Scientism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.[1][2]

While the term was defined originally to mean "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to natural scientists", some scholars, as well as

religious leaders, have also adopted it as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)".[2][3]

Overview

Anglican, writing in his Essays, "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."[5]

With respect to the

confirmatory.[13]

More generally, scientism is often interpreted as science applied "in excess". This use of the term scientism has two senses:

  • The improper use of science or scientific claims.[14] This usage applies equally in contexts where science might not apply,[15] such as when the topic is perceived as beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, and in contexts where there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify a scientific conclusion. It includes an excessive deference to the claims of scientists or an uncritical eagerness to accept any result described as scientific. This can be a counterargument to appeals to scientific authority. It can also address attempts to apply natural science methods and claims of certainty to the social sciences, which Friedrich Hayek described in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) as being impossible, because those methods attempt to eliminate the "human factor", while social sciences (including his own topic of economics) mainly concern the study of human action.
  • "The belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry",
    psychological [and spiritual] dimensions of experience".[17][18] Tom Sorell provides this definition: "Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture."[19] Philosophers such as Alexander Rosenberg have also adopted "scientism" as a name for the opinion that science is the only reliable source of knowledge.[20]

It is also sometimes used to describe the universal applicability of the scientific method, and the opinion that

factual knowledge and, in particular, that they alone can yield true knowledge about man and society".[21] The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism with respect to all topics of human knowledge.[22][23][24][25][26]

For

essayist, wrote in his 1951 essay Hombres y engranajes ("Man and mechanism") of the "superstition of science" as the most contradictory of all superstitions,[28] since this would be the "superstition that one should not be superstitious". He wrote: "science had become a new magic and the man in the street believed in it the more the less he understood it".[28]

Definitions

Reviewing the references to scientism in the works of contemporary scholars in 2003, Gregory R. Peterson[29] detected two main general themes:

  • It is used to criticize a totalizing opinion of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true method to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things;
  • It is used, often pejoratively,[30][31][32] to denote violations by which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are applied inappropriately to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. An example of this second usage is to term as scientism any attempt to claim science as the only or primary source of human values (a traditional domain of ethics) or as the source of meaning and purpose (a traditional domain of religion and related worldviews).

The term scientism was popularized by

F. A. Hayek, who defined it in 1942 as the "slavish imitation of the method and language of Science".[33]

epistemological validity of feelings and experiences such as love, emotion, beauty and fulfillment.[34] He predicted that "in coming years, the chief political dividing line will fall less and less among the traditional division between 'right' and 'left', but increasingly between the adherents of scientism, who advocate 'technological progress at any price', and their opponents, i.e., roughly speaking, those who regard the enhancement of life, in all its richness and variety, as being the supreme value".[34]

Descartes, assumed that those things that could be weighed, measured, and counted were more true than those that could not be quantified. If it couldn't be counted, in other words, it didn't count."[35]

In 1979, Karl Popper defined scientism as "the aping of what is widely mistaken for the method of science".[36]

In 2003,

myth of progress.[38]

Intellectual historian

Sam Harris, and writer Malcolm Gladwell.[40][41][42]

Strong and weak scientism

There are various ways of classifying kinds of scientism.[2][43] Some authors distinguish between strong and weak scientism, as follows:

Relevance to debates about science and religion

Both religious and non-religious scholars have applied the term scientism to individuals associated with

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by saying that accusations of scientism "[are] an all-purpose, wild-card smear ... When someone puts forward a scientific theory that [religious critics] really don't like, they just try to discredit it as 'scientism'. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town".[54]

Non-religious scholars have also associated New Atheist thought with scientism and/or with positivism. Atheist philosopher

Agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny has also criticized New Atheist philosopher Alexander Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality for resurrecting a self-refuting epistemology of logical positivism and reducing all knowledge of the universe to the discipline of physics.[57]

Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, discussed resemblances between scientism and traditional religions, indicating the cult of personality that develops for some scientists. He defined scientism as a worldview that encompasses natural explanations, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason.[58]

The Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr has stated that in the Western world, many will accept the ideology of modern science, not as "simple ordinary science", but as a replacement for religion.[59][page needed]

Gregory R. Peterson wrote that "for many theologians and philosophers, scientism is among the greatest of intellectual sins".

Genetic biologist Austin L. Hughes wrote in the conservative journal The New Atlantis that scientism has much in common with superstition: "the stubborn insistence that something ... has powers which no evidence supports."[60]

Repeating common criticisms of logical positivism and

self-refuting, as the truth of the two statements "no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically (or logically)" and "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true" cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.[61][62]

Philosophy of science

Main article: Philosophy of science

Anti-scientism

Philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who was an enthusiastic proponent of scientism during his youth,[63] later came to characterize science as "an essentially anarchic enterprise"[64] and argued emphatically that science merits no exclusive monopoly of "dealing in knowledge" and that scientists have never operated within a distinct and narrowly self-defined tradition. In his essay Against Method he depicted the process of contemporary scientific education as a mild form of indoctrination, intended for "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rules".[65]

[S]cience can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from

Marxists and similar religious movements; and ... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science ... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.

— Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, p. viii[66]

Pro-scientism

Physicist and philosopher

obscurantists
:

To innovate in the young sciences it is necessary to adopt scientism. This is the methodological thesis that the best way of exploring reality is to adopt the scientific method, which may be boiled down to the rule "Check your guesses." Scientism has been explicitly opposed by dogmatists and obscurantists of all stripes, such as the neoliberal ideologist Friedrich von Hayek and the "critical theorist" Jürgen Habermas, a ponderous writer who managed to amalgamate Hegel, Marx, and Freud, and decreed that "science is the ideology of late capitalism."

— Mario Bunge, Evaluating Philosophies[73]

In 2018, philosophers Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci co-edited a book titled Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism in which a number of chapters by philosophers and scientists defended scientism.[74] In his chapter "Two Cheers for Scientism", Taner Edis wrote:

It is defensible to claim that scientific, philosophical, and humanistic forms of knowledge are continuous, and that a broadly naturalistic description of our world centered on natural science is correct ... At the very least, such views are legitimate—they may be mistaken, but not because of an elementary error, a confusion of science with ideology, or an offhand dismissal of the humanities. Those of us who argue for such a view are entitled to have two cheers for an ambitious conception of science; and if that is scientism, so be it.

— Taner Edis, "Two Cheers for Scientism"[74]

Rhetoric of science

Main article: Rhetoric of science

Thomas M. Lessl argued that religious themes persist in what he terms scientism, the

ontological method (that the rational mind represents the world and both operate in knowable ways). According to Lessl, the ontological method is an attempt to "resolve the conflict between rationalism and skepticism". Lessl also argued that without scientism, there would not be a scientific culture.[75]

Rationalization and modernity

See also: Rationalization (sociology) and Antipositivism § Frankfurt School

In the introduction to his collected works on the

secular societies and capitalism.[76]

"Modernization" was introduced as a technical term only in the 1950s. It is the mark of a theoretical approach that takes up Weber's problem but elaborates it with the tools of social-scientific

postmodern" developments would have to set in. ... Indeed it is precisely modernization research that has contributed to the currency of the expression "postmodern" even among social scientists.

— Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Habermas is critical of pure

instrumental rationality, arguing that the "Social Life–World" of subjective experiencing is better suited to literary expression, whereas the sciences deal with "intersubjectively accessible experiences" that can be generalized in a formal language, while the literary arts "must generate an intersubjectivity of mutual understanding in each concrete case".[77][78] Habermas quoted writer Aldous Huxley
in support of this duality of literature and science:

The world with which literature deals is the world in which human beings are born and live and finally die; the world in which they love and hate, in which they experience triumph and humiliation, hope and despair; the world of sufferings and enjoyments, of madness and common sense, of silliness, cunning and wisdom; the world of social pressures and individual impulses, of reason against passion, of instincts and conventions, of shared language and unsharable feelings and sensations...

— Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science

See also

References

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    . Scientism is the thesis that all cognitive problems are best tackled by adopting the scientific approach, also called 'the scientific attitude' and 'the scientific method.' While most contemporary philosophers reject scientism, arguably scientists practice it even if they have never encountered the word.
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    . As for scientism, I take it to be quite different from Tennessen's 'belief in some sort of scientific world view miraculously emanating from the main bulk of the testimony of the senses or so-called scientific results.' The brand of scientism I defend boils down to the thesis that scientific research (rather than the navel contemplation or the reading of sacred texts) can yield the best (truest and deepest) possible knowledge of real (concrete, material) things, be they fields or particles, brains, or societies, or what have you. ... I take the scientific method, rather than any special results of scientific research, to be the very kernel of scientism. Consequently, I cannot accept Tennessen's implicit approval of Feyerabend's antimethodology or 'epistemological anarchism'—the latest version of radical skepticism.
  72. Council for Secular Humanism: 24–31. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on 2019-09-18. Retrieved 2019-09-19. Scientism is the thesis that all cognitive problems concerning the world are best tackled adopting the scientific approach, also called 'the spirit of science' and 'the scientific attitude'. While most contemporary philosophers reject scientism, arguably scientists practice it even if they have never encountered the word. However, the correct meaning of 'scientism' has proved to be even more elusive than that of 'science'...
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Bibliography

External links

Look up scientism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.