
What’s so bad about Scientism? - aqsalose
https://philpapers.org/rec/MIZWSB
======
juliangamble
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-
scie...](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism)

~~~
acover
> Strong Scientism: Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the
> only “real knowledge.”

Stupid question. What is an example of a hypothesis that is not falsifiable by
experiment but should still be considered "knowledge"?

~~~
icen
1+1=2

And no, apples are not the same things as numbers.

~~~
werpon
That's an axiom. It doesn't say anything about the real world, it just
introduces a framework of thought.

In other words, if you can imagine a reality where 1+1=2 for some meaning of
'1', '2', '+' and '=', then a series of conclusions will hold true.

~~~
taejo
It's not an axiom, it's a theorem (or maybe a definition of "2"). The more
usual definition of "2" is "S(S(0))" (the successor of the successor of zero).
"1" is "S(0)". "S(0) + S(0) = S(S(0))" is a _theorem_ , a consequence of the
axioms "for all x and y, x + S(y) = S(x + y)" and "for all x, x + 0 = x".

~~~
werpon
I called it an axiom for the sake of brevity. I felt that reciting the Peano
axioms would only cloud my point.

Was I 100% precise? No. Did you add something meaningful to the discussion?
That's for you to answer.

~~~
taejo
"axiom" is two letters shorter than "theorem", so no, brevity doesn't cut it
as an excuse. The difference between an axiom and a theorem is, undoubtedly,
germane to a thread about the different ways we can know things.

~~~
prance
I would go further: is "Axioms exist" true? You don't find them lying around
in nature. They exist only in people's minds. I would argue that this is an
inherent metaphysical question.

The scientismist's (?) standpoint could be that it exists because it is
manifested as a concept in human brains. But by the same argument, wouldn't
they then need to acknowledge that God exists?

The crux of the matter is to do science, you need formalism to express your
theories, to interpret measurement results etc. Those formalisms are what we
usually call "math". But any mathematical system has axioms, i.e. something we
need to just "believe" in in the first place, and those believes are not
themselves provable by science.

~~~
AstralStorm
Axioms can be shown to be useful or not. This is why some mathematicians
reason with or without axiom of choice. Likewise, systems of axioms can be
shown to be consistent or not.

------
ericdykstra
"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
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.)

------
flohrian
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?

------
hutzlibu
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.

------
belovedeagle
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
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.

