What’s so bad about scientism?

Abstract

In their attempt to defend philosophy from accusations of uselessness made by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, some philosophers respond with the charge of ‘scientism.’ This charge makes endorsing a scientistic stance, a mistake by definition. For this reason, it begs the question against these critics of philosophy, or anyone who is inclined to endorse a scientistic stance, and turns the scientism debate into a verbal dispute. In this paper, I propose a different definition of scientism, and thus a new way of looking at the scientism debate. Those philosophers who seek to defend philosophy against accusations of uselessness would do philosophy a much better service, I submit, if they were to engage with the definition of scientism put forth in this paper, rather than simply make it analytic that scientism is a mistake.

Keywords:

• Inference to the best explanation
• epistemological scientism
• scientistic stance
• success of science

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers of Social Epistemology for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. Richard Feynman is rumored to have said that ‘philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds’ (Kitcher 1998, 32). See also Weinberg (1994, 166–190).

2. According to Kidd (2016, 11), ‘The modern cheerleaders for science that Pigliucci points to – such as Hawking, Krauss, and deGrasse Tyson – are today’s continuants of those dogmatic dithyrambs to science and so often lapse into scientism.’

3. Or defining materialism as ‘putting too high a value on’ or ‘an exaggerated deference to’ matter in motion. See Ladyman (2011) on the materialist stance.

4. Some might think that, surely, there are terms that must be defined in a way that transfers emotive force, since they are supposed to be derogatory terms. But this is mistaken. Take, for example, ‘Nazism’; arguably, the most horrible of –isms. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of ’Nazism’ in English does specify that the term is sometimes used as a derogatory term. However, there is nothing derogatory about the definition itself, which is ‘The political principles of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.’ As Loughlin, Lewith, and Falkenberg (2013, 131) put it, ‘we need a definition of scientism that does not automatically amount to an accusation.’

5. Just as ‘we need a definition of scientism that does not automatically amount to an accusation’ (Loughlin, Lewith, and Falkenberg 2013, 131), we also need a definition of scientism that does not automatically amount to a ‘guilty’ charge.

6. On verbal disputes, see Chalmers (2011).

7. See also Ladyman (2011) on ‘the scientistic stance.’

8. Cf. Ladyman (2011) on ‘the scientistic stance.’ As an anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out, concerns about circularity can be raised against both naturalism and scientism. As Stroud puts it (1996, 43) ‘one thing that seems not to have been “naturalized” is naturalism itself.’ I address these concerns as far as scientism is concerned in Section 4.

9. See also Henry (2010).

10. See also Peels' (2016) ‘ES’, which is the view that ‘only the natural sciences are a reliable source of knowledge.’

11. On scientific knowledge, see Bird (2007, 2008), Rowbottom (2008, 2010), Niiniluoto (2014), and Mizrahi and Buckwalter (2014).

12. I am not using ‘vicious’ here in a virtue-theoretic sense (cf. Kidd, forthcoming). Rather, I am using ‘vicious’ in an epistemic sense. As Psillos (2011, 25) puts it, ‘Vicious circularity is an epistemic charge – a viciously circular argument has no epistemic force. It cannot offer reasons to believe the conclusion. It cannot be persuasive’ (original emphasis).

13. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

14. According to Peels (2016, 2462), an ‘important argument in favour of ES is that empirical research has shown that IR [i.e. that introspection is reliable] is false.’

15. Incidentally, this is why experimental philosophers who conduct experimental surveys and draw general conclusions from their samples of participants are sometimes accused by other philosophers of ‘not doing philosophy.’ For more on the ‘experimental philosophy is not philosophy’ charge, see Alexander (2010).

16. See also Leplin (1997), Douglas and Magnus (2013) on novel predictive success.

17. For an argument that the Real World Hypothesis is the best explanation for our sensory experiences, see Beebe (2009).

18. For an argument that the Real World Hypothesis is the best explanation for our sensory experiences, see Beebe (2009).

19. Though, as mentioned above, Beebe (2009) offers an abductive argument for the Real World Hypothesis.

20. For present purposes, this list would do. For a more detailed list of explanatory criteria, see Beebe (2009), 608–611.

21. On the structure of IBE, see Psillos (2007).

22. According to Woodward (2014), ‘the tendency in much of the recent philosophical literature has been to assume that there is a substantial continuity between the sorts of explanations found in science and at least some forms of explanation found in more ordinary non-scientific contexts, with the latter embodying in a more or less inchoate way features that are present in a more detailed, precise, rigorous etc. form in the former.’

23. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

24. See, e.g. Marinoff (1999). There are also two professional organizations of philosophical therapists or counselors: The American Philosophical Practitioners Association and the National Philosophical Counseling Association.

25. See Jenkins (2014) on how ‘intuition’ is used in many ways.

26. For counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism, see Mizrahi (2013a).

27. See also Longino (1995), 383.

28. For more on the value-free ideal, see Douglas (2009) and the essays collected in Kincaid, Dupré, and Wylie (2007).