everything and a human construction. AskPhilosophy presents 14 arguments, from Isaac Newton to Alex Rosenberg, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 3 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Whatever can be known, science can know; the rest is just ill-posed questions.
Comte, Stephen Hawking, Alex Rosenberg
Science teaches us truths about the world, but some questions lie beyond it.
Hilary Putnam, Max Weber, Isaac Newton, Thomas Nagel…
Scientific theories depend on eras, paradigms and human choices.
Thomas Kuhn, Pierre Duhem, Paul Feyerabend, Michel Foucault
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
It can explain everything
Whatever can be known, science can know; the rest is just ill-posed questions.
3 argumentsThe law of three states
Knowledge passes through three stages: the first two are provisional, and only the positive stage seeks laws through observation.
Philosophy is dead: science now answers the big questions
Philosophy has not kept up with the progress of physics: scientists are now the ones advancing knowledge.
Scientism: physics fixes all the facts, science answers everything
Science is the only reliable path to truth, and physics knows no purpose, no design and no self.
True, but not everything
Science teaches us truths about the world, but some questions lie beyond it.
7 argumentsWithout realism, the success of science would be a miracle
The extraordinary success of our theories has only one non-miraculous explanation: they are approximately true.
Science disenchants the world, but it does not say how one should live
Science masters facts, but it cannot prove that knowledge is worth having nor say how one should live.
I frame no hypotheses: science establishes laws, not ultimate causes
Gravity has been shown to exist and follow laws; its cause was not deduced from the phenomena, so it stays outside science.
Physical science left the mind out: it cannot explain everything
Physics was built by setting the mind aside; yet consciousness exists, so its picture of the world is incomplete.
A theory is scientific if it can be refuted
A thousand white swans do not prove all swans are white, but one black swan refutes it: only possible refutation is decisive.
Intelligence is made for matter, not for life
Intelligence is made for making things: it cuts and fixes, so it grasps matter but lets slip life, which moves.
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility
Our concepts are creations of the mind, yet the world lets itself be ordered by them: science presupposes this fact, it cannot explain it.
A human construction
Scientific theories depend on eras, paradigms and human choices.
4 argumentsScientific revolutions: changing paradigm is not proving
Rival paradigms share neither criteria nor vocabulary: so no neutral proof can settle between them.
An experiment never condemns a single hypothesis: Duhem's holism
A prediction relies on a whole set of hypotheses: when it fails, logic does not say which one is wrong.
Against Method: no rule made science progress
Every rule of method has been broken at some point, and those violations were necessary for science to progress.
Power and knowledge imply one another: truth is "of this world"
All knowledge presupposes power relations and truth is produced only under constraints: knowledge is not a neutral mirror.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.