Bad Questions: 1 Does Science Describe Reality?

The Question

“Does science describe reality?” At first glance, this seems a simple question. Science observes, measures, predicts — surely if it works, it corresponds to the world as it is. But lurking beneath this confidence is a persistent unease: what if all our models, equations, and experiments are only ever maps? What if the phenomena they describe are somehow not the world itself? This is the question’s strongest form: not naïve skepticism, but serious concern about the relationship between our knowledge and the world we inhabit.

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Why It Keeps Arising

Science is astonishingly effective. Physics predicts planetary orbits, chemistry yields new compounds, biology deciphers genomes. Yet, the very success of scientific models produces a subtle tension. A map that predicts perfectly still isn’t the territory; equations are symbols, data is constrained by instruments, observations filtered by interpretation. And so the question arises again and again: are our most powerful tools revealing reality, or are they simply projecting a coherent structure that is useful?

It also arises because of the human habit of ontologising models — treating our abstractions as if they are the entities themselves. The pressure is cultural, cognitive, and epistemic: science works, so we naturally expect it to “tell us the truth” about the world. The question feels legitimate because the stakes are high: what is the world, if not what our best tools describe?

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What the Question Quietly Assumes

To make sense, this question must assume several things:

1. Reality exists independently — there is a “world out there” that can, in principle, be revealed.

2. Science provides a window — human inquiry is capable of stepping outside its own methods to verify reality.

3. Truth is a relation of correspondence — knowledge succeeds when it matches the world.

4. Appearance is insufficient — mere prediction or utility is not enough; what matters is “what is really real.”

These assumptions are rarely stated, but they are the scaffolding holding the question in place. Remove them, and the question collapses.

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The Forced Binary

Once we grant these assumptions, the question quickly polarises:

• Realism: Science does describe reality. Its success is not just predictive; it reflects truth.

• Anti-realism: Science does not describe reality. It is instrumentally useful but ultimately a construct.

Every possible answer, it seems, falls into one of these camps. The debate becomes a pendulum swinging between absolute faith in correspondence and radical scepticism about representation. Yet the pendulum itself is generated by the very assumptions that make the question intelligible — it is trapped inside the frame.

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The Structural Diagnosis

No matter which side one takes, the answer is always incomplete. Realism cannot escape the fact that we only have models, never unmediated access to the world. Anti-realism cannot explain why the models work at all if they are not in some sense aligned with reality. The question is unanswerable by construction: it demands a verdict that can only exist outside the conditions that make the question coherent.

It is not a flaw in reasoning or evidence; it is a frame problem. Asking “Does science describe reality?” is like asking a map whether it is the territory: the map can respond, gesture, predict, but it can never certify the terrain itself.

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What Changes If We Stop Asking It That Way

Once we release the demand for correspondence, the question shifts. We can ask:

• How do scientific models make phenomena available to us?

• How do instruments, experiments, and theories co-construct reliable predictions?

• In what ways does the success of a model depend on context, constraints, and relational patterns rather than “truth”?

The focus moves from verification to actualisation: not what science mirrors, but what it brings forth, stabilises, and coordinates. Here, inquiry moves — not toward closure, but toward understanding the mechanisms by which knowledge operates.

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Closing Reflection

The power of the question lies in its grip: it draws us to the limits of our confidence, to the edge of representation itself. And yet, precisely by holding it up to the frame, we see why it can never give the satisfaction it promises. Science does not fail when it does not “describe reality.” The problem is the question’s hidden demand for a verdict reality is not structured to provide.