The Truth About Science

I am fascinated by the story of Cassandra. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed by Apollo to predict the future and to have no one believe her predictions. Rather, her predictions were met with disbelief and the consequences were tragic. Cassandra’s story is usually told as a tale of how jealousy and power bring sorrow and despair. To me, her story is very particularly about the need to communicate clearly using the best possible evidence to present ideas that may run against popular beliefs. I do not have a Cassandra complex; I try not make predictions, especially scientific ones. However, I am a scientist and an observer of science, and over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in scientific truth and our general human tendency not to recognize it when we see it. In an age of near rampant scientific misinformation, misrepresentation, and downright dishonesty, we the public, including those of us who are scientists, struggle to understand what is true in scientific proclamations. It is certainly the case that the politization of scientific “reporting” has contributed to public uncertainty. It is also the case that scientific fraud and the publication of fraudulent reports have contributed to the nonscientific public’s doubt in science. It is thus more important than ever that we, both scientists and nonscientists, understand the meaning of scientific truth. That understanding is complicated because, largely, scientific truth is relative—what may be “true” today could very well be “false” tomorrow. Let me be clear—I am not a philosopher of science, and neither are most of my scientist colleagues. However, I think that scientists can help nonscientists to understand better the nature of scientific truth. To do so, we must first acknowledge that there is more than one belief about what constitutes truth in science (Brüssow, 2022). One of these way of thinking about truth is the Correspondence Theory, suggesting that scientific truth requires that hypotheses fit with reality, typically defined as that which we know through our senses. Alternatively, the Pragmatic Theory purports that what is true is that which can be assimilated, validated, corroborated, and verified. Perhaps straddling both these ideas of truth is the Coherence Theory, where something is never definitely true because with one experiment that truth could be proven wrong. There are many more philosophies of truth; I personally lean toward pragmatics, where scientific truth is corrected by experiment. Importantly, the more experiments that support a hypothesis, the more likely it is to be true. Evidence, lots of it and from multiple methods, matters. Particularly within the framework of pragmatic theory, we understand that science is not forever truth. Rather, science is self-correcting knowledge; it builds over time with previous knowledge being revised by new evidence. This is the beauty of science; it can be improved over time (for a concise overview of theories of scientific change, see Anderson & Hepburn, n.d.). Thus, notably, although rarely acknowledged, scientific knowledge is provisional and subject to change. It is fallible, which is not to say that current scientific knowledge, and its predictions, should be ignored as “wrong.” Rather, understanding that most science is not fact acknowledges that while our current understanding may be incomplete, it is still valuable and based on the best available evidence, if indeed that is the case. The fallibility of science can be difficult to grasp, especially for many nonscientists who are not engaged in scientific research. Thus, while we as scientists become excited about new research findings that refine our understanding of a phenomenon, the general public is most likely just confused, leaving them unsure whom to believe—the purveyor of the old or the herald of the new. As scientists, it is our job to help the public, the nonscientists, sort this out. If we do not, we just further contribute to misinformation and scientific mistrust. How can we do this? First, we may consider explaining in our published papers how our current research advances what is already known. Indeed, we are taught to find scientific “gaps” and fill them with research. Sometimes that works out. More often, we are refining or correcting rather than filling. We do this work with data. We also subject our scientific findings to, hopefully, rigorous peer review, and provide sufficient information so that other scientists can replicate our work. The processes of review and replication help ensure that conclusions are reliable and not based on isolated data or flawed studies. Unfortunately, as scientists, we are at times unscientific in our work. For example, we sometimes ask unfocused questions, or we ask questions based on faulty theories and evidence, or we ask questions that are too complex. Questions matter, and ill-considered questions can result in confusing answers, which we then try to explain with even more complex analyses that few understand, including some good scientists. Following that, we attempt to interpret a mess of results using language that is not well understood by the public or perhaps even our scientific colleagues. And then, we post it all on social media. One action we often do not take but should is publishing our negative, nonsignificant findings (Sak, 2023). Especially if a study has been well designed and conducted, failure to publish nonsignificant findings is unacceptable. By not publishing important negative results, we condemn our scientific colleagues to waste their time and effort trying to replicate that which is not possible to replicate. We skew scientific truth, allowing it to become accepted rather than allowing it to be revised. We also may be endangering the public by allowing unsubstantiated science to go unchallenged by new but conflicting results. Adult attitudes toward science and technology are influenced early in life by our family, education, work, and other social influences; they are not the formed by reading the news (Miller et al., 2024). Thus, as scientists, we have our work cut out for us. We can and should advocate for improved science training in schools, including helping young people better understand how science, and its truth, evolves over time. We can also be sure that our own scientific work is carefully presented within the context of what is already known. We can challenge with evidence long-held scientific “truths” that may no longer be accurate. We can do the best science possible by asking the clearest questions derived from well-supported theoretical propositions, using exquisite, bias-free methods of data collection and analysis, and then presenting our results in places and ways that are accessible yet trustworthy. At Nursing Research, we continue to seek excellent scientific papers addressing important health topics. We welcome reports of nonsiginificant results as long as the methods were rigorous. We encourage authors to help our readers understand how their research changes or advances what is already known about a topic. We are also attempting to alleviate some of the difficulty readers, both scientists and nonscientists, have with understanding research reports. We now use a “plain language summary” for all original research and methods papers, both brief and full-length papers. These summaries provide a short synopsis of an article abstract in nontechnical language to help researchers and nonspecialists, including scientists from other fields, science journalists, and educators, quickly scan a wide range of content. Our summaries are machine generated and have been refined and improved including review by subject matter experts to validate the prompts used to generate consistently accurate results. We appreciate your feedback on this important new addition to our journal. Doing science is not easy, yet as scientists, we are responsible for rigorously pursuing it in order to inform decisions about health and health care. We need to acknowledge that our scientific work is not done until our results, and their relative truth, are understood by those who use it, including the general public. Only by such concerted and sustained effort will we be able to turn the tide of scientific mistrust.