наука и "истина"

К бурным дискуссиям о социальной природе научного знания: рецензия Саймона Блэкберна на книгу Алана Сокаля Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. Важный оттуда отрывок:

What explains the instrument's accuracy? Science says that the speed of light is so many meters per second, and that is true, or science says that the speed of light is so many meters per second and the speed of light is so many meters per second. The second makes no mention of truth, but it works just as well to explain our success. Indeed, it has some title to being science's own explanation of it, and that it is the best that there is. Science does not typically mention the concept of truth in describing how GPS devices work.

It is a queer thing about truth that it has this self-effacing quality. And it is not as if we have to choose which of the explanations should be preferred, the one with truth in the shop window or the one without it. They come to exactly the same thing. Many philosophers, myself included, think that this implies that the notion has a logical, rather than a metaphysical, function. A large claim such as "science gives us the truth" would be a summary way of collecting together a lot of examples such as "science says that cholera is due to a virus, and it is" and "science says that the earth circles the sun, and it does." Since we all assent to many such examples, we can summarize our confidence by assenting to the generalization as well.

Вот как-то так примерно (update: за вычетом того, что холера это не вирусное заболевание).