Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Nozick

Nozick is yanking the rug out from under our craving for scientific security. The line reads like a calm clarification, but it’s really a boundary-setting move: stop smuggling prophecy into the word “evidence.” When he says there’s “no justifiable prediction” about how a hypothesis will hold up, he’s not denying that science learns or advances; he’s denying that past success can be alchemized into a guarantee. “Corroboration” becomes deliberately modest: not a badge of truth, not a probabilistic stamp, just a record of survived hardship.

The subtext is an argument against a comforting myth of rational inevitability. In everyday talk, we treat a well-tested theory as if it’s been promoted to permanence, as if the universe has signed off. Nozick insists that what we really have is a biography of stress tests: Which attacks did it withstand? How brutal were they? That “historical statement” phrasing is doing heavy work. It shrinks the grand metaphysical question (“Is it true?”) into an archival one (“What has happened to it so far?”), exposing how much epistemology relies on memory and institutional practices of testing.

Contextually, this sits in the long shadow of Popper and the problem of induction: evidence can eliminate rivals and reveal weakness, but it can’t logically compel the future to resemble the past. Nozick’s intent is disciplinary. He’s trying to keep philosophy and science honest about what methods can deliver: resilience, not revelation.