How To Be An Agnostic
sets of empirically verifi able premises from which a conclusion,
that is more than could have been anticipated from any one of
the premises, can be induced. For example: the sun rises one
day, and then the next, and then the next, from which it is con-
cluded that the sun will rise every day.
The trouble is that the history of physics over the last 100
years, and arguably now biology too, has not looked anything
like this cumulative idea of scientifi c discovery. Physics has
undergone a series of revolutions, and today arguably awaits a
revolution again, to deal with unknowns like dark energy. There
are biologists who venture the same prognosis for their science
too. How else is it going to tackle apparent imponderables like
consciousness? So philosophers of science question the all-
powerful cumulative view.
Various alternatives have been formulated. Thomas Kuhn
thought that the apparently cumulative periods of scientifi c
endeavour were only one part of the story. He called this normal
science, when scientists pursue their line of research on the
assumption that it fi ts into the great puzzle of knowledge that
awaits completion. However, there is another part of the story,
when science undergoes a paradigm shift. As the uncertainties of
one paradigm become irresistible, scientists fi ght it out to estab-
lish a new one. When that has happened, a new round of normal
science is initiated and the illusion of cumulative truth returns.
This is arguably what happened to physics at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Scientists then thought that they were
just putting the fi nishing touches to the picture of the world that
originated with Newton, were it not for a handful of experiments
that kept throwing a spanner in the works. These experiments
confounded the wave theory of light by showing how light could
behave as if it were particles of energy too. Some took this conun-
drum to be a result of errors; they took the ‘fl awed’ experiments
to be addressing the wrong questions. However, eventually, the
weight of evidence became unavoidable. From what seemed a
mere glitch, a whole new paradigm in science was born, namely,
the indeterminate, probabilistic world of quantum mechanics.