Not aesthetic; epistemological. But yes, scientism suffers from the recursion problem you identify. Epistemology is the philosophic topic of truth - what we k

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.