Abstract
In Identifying Future-Proof Science (OUP 2022) I argue that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and “oxygen atoms are heavier than hydrogen atoms”. Whilst claims about truth in science are usually associated with scientific realism, it is crucial to note that most anti-realists will also agree with such examples, whether on the grounds that they concern in-principle observables, on the grounds that we are rightly confident that there are no plausible unconceived alternatives, or on other grounds. But how should we go about identifying future-proof science? This appears to be a new question for philosophers of science, and not an unimportant one. It unites traditional ‘realists’ and ‘anti-realists’, usefully demonstrating a point of consensus amongst philosophers of science: we all agree that there are many established scientific facts, including facts about things that have never been observed. Even philosophers who stress that “history shows that scientific truths are perishable” (Oreskes 2019, Why Trust Science?) think that there are many scientific truths that are here to stay, such as ‘smoking causes cancer’ and human-caused climate change. Kyle Stanford, for example, believes in many ‘establish scientific facts’, including our knowledge of fossil origins (Stanford 2011). Thus I argue that philosophers should never have presented themselves as polarised on two sides of a ‘science and truth’ debate. The labels ‘realism’ and ‘antirealism’ are mostly unhelpful, and should be left behind. The interesting question concerns how we identify the scientific facts. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence (novel predictive success, unifying explanations, etc.), instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (were it ever going to happen). There are important consequences for school education: If this is indeed the way to identify future-proof science, then the vast majority of school-leavers will have hardly any of the requisite skills, since schools systems around the world completely neglect to teach children how to judge the second-order evidence for scientific claims.
