7 ms·

What’s so bad about Scientism?

31 points by aqsalose 10y ago

belovedeagle 10y ago
I didn't read the whole article; I hope to be able to return to it tomorrow. However, from a brief skim, it seems it started out well and then quickly went downhill. A better title might be, "A strawman in defense of Scientism". The gist of it is that the author starts with a decent argument about why philosophers against scientism might want to attack a weaker (i.e., more easily believed/more likely true) version of scientism, since that would give more weight to their arguments. But then the author goes off the rails by choosing to defend that weak version of scientism with some rather silly arguments, essentially arguing that since the term has been redefined, none of the work which has gone before (which has shown that these silly arguments are silly) applies any more.
- aqsalose 10y ago
  I agree that the first part was the strong part of the paper (and was the reason I decided to link it on HN), and e.g. statistics about differing word usage in different fields isn't what I'd call conclusive evidence. But are you postulating that all arguments (for a weaker version of) Scientism (either all arguments there are or even only the all arguments the author presents), are silly? That's something I'd disagree with. For example, while science isn't the perfect process like in the textbooks portrayals, a model that produces testable predictions (and thus can be evaluated) seems the very good way to characterize how we get new knowledge about various phenomena of the world and can convince others that it is knowledge and not just an esteemed opinion. Also the bit "vicious circularity" resonated with me: in my opinion, (looking at what we know of the evolutionary history our species[1]) it's quite reasonable hypothesis that humans could develop logic and mathematics in the first place because of the physical world we observe is regular and predictive enough so that human cognition had a chance to develop. [1] Not in the evo psych sense, just that we descend from the same great-great-*-parents as our cousins (the other) apes, and during the history we ended up being the ones with wider cognitive capabilities. Even though our cousins are relatively bright.
juliangamble 10y ago
Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scie...
- barnabes 10y ago
  The issue, in my eyes anyway, is when the scientific method is used as a hammer; when it's used to crush a debate. Any method, whether scientific, philosophical, spiritual or otherwise should be used to spawn debate, and to contribute to a rich discussion. But science being used to stop debate, used to stop exchange, used to stop meaningful conversation does more harm than good to all involved.
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    The irony is that it took a philosopher to produce a much better defense of scientism than many scientists are capable of.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - carsongross 10y ago
    The issue, in my eyes anyway, is when the scientific method is used as a hammer; when it's used to crush a debate. The scientific method isn't being used to crush debate. It simply isn't being used. What's most responsible for crushing debate today is (empirically false) post-modern social constructionism coupled with female mother/protector ethics. Jordan Peterson is one of the best people on these (and many, many other) topics: https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos
ordbajsare 10y ago
It's pure evil!
dagenleg 10y ago
So that's how intellectual masturbation looks like. It's pretty cute - almost looks like a real paper with proper formatting, citations. There was even an attempt at first-order logic!
flohrian 10y ago
By “scientism,” Pigliucci (2010, p. 235) means, “the intellectual arrogance of some scientists who think that, given enough time and especially financial resources, science will be able to answer whatever meaningful questions we may wish to pose—from a cure for cancer to the elusive equation that will tell us how the laws of nature themselves came about” Hm. Is it possible to construct a (sensible) physical correspondence to the incompleteness theorem or to an undecidable problem?
ericdykstra 10y ago
"Science vs Philosophy" is a misguided debate. The scientific method answers questions about how the world works. Philosophy discusses how best we should act in the world as it is. Do they sometimes try to answer the same questions? Yes, and it's usually in the case where philosophical ideas can be, and have in the past, been the best model for explaining phenomenon that we didn't have the tools to measure with science. Now that that's out of the way... There is, of course, nothing wrong with the scientific method for examining the world, but Scientism has many pitfalls: - Biased scientists that only publish research whose results are favorable to their own idea of the world. - Advocating for blowing up real-life systems in favor of new "scientifically proven" ones, because unintended consequences are a given in complex systems. - "Scientists" promoting their research for their own monetary gain, regardless of known consequences. - A culture where anyone who disagrees with the "general consensus" is labeled as an "idiot," even if they back up their claim with showing flaws in the research process. - Even with good science and valid results, often the recommendation about what to do about the findings is not based in science, but followers of scientism will conflate the two. Anti-scientism is not the same as anti-science.
- mizzao 10y ago
  Given the reproducibility crisis in science (esp. in fields like psychology, where an estimated two-thirds of papers aren't replicable), it's good to be skeptical of new work instead of saying "scientists showed this! now let's redo an entire part of the world". An important real consequence of scientism: the war on fat circa 1960, overconsumption of sugar, and resulting diabetes epidemic. (Spoken as a practicing scientist.)
hutzlibu 10y ago
A little bit of philosophy bashing? Ok, why not, let's start with a old joke from former soviet Eastgermany : A mathematic, a biologist and a physicist are flying in a hot air balloon, but got lost. Then they see a men jogging under them, so they get lower and the biologist shouts to him: "Hey you, where are we?" The man looks up, but does not answer. Then the physicist shouts: "Hey you, can you please tell us, where we are?" Still nothing, but then finally he shouts back: "you are in a hot air balloon!" "Ah, a philosopher" says the mathematician. "How do you know?" ask the others. "Well, a) he took very long for his answer, b) it fits with objective reality and c) it is totally worthless for us." (the main job of the philosophers back then and there was to defend the Marx-Lenin Philosophy to the people, where they tried to prove them, that the people are on the way to the best of every possible society, but people still complained about not having toilet papers) Then a line I remember from Thureau: "We have Professors of Philosophy, but no Philosophers." So, to get more serious and a wildly speculative hypothesis: maybe Philosophers got so bad overall, because they tried too hard beeing regarded as scientist, when maybe their field is not really approachable with scientific methods. At least not main parts of it. Because there is a big, maybe infinite world, which we can't (yet) explain properbly with math. And maybe there are some areas, which you can never describe with math. To get a bit esoteric: The Tao that can be told, is not the eternal Tao ... This is in my opinion the purpose of Philosophy. Think freely and create modells about those areas. Philosphy as the art of wisdom. Trying to understand complex worlds, which you cannot put in (finite) numbers. Humans for example. Because we are more than just some numbers and can't be reduced to them, which is, what is sadly more and more happening. And philosophers trying to be, what they are not, might be a cause to it.

31 points by aqsalose 10y ago

I didn't read the whole article; I hope to be able to return to it tomorrow. However, from a brief skim, it seems it started out well and then quickly went downhill. A better title might be, "A strawman in defense of Scientism". The gist of it is that the author starts with a decent argument about why philosophers against scientism might want to attack a weaker (i.e., more easily believed/more likely true) version of scientism, since that would give more weight to their arguments. But then the author goes off the rails by choosing to defend that weak version of scientism with some rather silly arguments, essentially arguing that since the term has been redefined, none of the work which has gone before (which has shown that these silly arguments are silly) applies any more.

aqsalose 10y ago
I agree that the first part was the strong part of the paper (and was the reason I decided to link it on HN), and e.g. statistics about differing word usage in different fields isn't what I'd call conclusive evidence. But are you postulating that all arguments (for a weaker version of) Scientism (either all arguments there are or even only the all arguments the author presents), are silly? That's something I'd disagree with. For example, while science isn't the perfect process like in the textbooks portrayals, a model that produces testable predictions (and thus can be evaluated) seems the very good way to characterize how we get new knowledge about various phenomena of the world and can convince others that it is knowledge and not just an esteemed opinion. Also the bit "vicious circularity" resonated with me: in my opinion, (looking at what we know of the evolutionary history our species[1]) it's quite reasonable hypothesis that humans could develop logic and mathematics in the first place because of the physical world we observe is regular and predictive enough so that human cognition had a chance to develop. [1] Not in the evo psych sense, just that we descend from the same great-great-*-parents as our cousins (the other) apes, and during the history we ended up being the ones with wider cognitive capabilities. Even though our cousins are relatively bright.

juliangamble 10y ago

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scie...

barnabes 10y ago
The issue, in my eyes anyway, is when the scientific method is used as a hammer; when it's used to crush a debate. Any method, whether scientific, philosophical, spiritual or otherwise should be used to spawn debate, and to contribute to a rich discussion. But science being used to stop debate, used to stop exchange, used to stop meaningful conversation does more harm than good to all involved.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  The irony is that it took a philosopher to produce a much better defense of scientism than many scientists are capable of.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- carsongross 10y ago
  The issue, in my eyes anyway, is when the scientific method is used as a hammer; when it's used to crush a debate. The scientific method isn't being used to crush debate. It simply isn't being used. What's most responsible for crushing debate today is (empirically false) post-modern social constructionism coupled with female mother/protector ethics. Jordan Peterson is one of the best people on these (and many, many other) topics: https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos

ordbajsare 10y ago

It's pure evil!

dagenleg 10y ago

So that's how intellectual masturbation looks like. It's pretty cute - almost looks like a real paper with proper formatting, citations. There was even an attempt at first-order logic!

flohrian 10y ago

By “scientism,” Pigliucci (2010, p. 235) means, “the intellectual arrogance of some scientists who think that, given enough time and especially financial resources, science will be able to answer whatever meaningful questions we may wish to pose—from a cure for cancer to the elusive equation that will tell us how the laws of nature themselves came about” Hm. Is it possible to construct a (sensible) physical correspondence to the incompleteness theorem or to an undecidable problem?

ericdykstra 10y ago

"Science vs Philosophy" is a misguided debate. The scientific method answers questions about how the world works. Philosophy discusses how best we should act in the world as it is. Do they sometimes try to answer the same questions? Yes, and it's usually in the case where philosophical ideas can be, and have in the past, been the best model for explaining phenomenon that we didn't have the tools to measure with science. Now that that's out of the way... There is, of course, nothing wrong with the scientific method for examining the world, but Scientism has many pitfalls: - Biased scientists that only publish research whose results are favorable to their own idea of the world. - Advocating for blowing up real-life systems in favor of new "scientifically proven" ones, because unintended consequences are a given in complex systems. - "Scientists" promoting their research for their own monetary gain, regardless of known consequences. - A culture where anyone who disagrees with the "general consensus" is labeled as an "idiot," even if they back up their claim with showing flaws in the research process. - Even with good science and valid results, often the recommendation about what to do about the findings is not based in science, but followers of scientism will conflate the two. Anti-scientism is not the same as anti-science.

mizzao 10y ago
Given the reproducibility crisis in science (esp. in fields like psychology, where an estimated two-thirds of papers aren't replicable), it's good to be skeptical of new work instead of saying "scientists showed this! now let's redo an entire part of the world". An important real consequence of scientism: the war on fat circa 1960, overconsumption of sugar, and resulting diabetes epidemic. (Spoken as a practicing scientist.)

hutzlibu 10y ago

A little bit of philosophy bashing? Ok, why not, let's start with a old joke from former soviet Eastgermany : A mathematic, a biologist and a physicist are flying in a hot air balloon, but got lost. Then they see a men jogging under them, so they get lower and the biologist shouts to him: "Hey you, where are we?" The man looks up, but does not answer. Then the physicist shouts: "Hey you, can you please tell us, where we are?" Still nothing, but then finally he shouts back: "you are in a hot air balloon!" "Ah, a philosopher" says the mathematician. "How do you know?" ask the others. "Well, a) he took very long for his answer, b) it fits with objective reality and c) it is totally worthless for us." (the main job of the philosophers back then and there was to defend the Marx-Lenin Philosophy to the people, where they tried to prove them, that the people are on the way to the best of every possible society, but people still complained about not having toilet papers) Then a line I remember from Thureau: "We have Professors of Philosophy, but no Philosophers." So, to get more serious and a wildly speculative hypothesis: maybe Philosophers got so bad overall, because they tried too hard beeing regarded as scientist, when maybe their field is not really approachable with scientific methods. At least not main parts of it. Because there is a big, maybe infinite world, which we can't (yet) explain properbly with math. And maybe there are some areas, which you can never describe with math. To get a bit esoteric: The Tao that can be told, is not the eternal Tao ... This is in my opinion the purpose of Philosophy. Think freely and create modells about those areas. Philosphy as the art of wisdom. Trying to understand complex worlds, which you cannot put in (finite) numbers. Humans for example. Because we are more than just some numbers and can't be reduced to them, which is, what is sadly more and more happening. And philosophers trying to be, what they are not, might be a cause to it.