What do we talk about when we talk about scientism? Most people who have heard of the term believe it’s something bad, an epistemic sin or affliction we should avoid at all costs. And that is indeed the most common usage of the term. The general gist is that of science overreaching, pushing beyond its proper limits, illegitimately colonizing other fields of inquiry. On the other hand, the word has also been appropriated by some people as a badge of honor, in defiance of its negative connotations. Philosophers like Alex Rosenberg and Don Ross now proudly proclaim to be advocates of “scientism”. Roughly, they believe that science should rule supreme in the realm of knowledge and that there are no “other ways of knowing” apart from science.
This question of scientism and the limits of science was the topic of a volume I put together in 2018 together with Massimo Pigliucci. It contains contributions by both the friends and foes of scientism, and tries to answer the question: what, if any, are the proper limits of science? In our introduction to Science Unlimited?, we distinguished two ways to go about defining “scientism”:
- As a term of abuse similar to “pseudoscience” (pejorative definition). Here scientism is bad by definition, and the relevant question to ask then becomes: what qualifies as “scientism”? Is it a useful term? Is there anything in our modern society that fits the description?
- As an ordinary philosophical position about the scope and purview of the sciences (neutral definition). The question then becomes: is this view defensible or not? Are there any good arguments in its favor?
Now last month I read a clever new paper in Metaphilosophy in defense of scientism, which pursues the second strategy. The Finnish authors, known as the Helsinki Circle, argue in defense of a neutral definition of “scientism”, distinguishing between four different flavors represented by the quadrant below. The four positions follow from two simple choices: either you adopt a narrow or a broad definition of science, and either you believe that science is the only valid source of knowledge or that it is simply the best one available.
Because “scientism” is mostly a bugbear defined by critics, most attention has been focused on the most radical version (upper left corner), which states that the natural sciences are the only valid form of knowledge. This is a pretty extreme view, which would imply that all of the humanities and social sciences are just rubbish. I believe this version of scientism is relatively easy to knock down, but in fact barely anyone holds it, with the notable exception of the philosopher Alex Rosenberg.
The authors want to draw attention to the other three versions of “scientism”, which are more defensible but nonetheless interesting and non-trivial. In the rest of the paper, they discuss how the different interpretations of scientism fare under two lines of criticism: (a) that scientism is self-defeating because the thesis itself cannot be demonstrated by scientific means; (b) that science inevitably relies on non-scientific sources of knowledge, such as metaphysical assumptions or data from our senses.
Foundationalist fallacy
Here I want to focus on the second objection. Does science “presuppose” the existence of an external world, or lawful regularities, or the truth of naturalism, or other metaphysical notions? No it doesn’t. These are merely working hypotheses that are being tested as we go along. They could turn out to be wrong in some respects, but they have served us pretty well thus far. I’ve argued for this position at length myself, in a paper with the neurologist Yon Fishman and earlier with my Ghent colleagues, but here is how the Helsinki Circle makes the case:
“One does not have to assume that science can achieve knowledge of the external world. Science can merely start with the hypothesis that some kind of knowledge could be achievable. For all practical purposes, this hypothesis would merely state that there are at least some regularities to be found. This hypothesis could be tested by simply attempting to obtain empirical knowledge with scientific means. If it is impossible to achieve this kind of knowledge, then the efforts would just be in vain. But hoping that something is the case is not the same as believing that it is the case.”
Second, does the fact that scientists rely on their sense organs invalidate scientism? No. If that constituted a “limit” to science, the question of scientism would become completely trivial. Of course science relies on information acquired through our human senses. In fact, it could not even get off the ground without it. But this sensory input too is being refined and corrected as we go along. Science has developed all sorts of methodological safeguards and corrections to compensate for the biases and foibles of human perception, which have been discovered in their turn through scientific investigation (the Helsinki authors develop some nice analogies with water purification and recycling of garbage here). For example, we adopted the double-blind protocol in medical research once we found out about confirmation bias and the placebo effect.
All these arguments about science being “based” on some extra-scientific assumption or source of knowledge are guilty of what I call the “foundationalist fallacy”. The mistake is to think that knowledge is something that needs to be “grounded” in some solid foundation, and that if this foundation is not completely secure, the whole edifice will collapse. But this metaphor of human knowledge is deeply misguided, and it inevitably leads to infinite regress. Whatever ultimate foundation you come up with, you can always ask the question: what is that foundation based on? It cannot be self-evident, floating in mid-air. This reminds one of the old Hindu cosmology according to which we live on a flat earth supported by four big elephants. Pretty solid, but what are the elephants standing on? On the back of a giant turtle. And that turtle? On the back of an even larger turtle. And so it’s turtles all the way down, ad infinitum.
A better metaphor of human knowledge is that of a large web with many interconnected strands that mutually reinforce each other. The more connections, the more reliable our knowledge. The philosopher Susan Haack compares science to solving a crossword puzzle, in which vertical and horizontal answers intersect and strengthen one another. Naturally, if you want to solve such a puzzle, you have to start somewhere. But that doesn’t mean your first answer will be the “foundation” of all the others. In fact, you can start anywhere. If you’re smart, you start with a pencil first, filling in tentative answers, and then later when you’re more confident you use ink. If you’re stuck somewhere, you can always backtrack and erase some answers. As the authors write, knowledge is not an all-or-nothing, black-or-white affair, despite what the detractors of scientism believe:
“Science is in the business of identifying and distinguishing practices, methods, experiments, instruments, forms of inference, and so forth that do and do not work. It emphasises and refines those that work while weeding out those that do not. In other words, even something with “very little epistemic quality” can be refined to become something of high epistemic quality. Hence, the “it’s all or nothing” reasoning that the critics of scientism so eagerly practise simply does not hold water”
Epistemic opportunism
My only concern with this paper is their notion of “epistemic opportunism” in science, which is the idea that science has no pre-established rules or methods but is open-ended and flexible, incorporating any method that proves reliable. I agree that science takes on board anything that works, but at a certain point this risks trivializing the thesis of “scientism”. Suppose that tomorrow we discover that reading tea leaves really worked, furnishing reliable predictions about future events. Scientists would definitely pay attention and try to figure out what the hell is going on. Perhaps meteorologists would start incorporating tea leaves to their toolbox. But of course that would be a radical departure from science as we know it, and would necessitate a complete overhaul of our scientific worldview. It would be lame to then say: “Scientism is still correct because reading tea leaves is now part of science!”
To make scientism into an interesting, non-trivial thesis, I think we need to add the idea of methodological continuity: all valid ways of knowing are continuous with those of the sciences, and form one seamless web. There are no “other ways of knowing” apart from the ones being used in science (empirical observation and various logical and statistical inferences). Of course, we can still make pragmatic distinctions between institutionalized science and other forms of inquiry. Take an everyday form of knowledge acquisition such as a plumber trying to locate a leak. It would be somewhat strange to call my plumber a “scientist”, but that doesn’t mean that he’s engaged in some “other way of knowing”. If he’s a good plumber, he will rely on the same methods and modes of inference that are found in the scientist’s toolkit: making observations, testing out different hypotheses, using logical inferences, and so on. Needless to say, the background knowledge used by my plumber is also connected to proper scientific knowledge, for example about fluid dynamics. The main difference is that my plumber is working on a relatively mundane and isolated problem (my sink), which is both simple enough to solve on his own, and parochial enough not be of any interest to academic journals. To see what would really constitute a “different way of knowing”, imagine that my plumber started using a dowsing rod or magic crystals to locate the leak. Such methods are radically different from the ones being used in science. But not coincidentally, they are also bunk.
In short, the definition of “scientism” that I would endorse is the following: there are no other ways of knowing apart from those used by the sciences (broadly construed, including history and the humanities). All valid modes of knowing are continuous to each other and rely on pretty much the same methods and modes of inference. If, on the other hand, someone presents us with a method that is completely detached from the ones used in science, like personal intuition or revelation or reading tea leaves, we can be confident that it’s rubbish. As I put it in my chapter for the book:
“If a factual question is answerable at all, it can be answered using methods that are at least continuous with science. If some epistemic enterprise becomes too detached from science, and thus from the rest of the web of knowledge with which science is connected, that usually does not bode well for that enterprise (e.g. theology, analytic metaphysics, phenomenology).”
In any event, the defenders of “other ways of knowing” will have a hard time answering the arguments in this new paper!
Maarten Boudry
Maarten Boudry is a philosopher of science and current holder of the Etienne Vermeersch Chair of Critical Thinking at Ghent University. His most recent book is Science Unlimited? On the Challenges of Scientism, co-edited with Massimo Pigliucci. He published more than 40 papers in academic journals, and several popular books in Dutch on critical thinking, illusions, and moral progress.
Thank you for the helpful article and important points and distinctions you raise. However, being in the arts, I can tell you that this approach to knowledge applied to the creative or interpretive process will not get you very far. This might be far too intuitive for you, perhaps, but there is a genuine type of knowledge, I believe, that is impossible to reduce to scientific reasoning or explanation that the arts revel in. The knowledge necessary to be a great painter, musician, or poet cannot ultimately be taught nor explained in the laboratory. Yes, much of this knowledge is scientific and logical but in no way can it be limited to it. In fact, to produce art that is memorable or endures requires a knowledge that, seems to me, not only defies neat and tidy definitions but goes beyond it. This knowledge resists formulaic categories and must lie somewhere else. It reminds me of Oscar Wildes point, “For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it. The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt itself to the definition.” (Lecture to Art Students)
Building on Jamie Fiste’s note, here are the two points where I think your argument is flawed:
1. First, when you say that almost no one (emically) holds the most radically scientistic perspective (natural sciences are the only way to access real knowledge), I think that’s just not the case, especially since … Flaw 2:
2. Your argument happens at an ideal level. When we get down to earth and into the labs and the research institutes and so on and find ourselves with real, living scientists, … well … the way they go about their work – the imagination of the research questions at hand, the axioms and assumptoin they take as starting points (and then promptly forget having taken) to pursue those questions, the confidence and expansiveness they invest in the results of the results of their (so-constrained) studies and experiments , and so on – begins to look a lot more like the radical form of scientism you suggest no one holds. And then there are the applied hard sciences – think medicine – where the practitioner-scientists effectively discount all knowledge not derived from science. (Think, for example, about the woman in pain who says her back hurts …. ). Here’s where the whole range of the social studies of science come in … and maybe ought to find a way into the philosophy of science … In other words, I don’t think it’s possible or “correct” to address scientism as a purely abstract or ideal question: scientism “becomes a question” because it has real effects in the lived world, and ignoring those aspects of its identity means ignoring “something important” about “it.”
Anyway, thank you for the thinking, and good onward road.
Jamie Fiste wrote:
“The knowledge necessary to be a great painter, musician, or poet cannot ultimately be taught nor explained in the laboratory.”
And yet they teach art in schools, from grade school to colleges and universities. Computers are being taught to create art.
How can art be a different way of knowing, unaccessible to science if it can be reduced to computer code?
What constitutes a “great artist” is a matter of opinion, not fact. There are many, many talented artists, some catch attention of the public often through pure luck or knowing the right people. We can compare the work of Michael Angelo to a Jackson Pollack. What the art world considers a great artist is even more ephemeral than the descriptions of other ways of knowing.
When people talk about a different way of knowing they never seem to be able to focus on exactly what that different way of knowing is. It’s always ephemeral, indescribable, just out of reach of human vocabulary. They can never explain it other than in rather mushy terms.
If there is another way of knowing, how do we know it can’t be described by science in the future as we know more? We haven’t seen any evidence that the human brain works on anything other than physics acting on particles and molecules. Which means any other way of knowing must be subject to the laws of physics and is discoverable by science. Perhaps not now, but perhaps in the future. I write perhaps because just because something is ruled by physics does not mean we can understand it. Particle science may be limited by our ability to build powerful enough particle accelerators to definitely produce evidence that disproves some hypothesis.
Is this in fact another way of knowing if it’s beyond most people except for a few great artists? Is this another way of knowing if everyone has a different outcome in that way of knowing? This is not knowing as we relate knowledge to facts or reproducible experiments. If ten people look at a painting and come to ten different interpretations, I would argue this isn’t knowing. It is as ephemeral as is theology, everyone having their own opinion on what religion is correct and what God is or isn’t.
It may make you feel sad or happy and wonder, but again, it’s all based on physics, particles, molecules and biochemistry and thus within the realm of science to understand.
But can a person explain that way of knowing or are they just justifying rationals for those feeling after the fact? Neuroscience suggests they are and the real reasons for those feelings are buried and likely unknown to the person.
If a person is standing close to an exhaust fan they may experience auditory noises that sound a lot like many people talking. Some people will claim this is evidence of ghosts, others will understand this is a combination of our brain trying to make sense of the noise and the noise that is similar to a murmuring crowd. An artist could reproduce this effect, create different outcomes in other peoples brains through his art, yet it is still an auditory effect.
As art it would be called another way of knowing.
Jimmy Jimmyston,
Don’t forget my sentence immediately after, “Yes, much of this knowledge is scientific and logical but in no way can it be limited to it.” So yes, a certain amount of it can be taught in the same way as any other discipline.
You bring up a lot of points but hopefully this clarification will answer many of them. Being a cellist, I will limit myself to music in my response. What I mean by artistic knowledge – and I’ve been kicking this idea around for some time – is essentially a knowledge of human nature and the creative ability to expresses and/or appeal to that nature in non-verbal ways (again, I am primarily referring to music here). The differences in the musical eras and the corresponding techniques are only differences in tools at the composers’ and musicians’ disposal.
The scientific methods of arriving at knowledge espoused in the article by Boudry assume a basic reliability of language. In my perspective (and it’s basically the same as the 19th century Romantics), language only scratches the surface in it’s ability to expresses the inner life while music is able to get at the heart of things. Music makes a more direct and immediate appeal. This takes knowledge to accomplish both on the part of the composer and the performer; it’s a knowledge of human nature that isn’t arrived at via the traditional method’s used by psychologists or sociologists. Artists don’t collect data and derive theories from it or, to be more rationalist about it, formulate theories from premises and interpret data in light of those theories. Art doesn’t proceed in that way. Yet, it seems to me, that composers and musicians have tremendous insights into what moves people, what appeals to them as beautiful, and what expresses those deep sentiments that fail language. This is genuine knowledge in my book. My main point is that this knowledge is arrived at not through science (even broadly defined) but instinctually or intuitively. The scientific component of a musician’s knowledge (music theory, history) provides the tools but the tools are only as good as the instinctual and intuitive insights.
This has been a discussion in the west at least since the 19th century, during which the Romantics lost faith in Kant’s 18th century rationalism that the world is best understood through language, reason, and logical deduction. Without denying the value of science to come to knowledge, there are aspects of human life that are best understood through art more generally and music particularly. When listening to a Brahms slow movement, for example, I experience a new perspective on myself and my own life – it’s genuine knowledge that cannot be achieved via language (perhaps this is the appeal of music therapy used by some psychologists). That it can’t be explained perfectly in a Kantian sort of way doesn’t particularly concern me.
So hopefully that clarifies what I mean by artistic knowledge. By not addressing your points directly, I hope you don’t understand that as me being dismissive in any way. It just seems to me best to provide a clarification first.
The claim is that scientism is not a self-refuting premise, because the statement ‘only scientific pursuits obtain truth’ can be scientifically evaluated. Or in your words ‘ there are no other ways of knowing apart from those used by the sciences’. Please demonstate. You did attempt to address this, but not scientifically but philosophically:
“A better metaphor of human knowledge is that of a large web with many interconnected strands that mutually reinforce each other.”
This statement lacks scientific proof.