ABSTRACT
Persons who say 'one can prove anything with science' have stopped trusting science. In order to understand why this has come about, and also understand the nature of corrupt science, we first need to have a grasp of what good science looks like. This is how empirical science works using a mix of experiment, induction and deduction. The version of empirical science utilised by the natural sciences is called positivism. Positivist science limits itself to what can be observed and measured. Empirical science is mostly used to produce statistical truths of the more-or-less kind, rather than 'hard' truths of the true or false kind. Positivist empirical science generates two kinds of knowledge – absolute and statistical. Corruptions occur when statistical truths are misrepresented as absolute ones. But, even if the results are found to be statistically significant, this does not guarantee their truth value. The results could still be due to chance (an aspect of the problem of induction).
