>Maybe from the Enlightenment to the early 20th century. Back then, science was still understood as the pursuit of truth.

But, that was a period of material scarcity. Only a relatively small wealthy upper class had access to that kind of education. That was a period of time still rife with superstition... literal witch-hunts.

P.S. - Bravo for volunteering a reply.

> The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.

I am not an experimental scientist or philosopher, but I am a mathematician, and I thoroughly reject the claim that the big idea of 20th-century mathematics is that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. To be sure, we found that one can speak meaningfully, and rigorously, of the limits of decidability; but only an algorithmic view of mathematics will lead one to conclude that this makes the truth unreachable. Perhaps one could advance the claim that certain truths are unreachable (I do not, and find the claim woolly), but that is quite different from saying that truth itself is unreachable.

I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of certainty.

What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.

Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.

Radically overturned is an overstatement I think. The theories you've listed are all tautologically valid in the domains in which we've tested them. What will happen is that either they will continue to hold in new domains where they haven't yet been tested, or we will discover a more general theory that will reduce to these theories in the limit.

Indeed, to illustrate; Einstein and Planck doesn't mean that for most of our lived experience and work, classical mechanics offers a far more useful model of the world.

I was referring to the crisis in the early 20th century, when the paradoxes and inconsistencies in the foundations of mathematics became too troublesome to ignore. The crisis was eventually resolved, but the mathematics that arose from it was more limited in scope than what earlier mathematicians had hoped. That is usually not a major concern if you work in mathematics, but it was a significant change in the understanding of the nature of truth.

> Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.

What is the utility of empirical evidence to building consensus if it does not reflect some underlying truth?

I disagree with your characterization of science and math of the 20th century. To start, quantum mechanics does not entail lack of realism. The 20th century also saw two deterministic interpretations of QM emerge (many worlds and Bohmian mechanics).

The fact that experiments can only rule out explanations can be used to establish a process that provably converges on truth (Solomonoff Induction).

Incompleteness and undecidability are provably true propositions. Cold, hard truth.

In other words, there are counterparts to all of your points that supposedly undermine the concept of truth.

Truth is an anti-scientific concept. When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind. Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach. And it's irrelevant anyway. The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.

> Truth is an anti-scientific concept.

There is no epistemic value to empirical evidence if the empirical evidence were not proxy to some truth.

> When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind

No, "truth" is the proposition that will agree with all conceivable robust evidence.

> Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach.

I disagree, and I already mentioned Solomonoff Induction that I think disproves this.

> The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.

I disagree as well. Plenty of empirical evidence is useful without a model. For instance, taxonomy in biology was very useful before we knew of genes or even evolution.

The actual utility here is clearly truth, whether that be individual facts or whole theories.