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Does modern science provide facts about the natural world? Scientific realists and positivists both argue that it does. However, neither position critically addresses the question of how experimental science is conceptually and historically possible as a natural and empirical science. How have scientists used technology to explore, model, and understand Nature? The scientific realist and positivistic philosophies of science have both presupposed the same operational metaphysics: that natural phenomena and machine performances are consequences of the same natural principles, laws, and mechanisms. This metaphysics allows the ongoing technological activities of experimentation to disclose natural phenomena in terms of mechanistic models that are tested by their implementation in future technological innovation. It is due to the perpetual need to test the products of science by implementing them in the ongoing process of technological innovation, that the scientist?s never ending refinement of truth is perpetually placed at the disposal of technology for no other purpose than the extension and development of further technological innovation. It is inherent condition of such a process that every scientific product is perpetually transformed into an instrument for further productivity. Whilst the products of science are tested in their implementation in the ongoing process of technological innovation, leading to the need for further products and tests, they remain incomplete and cannot be represented as final objective truths because such truths could not be tested without becoming instruments open to further refinement. Once the innovation of new technology became represented as the means to test truth propositions, not only were truth propositions reduced to a form that could be subjected to technological test, but also it meant that the truth-status of any proposition was henceforth perpetually deferred to the future. Thus objective truth is an imagined asymptote that is never realised. Once the origin, function, and implications of this metaphysical equation between technological power and nearness to truth is reavealed then it is questionable whether modern sciences such as physics, chemistry, and genetics are natural and empirical sciences at all! |
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