Before I start, I would like to mention that I am a physics and mathematics undergratuate: two sciences.
Science is a world of unfreedom. The requirements for truth are objective and strict, there is no wiggle room. Science is also tyrannical. With a harsh and authoritarian voice it debunks everything. It pretends to be the truth; the objective view of reality. However, the question is whether there is such a thing as an “objective view”. Can't that reality differ from person to person?
This question, as given above, is nonsense. The search for genuine or intrinsic truth makes no sense. Why not? Because the word “truth” has no meaning here, and neither does the question as a whole.
The meaning of “truth,” or what counts as “true”, depends on the language game being played. What is considered “true” is determined by the shared criteria by which truth is tested, which vary with context.
Take physics as an example. Physics, like other natural sciences, bases truth on an empirical method of experimental observation and logical reasoning. Another example: in mathematics, the truth of a statement is determined with logical reasoning from a number of pre-agreed axioms and definitions, and with particular attention to rigor.
And so, even completely outside science, there are language games with their own meaning for truth. Completely outside any of such language games, "truth" means nothing. Universal Truth with a capital T is nothing. We can only speak about truth if there are agreements about what we mean by this and how we determine it. That does not make truth subjective, but the objectivity of truth is socially shaped.
An interesting corollary we can draw from this is that, for example, Einstein's theory of gravity is more true than Newton's, but Aristotle's theory of gravity is neither more true nor less true than either Einstein's or Newton's. This is because Einstein and Newton play the same language game for the truth of a physical theory with criteria such as experimental observation and logical and mathematical formulation. In contrast, Aristotle played a different language game, because with him, physics was purely qualitative, and a theory was accepted if it was a coherent, logical-sounding story. He had no real experimental research or mathematical formulation.
So, even though many people quickly think of science when they think of “discovering the truth,” truth is also discussed to a greater or lesser extent in completely different contexts. A few examples I can think of are art, esotericism, philosophy, mysticism, and in my opinion also religion and psychoanalysis. We can, I think, conveniently divide all these into three categories: namely, according to how strict the criteria for truth are.
1. First of all, we have the category of science, where the requirements for truth are strict. Truth is such that everyone in the scientific world should agree on it. It is unfree: there is no room for personal interpretation, intuition or feeling, but it is practical.
2. I contrast the category of science with the category of art. Because where science is unfreedom, art is absolute freedom. In science there are agreed rules by which the truth is tested, while in art, there are none. Nonetheless, people still talk about the fact that a work of art can carry a (deep) truth. Art does not pretend to be the truth, but everyone still gets the feeling that they have discovered a truth when they see certain artworks.
3. The last category lies between the previous two. This category is characterized by the idea that it concerns an objective, if not universal and intrinsic truth, in combination with the lack of strict criteria to test this truth. Under this I would include, for example, mysticism, esotericism, most of philosophy, religion and psychoanalysis. Take psychoanalysis, or at least the theory behind it, as an example (and I am thinking in particular of Freud and Jung because that is as far as my knowledge extends). It is no science since things such as "the unconscious" cannot be tested empirically. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic explanations can resonate strongly with people and give them the idea of understanding themselves better, or in other words: they can reveal some truth.
The most important distinction that these categories entail is that, with respect to truth, they concern different language games (though there may be subcategories I would say). If one were to, for example, place psychoanalysis in the language game of science, one could rightly call it pseudoscience. But the raison d'être of psychoanalysis (or at least my view of it) lies not in its theoretical explanation, but in the personal growth one can get from it. And so the same goes for religion (again, my interpretation of it) and so on. (And also for something like astrology - so yes (and I say it with pain in my physics heart): astrology can be true.)
Science differs from other truths in that it is practical: it has the ability to accurately predict outcomes. But that does not imply that what science says is really the reality, what people often think and what the tyrannical nature of science is. Scientific theories are not real, intrinsic, universal or any other kind of those kinds of truth; rather, see them as a kind of tools. What is true in physics is that Newton's theory predicts approximately well in case x or y - which therefore has practical use when case x or y applies.
And, it may come unexpectedly, but what I am working towards is a philosophy of life.
I like to put it this way: science is concerned with how real things are, not how things really are. What science says is objective and corresponds (as best as possible) with the things we see in the world around us. But we experience more than just what science can investigate: the things in category 3 may not be provable within science, but within their own language game their truth certainly makes sense. There are still the subjective experiences we all have, that are ignored by science with its desire for generality, but make the world meaningful to us. Although science nowhere points to any meaning of life, it is entirely up to you whether you might see one. And while science describes the outside world as lifeless objects that behave according to mathematical formulas, the opportunity lies with you to see something in it and, as it were, to give the world a character. The world is more than the one science describes.
I'd like to end with a quote from Tolstoy:
“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
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