Science and Reality

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to re-introduce a conception which, having served for two millennia as a guide to the understanding of nature, has been repudiated by the modern interpretation of science. I am speaking of the conception of reality. Rarely will you find it taught today, that the purpose of science is to discover the hidden reality underlying the facts of nature. The modern ideal of science is to establish a precise mathematical relationship between the data without acknowledging that if such relationships are of interest to science, it is because they tell us that we have hit upon a feature of reality. My purpose is to bring back the idea of reality and place it at the centre of a theory of scientific enquiry. The resurrected idea of reality will, admittedly, look different from its departed ancestor. Instead of being the clear and firm ground underlying all appearances, it will turn out to be known only vaguely, with an unlimited range of unspecifiable expectations attached to it. It is common knowledge that Copernicus overthrew the ancient view that the sun and the planets go round the Earth and that he established instead a system in which it is the sun that is the centre around which all planets are circling, while the Earth itself goes round the sun as one of the planets. But we do not see it recognised that in the way Copernicus interpreted this discovery, he and his followers established the metaphysical grounds of modern science. We cannot find this recognised, since these grounds of science are predominantly contested today. The great conflict between the Copernicans and their opponents, culminating in the prosecution of Galileo by the Roman hierarchy, is well remembered. It should be clear also that the conflict was entirely about the question, whether the heliocentric system was real. Copernicus and his followers claimed that their system was a real image of the sun with the planets circling around it; their opponents affirmed that it was no more than a novel computing device. For thirty years Copernicus hesitated to publish his theory, largely because he did not dare to oppose the teachings of Aristotle by claiming that the heliocentric system he had set up was real. Two years before the