The aspiration to describe reality as it truly is has long haunted the sciences. But does the rationality of science depend on achieving that goal? Can science remain rational even if its theories fall short of fully capturing the world's metaphysical framework? This essay argues that not only is such a complete and literal description impossible for science to achieve, but also that scientific rationality does not and should not rest on that ambition.
Drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe's Causality and Determination and Modern Moral Philosophy, and Pierre Duhem's The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, this essay develops two interrelated claims: first, that scientific theories cannot offer exhaustive and literal descriptions of reality; and second, that the rationality of science instead lies in its internal coherence, predictive ability, and methodological rigor, not in its metaphysical completeness.
I. Is a Literal and Exhaustive Description of Reality Possible?
By saying "to give a complete and literal description of reality," we mean to give a precise and total account of all aspects of existence as they truly are, not only observable phenomena but also the underlying laws and mechanisms that govern them. This ambition supposes that scientific knowledge can peel back appearances to expose reality's inner structure.
Yet Anscombe's Causality and Determination challenges this very assumption. Scientific inquiry is often aimed at identifying causal relationships. We look for the way a ball rolls after a push, the way a rock is corroded after a drip of acid, the way a pattern of disease appears after inflicting a mutation. "It is over and over again assumed that any singular causal proposition implies a universal statement." (Anscombe, 1971) However, Anscombe argues, we cannot derive universal, necessitating laws directly from singular causal statements. (Anscombe, 1971) We cannot infer that "all acids corrode metals" simply from observing that sulfuric acid corrodes iron. Instead, causal statements are inherently context-dependent: they are entangled with background conditions, potential interferences, and mechanisms of prevention.
For example, the corrosive power of acid depends on environmental variables such as concentration, temperature, and the presence of inhibitors. A universal law abstracted from these conditions would likely oversimplify the causal statement. As Anscombe puts it, the idea of a causal statement deprived of its context and understood as a universal lawlike link "is the ghost of an ideology." (Anscombe, 1971)
This insight resonates with her earlier critique in Modern Moral Philosophy, where she warns against the "survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one." (Anscombe, 1958) Just as moral concepts like "ought" lose their sense when removed from the belief in divine law (Anscombe, 1958), so too do scientific laws become misleading when divorced from the contexts they were formulated within that make them meaningful. The truth of any statement A, including any scientific causal claim, depends on a network of conditions, assumptions, and interpretive practices. No description can exhaustively account for all possible circumstances that might affect its truth.
This leads to a fundamental limitation: science cannot give a literal statement that includes all the context required to ensure its truthfulness. There is always a remainder, something unspoken, unformulated, or unformulable, that conditions the statement's validity.
Thus, it is not possible for science either to (1) exhaustively describe reality by seeking a set of universal laws underlying how all existences are and behave (we would be depriving causal statements of their essential context if formulating them into universal laws), or to (2) literally and truthfully describe reality in terms of causal statements (as their essential contexts cannot be fully specified). Instead, science, just like moral philosophy, works under a language with context that cannot be disregarded nor put into exact words. It is not possible for science to give such a complete and literal description of reality. The rationality of science is destined to fall apart if dependent on that ability.
This realization prompts the following question: what shall the rationality of science depend on?
II. Scientific Rationality as Structural Coherence and Predictive Power
The rationality of science instead depends on its structure and methodology, on its internal coherence and empirical predictive power. This view is articulated in Duhem's The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, where Duhem regards physical theory as a condensed representation of concrete facts, instead of any kind of metaphysical statement (Duhem, 1906). A successful theory, in Duhem's view, is a better manifestation, not a literal description, of what really is. He draws a deliberate line between the physical (representative) and metaphysical (explanatory) parts of science, asserting that the aim of science lies in the former.
By doing so, Duhem argues that the rationality of science depends on (1) how efficiently and coherently it organizes and represents and (2) how effectively it predicts empirical phenomena, instead of how close the explanation it offers is to a literal description of reality. And the process by which theories achieve this power and come to be regarded as rational is methodological: through mathematical abstraction, idealization, and approximation.
This reorientation is consistent with Anscombe's redefinition of causality. In Causality and Determination, she argues that causal judgments are not about metaphysical links between events but are based on our recognition of capacities or powers, the way certain things tend or are disposed to act. (Anscombe, 1971) This dispositional or capacity-based view avoids the illusion of determinism. When we say "acid corrodes metal," we are not making a metaphysical pronouncement about necessity; we are offering an intelligible, context-sensitive interpretation of how substances behave.
Scientific causal statements, then, are no longer objective mappings of cause and effect "out there," but rather human interpretations of systems of facts. Just like how Duhem reframed the nature of scientific theory, Anscombe reframed how we understand causality. They are both now human tools for organizing and understanding concrete facts and predicting future outcomes, not how we grasp the essence of reality.
Thus, with such new understandings of scientific theory and causality, a rational physics can construct theories with fields, particles, or wavefunctions without committing to a final ontology of the world; and a rational biology can speak of causalities involving genes or metabolism without requiring literal metaphysical correlates. We are still not able to give a complete literal description of reality, but still, we are able to regard this science as a rational way of approaching the empirical world.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the rationality of science does not and cannot depend on its ability to give an exhaustive, complete, and literal description of reality, not only because it is impossible, but also because it is not necessary. Scientific inquiry gains its rational character from the strength of its internal coherence, the discipline of its methodology, and the power of its empirical predictions. As long as we develop scientific theories that serve as coherent, efficient, and predictive representations of observations through proper methods of abstraction, modeling, and approximation, such science remains rational.
We may apply our own causal interpretations and formulate explanations upon such representations, but we must distinguish those from literal descriptions of reality, that is, from metaphysical truth. That is the only way the rationality of science may survive through ambiguity, revision, or even subversion of its prevailing theories.
Bibliography
- Anscombe, G.E.M. Causality and Determination. Cambridge University Press, 1971.
- Anscombe, G.E.M. "Modern Moral Philosophy." Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124, 1958.
- Duhem, Pierre. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Translated by Philip P. Wiener, Princeton University Press, 1954.