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Science isn't perfect but wow it's accomplished so much. The entire modern world would have never come to be without scientific research. Hard to argue against

Science isn't perfect but wow it's accomplished so much. The entire modern world would have never come to be without scientific research. Hard to argue against that.

jfengel 2y ago
It is true. But one way to view scientism is to think of it as the belief that only those accomplishments are valid. Scientism rejects the notion that any kind of aesthetic or moral sensibility has any meaning at all. That is a statement which is neither true nor false; it is itself an aesthetic judgment.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Not aesthetic; epistemological. But yes, scientism suffers from the recursion problem you identify. Epistemology is the philosophic topic of truth - what we know, and how we know, and how we know we know. Scientism says that science is the only valid epistemology. But that statement was not itself demonstrated by science[1]. Scientism therefore says that it itself cannot know the truth of what it claims as a dogmatic position. [1] Yes, science demonstrates that we can learn truth from science[2]. The problem comes with the word "only". You can't prove the "only" using science. [2] Or maybe not even that. We can demonstrate that the universe seems to follow certain rules. But that depends on us observing accurately. Apart from experimental difficulty, the deeper problem is that we cannot prove that what we measure accurately reflects the real state of the universe. (See the "we live in a simulation" people for one way in which we might not perceive accurately.) The claim that what we observe is the actual state of the universe is not a scientifically proven statement; it is a philosophical position in epistemology. It is an assumption that science has to make in order to be able to do anything, but it is still an assumption - and one that scientism gives you no basis for making.

Science isn't perfect but wow it's accomplished so much. The entire modern world would have never come to be without scientific research. Hard to argue against that.

jfengel 2y ago

It is true. But one way to view scientism is to think of it as the belief that only those accomplishments are valid. Scientism rejects the notion that any kind of aesthetic or moral sensibility has any meaning at all. That is a statement which is neither true nor false; it is itself an aesthetic judgment.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Not aesthetic; epistemological. But yes, scientism suffers from the recursion problem you identify. Epistemology is the philosophic topic of truth - what we know, and how we know, and how we know we know. Scientism says that science is the only valid epistemology. But that statement was not itself demonstrated by science[1]. Scientism therefore says that it itself cannot know the truth of what it claims as a dogmatic position. [1] Yes, science demonstrates that we can learn truth from science[2]. The problem comes with the word "only". You can't prove the "only" using science. [2] Or maybe not even that. We can demonstrate that the universe seems to follow certain rules. But that depends on us observing accurately. Apart from experimental difficulty, the deeper problem is that we cannot prove that what we measure accurately reflects the real state of the universe. (See the "we live in a simulation" people for one way in which we might not perceive accurately.) The claim that what we observe is the actual state of the universe is not a scientifically proven statement; it is a philosophical position in epistemology. It is an assumption that science has to make in order to be able to do anything, but it is still an assumption - and one that scientism gives you no basis for making.