Science is unquestionably the most powerful approach humanity has developed so far to the understanding of the natural world. There is little point in arguing about the spectacular successes of fundamental physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, and countless other fields of scientific inquiry. Indeed, if you do, you risk to quickly slide into self-contradictory epistemic relativism or even downright pseudoscience.
That said, there is a pernicious and increasingly influential strand of thought these days — normally referred to as “scientism” — which is not only a threat to every other discipline, including philosophy, but risks undermining the credibility of science itself. In these days of crisis in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences, it is crucial to distinguish valid from ill-founded criticism of any academic effort, revisiting once more what C.P. Snow famously referred to as the divide between “the two cultures.”
First off, what is scientism, exactly? Sometimes it pays to go back to the basics, in this case to the Merriam-Webster concise definition: “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).” But surely this is a straw man. Who really fits that description? Plenty of prominent and influential people, as it turns out. Let me give you a few examples:
Author Sam Harris, when he argues that science can by itself provide answers to moral questions and that philosophy is not needed. (e.g., “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ [etc.] … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”)
Science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson (and physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, science educator Bill Nye, among others), when he declares philosophy useless to science (or “dead,” in the case of Hawking). (e.g., “My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?” —N. deGrasse Tyson; also: “I think therefore I am. What if you don’t think about it? You don’t exist anymore? You probably still exist.” —B. Nye).
Any number of neuroscientists when they seem to believe that “your brain on X” provides the ultimate explanation for whatever X happens to be.
Science popularizer Richard Dawkins, when he says “science” disproves the existence of God (while deploying what he apparently does not realize are philosophical arguments informed by science).
A number of evolutionary psychologists (though not all of them!) when they make claims that go well beyond the epistemic warrant of the evidence they provide. Literature scholars (and biologists like E.O. Wilson) when they think that an evolutionary, data-driven approach tells us much that is insightful about, say, Jane Austen.
The list could go on, for quite a bit. Of course, we could have reasonable discussions about any individual entry above, but I think the general pattern is clear enough. Scientism is explicitly advocated by a good number of scientists (predictably), and even some philosophers. A common line of defense is that the term should not even be used because it is just a quick way for purveyors of fuzzy religious and pseudoscientific ideas to dismiss anyone who looks critically at their claims.
This is certainly the case. But it is no different from the misuse of other words, such as “pseudoscience” itself, or “skepticism” (in the modern sense of a critical analysis of potentially unfounded claims). Still, few people would reasonably argue that we should stop using a perfectly valid word just because it is abused by ideologically driven groups. If that were being the case, the next version of the Merriam-Webster would be pretty thin…
Philosopher of science Susan Haack has proposed an influential list of six signs of scientistic thinking, which — with some caveats and modifications — can be usefully deployed in the context of this discussion.
The first sign is when words like “science” and “scientific” are used uncritically as honorific terms of epistemic praise. For instance, in advertisement: “9 out of 10 dentists recommend brand X.” More ominously, when ethically and scientifically ill-founded notions, such as eugenics, gain a foothold in society because they are presented as “science.” Let us not forget that between 1907 and 1963, 64,000 American citizens were forcibly sterilized because of eugenic laws.
The second of Haack’s signs is the adoption of the manners and terminology of science regardless of whether they are useful or not. My favorite example is a famous paper published in 2005 in American Psychologist by Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada. They claimed — “scientific” data in hand — that the ratio of positive to negative emotions necessary for human flourishing is exactly 2.9013 to 1. Such precision ought to be suspicious at face value, even setting aside that the whole notion of the existence of an ideal, universal ratio of positive to negative emotions is questionable in the first place. Sure enough, a few years later, Nicholas Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman published a scathing rebuttal of the Fredrickson-Losada paper, tellingly entitled “The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio.” Unfortunately, the original paper is still far more cited than the rebuttal.
Third, scientistically-oriented people tend to display an obsession with demarcating science from pseudoscience. Here I think Haack is only partially correct, as my observation is rather that scientistic thinking results in an expansion of the very concept of “science”, almost making it equivalent with rationality itself. It is only as a byproduct that pseudoscience is demarcated from science, and moreover, a lot of philosophy and other humanistic disciplines tend to be cast as “pseudoscience” if they somehow dare assert even a partial independence from the natural sciences. This, of course, is nothing new, and amounts to a 21st century (rather naive) version of logical positivism:
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express — that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false. — A.J. Ayer (Language, Truth, and Logic)
The fourth sign of scientism has to do with a preoccupation with identifying a scientific method to demarcate science from other activities. A good number of scientists, especially those writing for the general public, seem blissfully unaware of decades of philosophical scholarship questioning the very idea of the scientific method. When we use that term, do we refer to inductivism, deductivism, adbuctivism, Bayesianism, or what?
The philosophical consensus seems to be that there is no such thing as a single, well-identified scientific method, and that the sciences rely instead on an ever-evolving toolbox, which moreover is significantly different between, say, ahistorical (physics) and historical (evolutionary biology) sciences, or between the natural and social sciences.
Here too, however, the same problem that I mentioned above recurs: contra Haack, proponents of scientism do not seem to claim that there is a special scientific method, but on the contrary, that science is essentially co-extensive with reason itself. Once again, this isn’t a philosophically new position:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion — David Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding).
Both Ayer’s verifiability criterion and Hume’s fork suffer from serious philosophical problems, of course, but to uncritically deployed them as a blunt instrument against in defense of scientism is simply a result of willful and abysmal illiteracy.
Next to last, comes an attitude that seeks to deploy science to answer questions beyond its scope. It seems to me that it is exceedingly easy to come up with questions that either science is wholly unequipped to answer, or for which it can at best provide a (welcome!) degree of relevant background knowledge. I will leave it to colleagues in other disciplines to arrive at their own list, but as far as philosophy is concerned, the following list is just a start:
- In metaphysics: what is a cause?
- In logic: is modus ponens a type of valid inference?
- In epistemology: is knowledge “justified true belief”?
- In ethics: is abortion permissible once the fetus begins to feel pain?
- In aesthetics: is there a meaningful difference between Mill’s “low” and “high”
pleasures? - In philosophy of science: what role does genetic drift play in the logical structure of
evolutionary theory? - In philosophy of mathematics: what is the ontological status of mathematical objects, such as numbers?
The scientific literature on all the above is basically non-existent, while the philosophical one is huge. None of the above questions admits of answers arising from systematic observations or experiments. While empirical notions may be relevant to some of them (e.g., the one on abortion), it is philosophical arguments that provide the suitable approach.
Lastly, a sixth sign of scientism is the denial or denigration of the usefulness of nonscientific activities, particularly within the humanities. Saying that philosophy is “useless” because it doesn’t contribute to solving scientific problems (deGrasse Tyson, Hawking, Krauss, Nye), betrays a fundamental misunderstanding (and let’s be frank, simple ignorance) of what philosophy is. Ironically, the scientistic take could be turned on its head: on what empirical grounds, for instance, can we arrive at the value judgment that cosmology is “more important” than literature? Is the only thing that matters the discovery of facts about the natural world? Why? And while we are at it, why exactly do we take for granted that money spent on a new particle accelerator shouldn’t be spent on, say, cancer research? I’m not advocating such a position, I am simply pointing out that there is no scientific evidence that could settle the matter, and that scientistically-inclined writers tend, as Daniel Dennett famously said in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, to take on board a lot of completely unexamined philosophical baggage.
In the end, it all comes down to what we mean by “science.” Perhaps we can reasonably agree that this is a classic example of a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” concept, i.e., something that does not have precise boundaries, nor is it amenable to a precise definition in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. But as a scientist and a philosopher of science, I tend to see “science” as an evolving beast, historically and culturally situated, similar to the in-depth analysis provided by Helen Longino in her book, Science as Social Knowledge.
Science is a particular ensemble of epistemic and social practices — including a more or less faulty system of peer review, granting agencies, academic publications, hiring practices, and so on. This is different from “science” as it was done by Aristotle, or even by Galileo. There is a continuity, of course, between its modern incarnation and its historical predecessors, as well as between it and other fields (mathematics, logic, philosophy, history, and so forth).
But when scientistic thinkers pretend that any human activity that has to do with reasoning about facts is “science” they are attempting a bold move of naked cultural colonization, defining everything else either out of existence or into irrelevance. When I get up in the morning and go to work at City College in New York I take a bus and a subway. I do so on the basis of my empirical knowledge of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority system, which results — you could say — from years of “observations” and “experiments,” aimed at testing “hypotheses” about the system and its functionality. If you want to call that science, fine, but you end up sounding pretty ridiculous. And you are doing no favor to real science either.
Massimo Pigliucci
Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books includeHow to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life(Basic Books),A Handbook for New Stoics: How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control (The Experiment, with Gregory Lopez),andHow to Live a Good Life(Vintage, co-edited with Skye Cleary and Dan Kaufman). Check out more from Massimo atmassimopigliucci.wordpress.com.
I think I’d prefer the term to be ‘scientificism’ as then a proponent of scientificism would be a ‘scientificist’ as opposed to a proponent of scientism being a scientist…
Scientism is a much cleaner term. There is little need for a noun Descriptor of a person who exhibits it because there is virtually no person who expounds, overtly adheres, or self defines as a Scientism-ist. I think we can safely refer to someone falling into it with a little more distance than “scientificist.”
No it’s not “cleaner” because it is misleading as it falsely encourages confusion between a follower of scientism and a scientist (the idea that such a person would be called a scientismist is ridiculous and contrary o linguistic convention). If you wanted something shorter than scientificism the natural choice is sciencism with the believer being called a sciencist.
It would be better we judge Science by the ‘ universal’ premise she keeps,that the ‘whole’ that exists is a physical whole, irrespective of her different methods. All her rest inferences,methods etc will be consistent with the said ‘universal’ premise as she can’t be illogical. Love to share the following blog that explains this stand in more detail: http://argumentsagainstscientificpositivism.blogspot.in/2014/05/thescientific-explanation-of-reality.html?m=1
I reasonably agree that science is a “family resemblance” concept.
Perhaps we can also reasonable agree that science is the collection of scientific claims.
And that a scientist is someone who makes a scientific claim.
Put like that, there is a “family resemblance” with scientism.
Scientism is the collection of scientistic claims.
And a scientistic is someone who makes a scientistic claim.
The problem with these propositions is the lack of evolvement.
A thief is someone who commits theft. But I can’t imagine a person who is constantly stealing. So, it’s more appropriate to state that a person is a thief “when” he is stealing, and only when he is stealing.
In analogy one might say that the proposition “Author Sam Harris is a scientistic, “when” he argues that science can by itself provide answers to moral questions and that philosophy is not needed”, is a scientific claim. However, the question arises if this proposition offers enough evolvement. Or, as a matter of fact, the question arises if there isn’t too much evolvement involved. Too much evolvement might change the scientific claim into a relativistic claim. When is there enough evolvement in a proposition to call it a scientific claim and not a scientistic claim. And when is there too much evolvement in a proposition to call it a scientific claim and not a relativistic claim?
I don’t agree with Sam Harris, but I have a great admiration for his guts. His guts to give his central argument.
“Here it is: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.”
I do wonder whether you call this central argument “scientism”.
And I eat his hat if your co-editor calls this central argument “scientism”.
I take a different view. Scientism is, for me, extreme reductionism. It boils down to the notion of complete bottom up explanations, starting with sub-atomic particles and forces. I feel this ignores the mystery of consciouisness, the famous “hard problem”, the great emergent property that we cannot explain.
There is no question that one can skip this problem, and use the scientific method for issues of psychology, or sociology or political science or ethics. And do this productively. I feel it is arrogance to think that one day we’ll understand consciousness, so we can skip over it for now.
Take, for example, the aesthetic experience of literature or art. We may identify the exact components that lead to this experience, but is not the subjective state of the experience. This is analgous to figuring out, perfectly, the neural correlates of consciousness, thinking this explains the subjective state of consciousness. It doesn’t and wont.
I feel that the characteristics of scientism, described above, are likely solid correlates of scientism, but they are not the root.
My thoughts arise from the Pinker-Weisentaller debates from a few years ago. This led a philsopher to suggest reading Dilthey. Dilthey nails it. As do some great thinkers of the 19th century such as Von Helmholtz.
Good stuff. I would add, even if the factors leading to an enjoyable art experience could be scientifically teased out… they change! And that’s the whole problem with Scientism. Like a marketing company claiming they know scientifically what motivates purchases, they may have some clues… but they are not looking at a scientific question, they’re looking at a cultural question.
I always thought Hume’s passage was a self-refutation gag – similar to “This statement is false.”
Without trying to marginalize his older comments concerning the role of philosophy, I’d like to push back a little bit about Bill Nye. He has, it seems, come around significantly concerning the importance of philosophy to science. I find this coming-around significant and worthy of note given the context of the current discussion. Indeed, it seems one root of scientism is little more than pure ignorance about philosophy. https://qz.com/960303/bill-nye-on-philosophy-the-science-guy-says-he-has-changed-his-mind/
Scientism would seem to have the value of providing considerable insight in to the processes of religion, particularly for those for whom experiencing religion is not an option.
Birds fly, fish swim, and human know. It’s in our nature to want to know everything, however distant and seemingly out of reach. As “knowers” we require a reference to some trusted authority, some methodology which we consider reliable.
We vary considerably in our relationship with our chosen authority.
Some of us hold our chosen authority loosely, using it where it is qualified, and setting it aside where it is not. So for instance, a Christian might use the Bible to define their relationship with reality, but not as a car repair manual.
Others of us cling to our chosen authorities tightly much as a small child might cling to their parent’s hand, needing to feel that their chosen authority is an all powerful force which can shelter and protect them in any circumstance, that is, a “one true way”.
The followers of scientism seem to me to be religious fundamentalists who can no longer believe in religion, so they aim their emotional need for a “one true way” in a different direction. This is likely not a popular theory with such true believers, but it is does offer at least a few of them the opportunity to better understand that which they so ardently reject, religious faith. We can best understand what’s happening in others by finding that same thing within ourselves.
Religious faith, like scientism, arises from a strong need to know what the rule book of our experience is. And that strong need arises from a very understandable desire to be safe, that is, it arises from fear.
And fear arises from the nature of thought itself, which is why those who on the surface may appear to be so very different can, just below the surface, be so very similar.
[…] APA Blog: The Problem with Scientism […]
Science is a branch of History, just as the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, claimed that Mathematics is a branch of Poetry, both with stricter rules. Thus Ortega claimed that the most sophisticated science is Etymology: the determination that one word is “derived” from another.
In case you missed this: https://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/one-philosophers-view-of-random-genetic.html?showComment=1518463621780#c3633580149962372553
I commented, as did another reader that Moran is confusing theory with logical structure of theory and added (on FaceBook) that he has thus unwittingly showing why scientists need philosophers
Moran writes, “He (Pigliucci) is mostly upset about the fact that science as a way of knowing is extraordinarily successful whereas philosophy isn’t producing many results.”
The unexamined assumption behind this statement seems to be that being extraordinarily successful at developing knowledge is automatically a good thing, and that all methodologies should therefore be measured against this standard. If we add to this assumption a healthy measure of adamant “one true wayism” it seems we arrive at scientism.
The problem here is that while it was true that a “more is better” relationship with knowledge was an entirely rational paradigm in a long historical era characterized by knowledge scarcity, it doesn’t automatically follow that a “more is better” relationship with knowledge is therefore also ideal in an era characterized by a knowledge explosion.
As example, a “more is better” relationship with food made perfect sense in the long era when humanity routinely lived on the edge of starvation. It makes far less sense in an era when food is abundant, and more of us (in the developed world at least) are dying from obesity related diseases than starvation.
The spectacular success of science has created a radically different new environment which we are now required to adapt to, like it or not. Successful adaptation will require more sophisticated thinking than an attempt to meet the 21st century with 19th century assumptions.
The problem of your reasoning regarding scarcity vs abundance is that the factor of “quality” and “quality assessment” are crucial on what you consume, the concept itself of knowledge and food as elements of your own, assets nonetheless which implies administration… hence philosophical reasoning, as it’s the only thing that allows us to sort through life and how to engage with it.
I personally consider “science” as a deformed and abused term used to describe anything minimally systematic within what we could consider “technology” which implies repeatability and production, a ghost from the industrial revolution I guess. Either way, I consider science as philosophy and very related to the original concept of mathematics… thus esoteric and mysterious in its basis, intimately related to metaphysics and epistemology: which apparently is not the case nowadays. It’s used today in the name of obscurantism.
I think all of this fails to factor in that, a) at least to this point, relying on the scientific method has been the only almost perfect way (when used properly) of determining reality and figuring out what is and isn’t true and b) everything that we’ve discovered by using the scientific method has come entirely from natural phenomenon, including things like religious experiences, NDEs, and the whole of the Universe. When people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins talk about science like they do, what they are saying must be interpreted through a lens of everything we’ve ever discovered being natural and science, when it’s done properly, being able to successfully test natural things and thus, being able to give us correct answers to most everything. Taken in this context, Harris and Dawkins are only saying what the evidence appears to support.
“everything we’ve ever discovered being natural”
But it isn’t. We’ve discovered many unnatural things. For example, accounting techniques, modes of governance, and principles of modern morality. We know that these things in our culture are neither science nor religion, but a third type of knowledge that might be called “civics”. Yet I’ve never seen any serious attempt to identify the civic rules of cultures far from ours.
Civic complaints from indigenous groups are routinely misrepresented in religious or pseudo-scientific terms, with disastrous results. For example the Dakota Access Pipeline, which should have been a simple case of a business defacing private land — and thus clearly flat-out wrong on many levels, became a toothless issue of faith and culture-war.
People like Harris and Dawkins are rightly criticized, for failing to disentangle the pursuit of science itself, from the pursuit of political and professional strategies to promote and safeguard it in Western culture. Rather than let them off the hook, we need to realize that every culture has its own version of this dilemma.
Science, when done correctly, is worldwide knowledge. Religion and civics, when done correctly, are specific to individual cultures. All three of these need to be demarcated, and science needs to be respectfully “federalized” over the other two.
There are several aspects of your argument that I find fallacious.
Your argument overlooks the limitations of the scientific method, assumes a naturalistic bias, restricts interpretations of evidence, and oversimplifies the complexity of reality.
The scientific method is a valuable tool for studying the natural world, but it has limitations. It focuses mainly on observable and testable phenomena within the physical and natural sciences. However, it may not address aspects of reality like subjective experiences, consciousness, and metaphysical questions.
Subjective experiences, consciousness, and metaphysical questions are outside science’s realm. That’s within the philosophical realm.
You suggest that scientific evidence must align with a naturalistic worldview. However, interpretations of scientific findings can be influenced by biases, assumptions, and paradigms.
It’s critical to approach scientific conclusions with an open mind and critically evaluate underlying assumptions and biases.
You also simplified the complexity of reality by assuming that science can provide all the answers. Reality encompasses a wide range of phenomena and questions that may require interdisciplinary approaches and multiple perspectives to fully understand.
For example, subjective experiences, consciousness, morality, and meaning, may require additional frameworks beyond the scientific method to explore their significance.
I am now a retired “scientist”. I specialized in several different biochemical physiological fields and I always thought of my published work as “scientific” i.e. it followed the “scientific method”, which I took to mean observe, verify, explain and test whether new predictions of the explanation turned out to be what was predicted, to simplify a complex process. A major technique is to reduce your test of the prediction to a change in only one variable in a control experiment. My view is that this method is the best way of obtaining knowledge about the observable world but practically has limited application. This excludes many of the things we need to explain so we can come up with the best answer of how to act. Would anyone suggest that we should not make any of the decisions we need to make as a society unless we can make them according to the scientific method? Under that condition we could not make any such decisions at all! Is this scientism? Reading all the above and elsewhere I am not sure.
Hello Harold!
I have to believe there are indeed people who would assert the scientific method is the only rational choice. As you point out, this does not appear realistic.
To determine whether the word “scientism” properly applies, we need to select a method of evaluation. From a pragmatic perspective: What do we hope to gain by an ideal answer to whether the “science-only decision” belief constitutes scientism?
Harold Kimelberg:
Here’s a simple way to understand it:
Everything we can count may not “count” as important; and we can’t count everything that “counts.”
what makes a view “scientistic” is the view that a strictly quantitative method is sufficient for knowledge of all things. Implied in this view is that there is nothing worth knowing that cannot be known by the quantitative method.
The list that the author gave consists of questions that cannot be known by the quantitative method, all of which are important questions:
In metaphysics: what is a cause?
In logic: is modus ponens a type of valid inference?
In epistemology: is knowledge “justified true belief”?
In ethics: is abortion permissible once the fetus begins to feel pain?
In aesthetics: is there a meaningful difference between Mill’s “low” and “high”
pleasures?
In philosophy of science: what role does genetic drift play in the logical structure of
evolutionary theory?
In philosophy of mathematics: what is the ontological status of mathematical objects, such as numbers?
Finally, a brief anecdote might make it even simpler. The religious scholar Huston Smith taught at MIT for some years. One day, he was speaking with a scientist who taught there. They were having a light, breezy conversation, trying to identify precisely what it was that distinguished the humanities from science.
Finally, the scientist – apparently unaware of the double meaning of what he was saying – exclaimed, “I know. I count and you don’t.”
I worked as a research engineer at one of the nation’s largest, most scientifically and commercially successful laboratories in the world. It was an environment that had produced more than one Nobel prize, the first transistor, and the first integrated circuit, among many, many other life-changing developments that affected every single living thing on this planet – and that is only the record during my short tenure there. I say it not to impress you, because you would have to be an idiot not to be impressed by these accomplishments, but to remind you how little religion and philosophy had anything to do with any of those accomplishments.
No one was asking if there was a Christian transistor, or if the discovery of evidence for the Big Bang would offend the sensibilities of a philosopher of science closeted somewhere in academia. I truly want you to understand that when thousands of engineers and scientists are working together to solve some very large problem, none of them are doing scientism, they are doing science. Any individual scientist may indeed be an opinionated twit, but that isn’t science. Her hubris is not science.
My first executive director was a holocaust survivor – in the summer you could see the number tattooed on his forearm – but that never came up in our discussions of the problems of digital telephony, nor should it have, because it is simply irrelevant to those problems. Science has accepted that the universe does not care about what you think it should be, it just is, whether we observe it accurately or have completely mischaracterized it. Science attempts to model our understanding of it on evidence, but fully realizes that models are contingent upon, and subordinate to, the actual workings of the universe. And that right there is what you are calling scientism — the belief in an objective reality.
I often use the microwave oven to illustrate my point. Does it harbor a demon who hates cold coffee? Maybe so, but you couldn’t ever construct one on the premise of demonology, as it requires knowledge of electromagnetic field theory to do that. Consider also that the microwave oven does not require your philosophical or religious consent – or even your understanding of it – for you to operate it. It operates just as well when an animist tribesman fresh from the Amazon pushes the button as when a plasma physicist does it. In some parts of academia, that claim is epistemological arrogance. Meh.
Yell at me on your Apple Iphones and fancy computers, your vitriol coursing through the algorithms and applied quantum theory that allow me to see your plaintiff cries. Booo hoooo. The seventies brought to fruition an era of epistemological nihilism that was anti-science with a religious axe to grind. Despite protestations here that science is winning that war, I disagree. Every day I see science denigrated as opinion or as the untrustworthy religion of the elites. This from a generation for whom a significant number believe in the UFO origin of crop-circles and even believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Thank you, philosophy, for giving them permission to do so without embarrassment.
Science isn’t a panacea, as it can’t by its nature even believe that about itself and still be science. The main crime of the scientist is technology. In a world that undeniably is more reliant each day upon that technology, we see the damaging effects of technology all of the time. It is no wonder that all have our reservations about moral progress. Yet, science is so hard-wired into the brains of us humans that no matter what, it will get done, and because the results are so powerful there will always be those ready to monetize what it finds.
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One thing I often find omitted in these discussions, which I would like you, Massimo, to expand on, is how many things in our lives through which we both learn and generate new knowledge are rather art than science. In fact, one of the most famous books on electronics, a subject that heavily relies on physics, is called ‘The Art of Electronics’ (by Horowitz and Hill) for good reasons. Even the very techniques we use when performing experiments and being inventive with making new engineering designs or scientific theories can rather be described as art than some organized and coherent principles stemming from a scientific theory.
Yes! My only quarrel with your comment is the reference to “rather art than science”. Science is an art – or a family of related arts. The art of identifying a theory, the art of designing appropriate experiments to test that theory, and the art of making practical applications of that theory – these are all aspects of science.
[…] what is being pushed as science in the public square is actually barely disguised scientism. Go here to read about scientism. When a method to discover facts about the natural world becomes an idol […]
A method to discover facts about nature has become an idol.
If we must have an idol, we could do worse than one that’s self-correcting, fact-revealing, inclusive, unifying, truth-seeking, constantly expanding, independently & objectively verifiable and progressively improving in scope, detail, and beneficial value…as far as I can tell, based on my current understanding.