Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

actually our there then that suggests a successful model. If we had sufficient

observations then maybe we could find a theory that fits them all. That’s the dream of science. But maybe we won’t be able to collect enough facts. Or maybe we won’t find a theory. Or, perhaps worse, maybe we find more than one theory and cannot decide which is best. Well, there’s another probability that is perhaps even more disturbing. Perhaps there will be a failure of correspondence. At the moment, we simply assume dead matter, in particular arrangements, is what makes up the entire universe. But what if there are other ‘relations’ between things that are important, besides just physical relations between things in space? What if consciousness matters, or agency – or life itself? We have a glimmer of this with

quantum entanglement, which so far, of course, is unexplained. What would a theory of science have to be like in order to tackle these more complex relations? The chances of successfully finding such a theory are perhaps not zero, but right now they surely seem very small indeed. And hence, the brute fact!

Some things we just seem forced to accept, even although they cannot be proven. The

circular argument is one that – rather than heading off into an infinite regress – instead returns to a brute fact. Mum and Dad say, ‘just BECAUSE!’

Science, at least in its official version, recognises the contingency of all its discoveries. It will wait, perhaps for centuries, for new thoughts to arise and new evidence to come in. But what of us?

Well, for the most part, we are not too keen on things that are vague or incomplete. So we

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