The foregoing thoughts appear to validate the claim that the practical necessities of science are not actual necessities but there is an obvious counter claim that the limit point of science will be that of universal necessity and this would seem to imply that the claim that the more expansive logic of the void has universal necessity is empty because its greater universality is only apparent. The weight of the counter claim is that ‘the final theory’ of science will be rather like the current theories: but this is not given; science may, at its apex, approach logic…

I have been contemplating an alternative view of science that is more robust than the ‘irrationalist’ view. This alternative to the standard view discussed above will help resolve the practical though not logical concern that scientific theories merely tentative and rather fictitious; and, while the alternative view will be seen to strengthen the immediate claims of science, it will also diminish the claims of science to ultimately encapsulate all being in its understanding. This is so because the empirical aspect of science grounds it in the immediate world regarding which there is no guarantee of continuity with the entire universe.

A source for this alternative view is the observation that often in the search for a new theory there are many unsuccessful and partially successful attempts until, finally, the successful theory is obtained. This final result may be due to some simple modification but the transformation may be profound. Whereas, previously the trial theories may have had inconsistencies and invalid predictions despite partial success, the final version may eliminate the problems (of course, until the one final theory –should there be one– there will always be issues that may or may not be immediately apparent.) It is important that the finally accepted theory will clear up the concerns that led to the search for a new theory. However, that is not all. It is often as though a switch has been turned on that introduces clarity and light into entire new realms. Phenomena that had not been conceived may be predicted; realms of phenomena that had been seen as unrelated become bound together. The classic example is Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism that, among its many consequences, showed light to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, showed radio waves, X-rays and gamma rays to be the same kind of phenomenon (the frequencies are different but the waves are of the same kind and are solutions of the same system of equations,) and, importantly, determined the speed of light from quantities that had no apparent connection to light (it should be admitted the suddenness of the transformation is partially the result of rewriting history but sometimes merely of writing history.) Although Maxwell’s original theory has obvious limits (given the date of its appearance it could not have anticipated quantum phenomena,) it appears that there is something right, something real about it

There is something similarly right about many of the ‘great’ theories of science: Newtonian mechanics, Darwin’s theories of evolution, Einstein’s theory of gravitation expressed in ‘relativistic’ terms, and the quantum theories. These theories have in common, not only that they clear up problems of the past but also that they bring into the realm of knowledge vast and often unanticipated tracts of nature. As an alternative to the standard view that a scientific theory is a limited theory about the entire universe, it may be said that a scientific theory is an absolute theory of a limited phase of the universe, i.e., that a good theory captures the essence of some phase of the universe. This is why it was and continues to be possible and effective to use older theories in their realms of validity: engineers continue to use Newton’s mechanics for many applications; more fundamentally, this is why it was possible to develop the older theories (this is in contrast to conclusions from standard theories of science where it is sometimes concluded that there is something magical about the development of the earlier theories in that the greater complexities did not provide a barrier to that development.) This alternative provides a view of science that shows it to be stronger than pictured in the great ‘irrationalist’ (the term is borrowed from David Stove’s 1982 book, Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, published by Pergamon in 1982)  views of the twentieth century philosophy of science. The  ‘irrationalists’ are Karl Popper who argued that in order to be science, to be about reality, a theory must be ‘falsiable’ i.e. testable; Thomas Kuhn who, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that a newer theory is no truer than the one it replaces, that the new and the old theories are ‘incommensurable;’ Imre Lakatos, responding to the conflict between the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, argued for ‘research programmes,’ or groups of similar theories, as the proper object of discussion, for this provides for both continuity and change (contra-Popper) and continuity with change (contra-Kuhn;) and, Paul Feyerabend, who argued that there is no universal scientific methodology, and that new theories became accepted not because they accorded with any scientific method (or, it might be presumed, with facts) but because their supporters resorted to any trick, rational, arational or irrational, to advance their cause (note the idea that even rationality is a trick)… continue