Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how scientists would keep a straight face with one another or even bother to do their daily craft work if their assumption was that there was no truer reality to be discovered. Of course, even if they were on track as judged by their peers and by the use of their ideas in practical work, it is always possible, indeed likely, that there are deeper conceptions of the underlying reality that will one day take the place of existing theories. But the absence of a final truth does not mean there is none at all. Conceiving of science as competition over ideas, science is also about conflict and therefore about power. Recall Robert K. Merton s law to the effect that, in any biography or autobiography of a scientist, after it is first stated that he cared not for precedence, it would take no more than twenty pages to find him engaged in a battle royal over that very thing.
Fame is a spur.
Over time, however, we know of few scientific ideas accepted against increasingly negative evidence. For as long as there exist diverse groups of independent scientists, there is no way to control them all. Against this view of the progressive improvement of scientific theories, there is the contention that science is inevitably politicized and that to contend otherwise is sheer rubbish. On the contrary, I claim, it is the view of inevitable politicization that reflects trashy thought. It is equivalent to the famous old joke about the child who kills his parents and then claims the mercy of the court because he has become an orphan.