>Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
While the odds are not on my favor trying to argue against a wikipedia definition, I would say that is a different concept from what I refer to as scientism (and a lot of other people, I imagine).
Scientism is taking arguments made by science or by scientists and believing in them as if they were an unquestionable set of precepts that govern life and other affairs, "because science".
This, in the same way as other -isms work, hence the addition of the suffix, to poke fun at the concept.
"Because science said so" being the modern equivalent of "because god said so", with all its downstream effects pretty much unmodified.
> 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 (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)".
"Scientism is the view that [...] scientific method [is] the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality."
I don't think the so-called scientific method is a method or algorithm. If I'm working on an experiment and I'm stuck and something good occurs to me in my dream, this is not scientific method but it may help to further the experiment.
I feel like you’re talking about the ideation process, but my take on it is that science is not necessarily an approach to source ideas but how you experiment and validate them.
Your ideation process could be systematic (your exploration of the problem is itself “scientific” and driven by a rigorous process) or it could be more “artistic” and driven by intuition and inspiration. In both cases you would be doing science if you’re *evaluating* these approaches methodically no matter how you source them.
The trouble with this way of looking at it is that it tends to make all kinds of everyday activities (e.g. baking) count as 'scientific' as long as the person doing them is being methodical. That's fine as far as it goes, but from a historical point of view it leaves it as a bit of a mystery why science as we now recognise it has not existed for most of human history.
What truths would not be accessible through science (in a universal, general context)?
I am not particularly creative, but I struggle thinking of a way to establish something as true (with the exception of mathematics) without having some sort of experiment or observation, coupled with reasoning and a model embodied in the real universe.
I want to be open minded and not reject about universal discovery, but I work from the assumption that the universe exists, is rational, objective, and ultimately, all methods to discover truth require some level of experiment/observation and models.
Maybe some truths about consciousness are beyond the reaches of science. For example, how do we know if a person is conscious and not just a "philosophical zombie"?
I don't treat it as truth we're conscious- it's an assumption for which we do not have the knowledge or ability to test fully.
But importantly, what physical detail about consciousness could possibly be the case such that it would not be accessible to a scientific endeavor. It's physically embodied and implemented by the rules the universe seems to obey, right? And if not, why not? Is it accessible through mystical methods which are non-scientific?
Ultimately science is limited by what is observable and measurable. The question is, what can we observe and measure about consciousness? How can we even be sure we're observing consciousness?
I believe we can study consciousness scientifically, even if our observations are limited to asking people what they experience, and making the grand assumption that the person is conscious (not a philosophical zombie). But the science may be limited by what is technologically possible.
As for something that may not be accessible to scientific endeavour: qualia. How can you know that what I perceive as the color red is the same as what you perceive as the color red? Maybe my red is your blue. Maybe my red is unlike anything you've ever experienced. How can we possibly know?
I don't think the question of whether you perceive red the same way as me is even remotely interesting to the vast majority of scientists (while it is very interesting to a subset of philosophers).
In terms of consciousness, so far the best we have are some indirect metrics; see the neural correlates of consciousness for some of the best scientific discussion. But as far as I can tell, most scientists simply treat consciousness as a phenomenon, and don't worry too much about the philosophical side.
Ultimately my point is: is there something mystical that is simply not addressable by science, and from the perspective of (most) modern scientists, nothing about the brain is mystical, it's just a bag of stuff that does some stuff.
I gave you an example, qualia. I gave you another example, the philosophical zombie problem. The latter has real implications, how can we know whether or not a coma patient is conscious?
There's new evidence to support the idea of quantum effects in the brain. Far from conclusive, but it does give a little credibility to the idea.
There's also a hypothesis that the electromagnetic field produced by the brain could be the "carrier of conscious experience", which would at least solve the binding problem.
But you're very hand wavy and simply disregard my examples. Instead, you throw around the word "mystical" without giving a clear definition, which makes it too easy for you to move the goal post. And then you simply refer to the brain as a "bag of stuff", which is a gross oversimplification.
Is that the sole meaning of the word? Because I've seen (and agree) with another version that says people easily trust mass media prefacing its content with "scientists say", "the scientific consensus says", etc...
It's probably nothing more than a corollary, since it's not like the average Joe is reading arXiv papers with all the focus and knowledge necessary to extract a usable "truth".
1. The belief that the scientific method and the assumptions and research methods of the physical sciences are applicable to all other disciplines (such as the humanities and social sciences), or that those other disciplines are not as valuable.
2. The belief that all truth is exclusively discovered through science.
The two definitions above are closely linked. They are both about a value judgment that only scientific truths are meaningful or valid or relevant.
The definition you give is distinct from those, but it seems like the kind of term people would invent. I imagine that lexicographers are keeping an eye on how wide that usage becomes.
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.
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.
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.
While the odds are not on my favor trying to argue against a wikipedia definition, I would say that is a different concept from what I refer to as scientism (and a lot of other people, I imagine).
Scientism is taking arguments made by science or by scientists and believing in them as if they were an unquestionable set of precepts that govern life and other affairs, "because science".
This, in the same way as other -isms work, hence the addition of the suffix, to poke fun at the concept.
"Because science said so" being the modern equivalent of "because god said so", with all its downstream effects pretty much unmodified.