"There Are Things Science Can't Explain"

It is something of a cliché in bad fiction for the characters, faced with the evidence of the paranormal or supernatural, to "look thoughtful" and say something along the lines of "There are things science can't explain."

As is usually the case with the clichés of bad fiction its speakers are rarely as thoughtful as they are meant to seem--the ambiguous statement usually seeming to mean not that "There are things that science has not explained," which would be entirely sound, but rather "There are things science will never be able to explain."

The confusion arises from what the writers seem to think science is. To them science is the mass of facts that scientists have amassed. But to the extent that the term "science" has a really distinct meaning it is as a term denoting a particular method of acquiring knowledge, not some mass of facts, with the use of that method--the "scientific endeavor"--necessarily open-ended. (Even John Horgan's "end of science" argument meant no more than that the scientific endeavor was at a point where really fundamental revision of the frameworks of scientific thought--on par with the foundations of genetics and evolution in biology, the periodic theory in chemistry, relativistic and quantum theory in physics--had been scarce for a long time, and did not seem likely for a long time to come. Three decades on he seems to have been right insofar as he meant that.) The result is that, even more than is normally the case with sweeping conclusions, discussing what science might or might not do is a subject where one should be especially careful of throwing around words like "never," simply because we don't know. (Indeed, to the scientist such an assertion is a challenge.)

However, were the linguistic awkwardness and scientific illiteracy producing no more wrong than that it would be a smaller thing than what is really going on behind the cliché. This is not so much an appraisal of the limitations of what science has explained so far, or what the limits of the scientific method might be, but a dismissal of science as such as the writer calls for obeisance before the Irrational so delightful to the anti-intellectual, the wallower in cheap epistemological nihilism, and the rest of the audience that so loves those occasions when the intellectual is taken down a peg as one who has failed to understand What Really Matters in Life, in contrast with the morons who supposedly do.