The Fallibility of Scientific Knowledge

Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher established that there is no permanence in nature . That proposition remains uncontested to this day. Evolution is a reality that somehow explains and/or is explained by the process of change.

Generally, change is an advantage if we talk about positive change as in the case of the fallibility of scientific knowledge. We must all accept the fact that science is not perfect and it relies on its imperfection in order to be beneficial to mankind. Science tries to simplify the complexity of the world by explaining it. This explanation however provides more questions to be explained thus scientific knowledge is burdened with the unending quest for explanations.

Whatever scientific knowledge we have right now is only good for today and in the future it just won’t be enough to solve our problems. We can now directly resort to the scientific revolution wherein a more radical shift in development paradigms becomes an issue in the scientific circle. Paradigm shift is thus a response to the ever changing need to solve problems that comes unanswered by scientific tradition. Science, in order to remain science must constantly change in order for it to be responsive to mankind’s needs.

The process of development relies on scientific knowledge in order to gain a foothold for its policies and decisions and for these to be effective it must be backed up by a paradigm that is responsive to the present situations thus in order for development to take place we must a accept that scientific knowledge is not an absolute truth but rather a variable which is a function of time.