Gordon H. Clark and Philosophy of Science | foxinthevineyard

Of course, Clark is by no means the first to realize these problems. Bertrand Russell did:

“All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: ‘If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.” This argument is of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: “If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.’ If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the argument upon which all scientific laws are based.” The Scientific Outlook By Bertrand Russell (Publisher: Routledge; New edition (July 18, 2001)

And Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations:

“First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it…. We know that our scientific theories always remain hypotheses…. In science there is no“knowledge” in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth…. Einstein declared that his theory was false: he said that it would be a better approximation to the truth than Newton’s, but he gave reasons why he would not, even if all predictions came out right, regard it as a true theory…. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement;… our knowledge, our doctrine is conjectural;… it consist of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.”

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