A Beginning

Let us start with a rather disputable conjecture:

All scientific theories are wrong.

This most clearly demonstrated by experience: Until now, virtually all theories had to be refined or improved or by themselves already acknowledged not to take all possible details into account. This could be a simple conclusion from history of science of large parts of philosophy of science dealing with rejections and improvements of theories.

One could argue against this in two ways:

1. The Optimist. OK, our nice little theory doesn't explain everything, but it works perfectly well in a huge number of cases. This may not be the very very final step, but it definitely captures an important paert of the truth and is thus not completely wrong or even partly correct.

2. The Meta-theorist. Yes, all our theories are wrong. But, the method is fine. We have no clue why, but mathematics is amazingly powerful and effective when describing nature. Let's not try to explain the success of science in building machines, improving life and understanding nature, instead, just accept it on go on using mathematics.

Both take the so-called success of science as a strong argument in favour of it and use it for their own purposes.

So, where does this lead us? We didn't solve the original problem (Are all scientific theories wrong?), but we brought in a different form: Whatever science is, why does it work? or even stronger: Why is the world understandable to us?