Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Scientism, as I use the term, isn’t science at all. It’s an ideological position about the scope and ability of science.
It is interesting to compare these two sentences of Daniel’s to the first two sentences in the scientism entry of ‘The Oxford Companion to Philosophy’:
TOCtP wrote:Scientism is a term of abuse. Therefore, perhaps inevitably there is no one simple characterization of the views of those who are thought to be identified as prone to it. (p.814)
I’d also like to point out that both the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy do not have entries for scientism, searches in both will only yield occurrences in other pages where the definition is provided by the context of the entry and isn’t uniform.
TOCtP wrote:In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.
(a)The sciences are more important than the arts for understanding of the world in which we live, or even, all we need to understand it.
(b) Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.
(c) Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such.
A successful accusation of scientism usually relies upon a restrictive conception of the sciences and an optimistic conception of the arts as hitherto practised. Nobody espouses scientism; it is just detected in the writings of others, Among the accused are [Paul and Patricia Churchland], W.V. Quine and Logical Positivism. (p.814)
Daniel’s definition appears to be a blend of both (a) and (b):
Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Scientism claims that all questions can and should be answered by science, that all questions are, in the end, reducible to scientific questions.
Now I am aware of one philosopher who doesn’t mind getting labeled as an advocate for scientism, Alex Rosenberg. I found it revealing to compare comments from both about the idea of “reductionism”:
Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Plainly, scientism (in my view) is connected with reductionism. But another way of looking at it is to see it as a form of imperialism. As the old saw has it, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. So, too, an occasional scientist will insist that his discipline offers the key to the entire universe. (Attempts to seize moral behavior and ethical theory for evolutionary biology seem a fairly obvious example of this.) More often, though—at least in my experience—it isn’t scientists who engage in the most flagrant examples of scientism. They’re too busy counting caribou in the Canadian Rockies, monitoring fruit fly genetics, peering into telescopes, and clambering about in the Grand Canyon—that is, doing actual science—to engage in such fantasies. Rather, it’s typically non-scientists, amateurs, who, in their understandable enthusiasm for the achievements of science and the marvels of technology, go much too far. Hammers are very useful tools, but they’re not equally useful for all purposes. Science is powerful, but its power comes, to a large extent, from its precise and limited focus. Properly understood, it doesn’t claim to be able to do all things—and it’s exactly that modesty that enables it to do certain things extremely well.
The following comes from an interview found in 3AM Magazine:
Alex Rosenberg wrote:I’ve always been interested in reduction and reductionism. Laying cards on the table, I’ve been arguing for reductionism in biology for a very long time. I was doing this even when I was offering accounts of why the positivist and post-positivist accounts of reduction in terms of theoretical derivation could not be satisfied—owing to supervenience of multiple realized macromolecular arrangements. Then, and today, I was still trying to figure out how reduction proceeds. I know it proceeds, because I see it reported every week in the pages of Nature and in Nobel Prize winning research. But obviously, as in the philosophy of mind and psychology, the reductionists are in the minority and most people are physicalists but antireductionists. How to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism remains a vexed question in biology, in psychology, and of course among metaphysicians as well.
But philosophers of biology have stopped trying to nail down any reduction in the field. They no longer seek to define the gene in terms of DNA. We’re more interested in questions of whether the gene/DNA make a unique contribution to heredity and development, or whether the latest science shows that nucleic acids are on a par with a lot of other factors in transmission of traits between generations and development of traits within generations. You’d think these are empirical questions for molecular biologist, but the molecular biologists answers turn on concepts like information, causation, and reproduction that are rife with ambiguities that can easily shift the answers biologists give. Philosophers are sensitive to the ambiguities and we take sides on the questions ambiguously expressed.
One reason I am so interested in matters of reduction is that I think that most of the evidence that decides biological claims is molecular. Just consider what DNA evidence—genetic and somatic–is telling us about systematics, phylogeny, development, or neuroscience, etc. One area that I follow closely and has the greatest implication for human evolution, human culture and human prehistory is the sequencing of the genomes of the four different Homo species that have been alive together on the planet in the last 60,000 years. Every few months more comes out from the Max Planck institute in Leipzig that help us understand differences between these species and scenarios that led to the extinction of three of them and the domination of one. I think and I hope that we are going to be able to shed increasing light on problems about human cultural evolution from these sources. That’s a tangential reason I remain interested in reductionism.