Scientism
Scientism is the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
While the term was defined originally to mean "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to natural scientists", some scholars, as well as political and 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 ".
Overview
has been viewed by some scholars as an early proponent of scientism, but this is a modern assertion as Bacon was a devout 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."With respect to the philosophy of science, the term scientism frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek, philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, and philosophers such as Mary Midgley, the later Hilary Putnam, and Tzvetan Todorov to describe the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methods and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measured or confirmatory.
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. This usage applies equally in contexts where science might not apply, 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 as being impossible, because those methods attempt to eliminate the "human factor", while social sciences 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", or that "science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective" with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological dimensions of experience". 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." Philosophers such as Alexander Rosenberg have also adopted "scientism" as a name for the opinion that science is the only reliable source of knowledge.
For social theorists practising the tradition of Max Weber, such as Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer, the concept of scientism relates significantly to the philosophy of positivism, but also to the cultural rationalization for modern Western civilization. Ernesto Sabato, physicist and essayist, wrote in his 1951 essay Hombres y engranajes of the "superstition of science" as the most contradictory of all superstitions, 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".
Definitions
Reviewing the references to scientism in the works of contemporary scholars in 2003, Gregory R. Peterson 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, to denote violations by which the theories and methods of one discipline are applied inappropriately to another 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 or as the source of meaning and purpose.
Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, in his 1971 essay "The New Universal Church", characterized scientism as a religion-like ideology that advocates scientific reductionism, scientific authoritarianism, political technocracy and technological salvation, while denying the epistemological validity of feelings and experiences such as love, emotion, beauty and fulfillment. 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".
E. F. Schumacher, in his A Guide for the Perplexed, criticized scientism as an impoverished world view confined solely to what can be counted, measured and weighed. "The architects of the modern worldview, notably Galileo and 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."
In 1979, Karl Popper defined scientism as "the aping of what is widely mistaken for the method of science".
In 2003, Mikael Stenmark proposed the expression scientific expansionism as a synonym of scientism. In the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, he wrote that, while the doctrines that are described as scientism have many possible forms and varying degrees of ambition, they share the idea that the boundaries of science could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science. According to Stenmark, the strongest form of scientism states that science does not have any boundaries and that all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor, with due time, will be dealt with and solved by science alone. This idea has also been termed the myth of progress.
Intellectual historian T. J. Jackson Lears argued in 2013 that there has been a recent reemergence of "nineteenth-century positivist faith that a reified 'science' has discovered all the important truths about human life. Precise measurement and rigorous calculation, in this view, are the basis for finally settling enduring metaphysical and moral controversies." Lears specifically identified Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's work as falling in this category. Philosophers John N. Gray and Thomas Nagel have made similar criticisms against popular works by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, atheist author Sam Harris, and writer Malcolm Gladwell.
Strong and weak scientism
There are various ways of classifying kinds of scientism. Some authors distinguish between strong and weak scientism, as follows:- : "of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the only 'real knowledge'", or, "the view that some proposition or theory is true and/or rational to believe if and only if it is a scientific proposition or theory", or, "only science yields epistemically credible data"
- : "of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the best knowledge", or, "science is the most valuable, most serious, and most authoritative sector of human learning", or, "scientific knowledge claims are the most credible knowledge claims"
Relevance to debates about science and religion
Both religious and non-religious scholars have applied the term scientism to individuals associated with New Atheism. Theologian John Haught argued that philosopher Daniel Dennett and other New Atheists subscribe to a belief system of scientific naturalism, which includes the dogma that "only nature, including humans and our creations, is real: that God does not exist; and that science alone can give us complete and reliable knowledge of reality." Haught argued that this belief system is self-refuting since it requires its adherents to assent to beliefs that violate its own stated requirements for knowledge. Christian philosopher Peter Williams argued in 2013 that it is only by conflating science with scientism that New Atheists feel qualified to "pontificate on metaphysical issues". Daniel Dennett responded to religious criticism of his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by saying that accusations of scientism " an all-purpose, wild-card smear ... When someone puts forward a scientific theory that 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".Non-religious scholars have also associated New Atheist thought with scientism and/or with positivism. Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that philosopher Sam Harris conflated all empirical knowledge with scientific knowledge. Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton argued that Christopher Hitchens possessed an "old-fashioned scientistic notion of what counts as evidence" that reduces knowledge to what can and cannot be proven by scientific procedure. 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.
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.
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.
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."
Repeating common criticisms of logical positivism and verificationism, philosopher of religion Keith Ward has said that scientism is philosophically inconsistent or even self-refuting, as the truth of the two statements "no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically " and "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true" cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.