I allude here only in passing to the doctrine that science has conclusive or unimpeachable authority. Few now think this. But what many defenders of science do think is that science verges on the indubitable. Scientific theories, it is maintained, are justified in a way that most other beliefs are not. Science offers no security.
Science has no authority.
On the one hand, those who are rightly impressed by Hume's argument that scientific theories and scientific predictions cannot be justified by experience, even in part, are led to conclude that experience plays only a psychological or rhetorical role. In both cases the integrity of science as a rational undertaking is drastically compromised. Among philosophers too, relativism attracts only a minority, though a more plangent one. Critical rationalists, who embrace both realism and skepticism, constitute an even smaller minority. The commonest position combines forthright realism with an ambivalent justificationism that longs wistfully for the day when Hume's skeptical attack will be meticulously outflanked.