Science & Tech Quote by Konrad Lorenz

Science doesn’t crown eternal truths; it promotes provisional ones. Lorenz’s line is a neat demolition of the popular fantasy that research is a clean march toward final answers, each “discovery” a permanent monument. Instead, he treats truth as a tool: the hypothesis that works well enough to make the next question askable, the next experiment designable, the next model imaginable. The word “working” is doing most of the philosophical lifting here. It frames scientific knowledge as something judged by performance under pressure, not by metaphysical certainty.

The subtext is a quiet warning against both dogma and despair. Against dogma: if today’s best idea is valuable partly because it can be replaced, then clinging to it as identity or ideology is anti-scientific. Against despair: the lack of finality isn’t failure; it’s the engine. Lorenz, a major figure in ethology, lived through a century that saw biology repeatedly rewrite its own fundamentals - behaviorism challenged by cognitive science, simplistic instinct theories refined by ecology and evolution, neat categories blurred by messy data. In that world, “truth” can’t mean immovable. It has to mean navigational.

The phrasing “open the way” makes progress feel infrastructural rather than heroic. Good hypotheses don’t just explain; they clear space. They create new measurements, new predictions, new disagreements worth having. Lorenz is defending a humble, ruthless optimism: our best ideas are ladders, not thrones, and the point is to keep climbing.