James Ladyman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, co-editor of Arguing About Science and Scientific Metaphysics. His work has focused on the philosophy of science and mathematics. Here, he discusses the difference between everyday and scientific truths, and whether or not science has too much power in contemporary culture.

What would it mean for science not to be true?

Well, there are lots of examples of false science…

Science itself, not just a part of science.

Well, it makes no sense to talk about science being true. I think science is something like an institution or a collective activity. As such it’s not really true or false, but it produces various statements that might be true or false. Some of them are true and some of them are false.

So can science produce things that we know are true, or can it only produce things that aren’t yet false?

I think, within a reasonable degree, it can produce things that are true; what an ordinary person would think of as knowing, in the sense that I know I was in Bristol this morning. You could say, “Ah well, you might have been created only five minutes ago with all those memories.” And I’d say, “Yes, that’s quite a radical sceptical doubt.” I can’t argue against that. But there’s no more problem with presupposing that kind of radical doubt is false in a scientific context than in everyday life. In everyday life it feels true that we know all sorts of things about the world, either on the basis of evidence, or because someone else has told us.