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...
In my view, the whole concept of scientism is the last attempt of philosophy to stay relevant, and it's usually only backed up by appeals to emotion and loaded words.
So, the scientist in me asks: what areas of knowledge are out of the scope of science and the scientific method?
Large areas of philosophy are routinely demolished by the strangeness revealed by science. Concepts like Time after general relativity, the reach of maths after Godel, existence being coexistence after the discovery of multiverses. Philosophy very often assumes things that the real world ends up proving aren't true.
Science is a part of philosophy, and at the same time it extends it. You're assuming that philosophy is only idealist guessing, which is wrong.
I mean, you wouldn't say that "Large areas of science are routinely demolished" by newer science, even though strictly speaking it's true, and you'd therefore give up on science as a whole?
(And if I'd really want to be mean, I'd ask you if science has ever even proven the "real world" exists or that science is true, but I think you got my point.)
> existence being coexistence after the discovery of multiverses
Please keep in mind that multiverses haven't actually been discovered. They are a very real possibility if the model of inflation of the early universe (and thus eternal inflation) is correct. But since the Planck satellite hasn't found conclusive b-mode polarisation patterns, inflationary models should be viewed with a bit of scepticism. On the other hand: inflation can explain a lot of problems in the early universe that would arise without it: magnetic monopoles, the large-scale homogenity and isotropy and geometric flatness. So, it remains a valid model, and the best explanation of the very early universe.
We should be aware of the things we don't know, and not just assume multiverses, when there is no conclusive evidence.
Multiverses as a result of space receding faster than speed of light are pretty much universally accepted. Other kinds are more controversial. There are galaxies not co-existant with us in the future that are now.
Are you sure you're not just more familiar with science than with philosophy? I don't think any of those examples hold up under the slightest scrutiny. Philosophy is mostly demolished by better philosophy.
Is philosophy knowledge? Can I use it, for example, to take an informed choice about the real world? Does it at least contain a set of verifiable, falsifiable statements that every practitioner can and has agreed upon?
Surely philosophy of science helps you build your framework of verifiable, falsifiable statements (after all, you need to have a logical framework for choosing which statements can be falsified or verified)!
One could argue that it is because of philosophy (of science) that you even consider "a set of verifiable, falsifiable statements that every practitioner can and has agreed upon" as a litmus test (or demarcation criterion) for what science is supposed to be.
Science can only answer the how? The why is always a philosophical question which has to be loaded with appeals to emotions. Certain personalities are okay with only asking the how, other personalities need the why. Certain other personalities don't need either. They just do. If we stop asking the why, which we more or less have as we think that it's a dead end that leads to nilhism and absurdism then we will accumulate more and more power and use it with delirious overall effects on the systems that we inhabit and will inevitably go extinct.
I dislike this point because it is imprecise. What do you mean by a "why" question? How do objects fall to Earth? Gravity. Why do objects fall to Earth? Gravity.
Well what I mean by why is the overall moral question of doing the right thing for the continued survival of life on the planet. That's more or less a metaphysical thing. And we don't have that figured out. And it does not seem to me that science will provide the answer to this. As science is hierarchical and specialized. It might provide individual answers but it does not provide guidance as to how or why to use those answers. For instance why we must live or do things a certain way. It merely provides knowledge and tools and then we apply that knowledge and tools to act on the world. If we do not act properly on the world with our science we will inevitably destroy the world. Currently we use the economic paradigm as our moral compass, which seems to work in certain cases but in other cases fails. Philosophy is needed to address this sort of deficit in our economic thinking.
This is not an answer to your exact question, but when people say "falsifiable" they usually mean something much more rigorous than what is possible within qualitative research[0] (and I'm not criticising qualitative research here), yet insights can still be gained from it.
I switched from physics to art to (ultimately) design and programming. You have no idea how much ignorance many physicists have of research that isn't easily quantifiable and turned into predictive formulas. I had to go through a period of growing more "aware" of my tunnel-vision myself. As a result, flat-out rejection of entire fields of research, claiming they do not create "real" knowledge is common.
On the flipside there's people trying to apply physics-style reductionism to problems that simply don't fit, because humans aren't built up of spherical frictionless humans in a vacuum[1].
Example: I did my master thesis of interaction design on gesture interfaces (the waving-hands-in-the-air kind, not the touchscreen kind), a topic that has been researched over forty years but has yet to really break through. One paper I read mentioned that on average the right index finger was raised one-point-zero-something times more often than the left. Sample size twenty or so. I still don't know how that is supposed to help me design better interfaces; right-handedness being the norm is a known, and I cannot conclude anything from these numbers. But hey, it's quantified and measured, therefore "proper" knowledge!
Not related to hypotheses but most axiomatic systems and the apparatus of deduction that accompanies them would probably qualify as they are not scientific (by the circular definition that anything that uses the scientific method is scientific). The most notable example would be mathematics. I'd argue that mathematics provides knowledge (as in it helps me understand stuff better).
Some people would say that the relational patterns in numbers are a kind of definition, and that such statements aren't so much truths but consequences of those patterns - and that it's only when you're using the two '1's to represent real world details that the '2' is true or false.
(and BTW, there are real-world situations where '1' and '1' do not make '2'... e.g. putting a snake and a mouse in a box. We only apply maths statements like that to the kinds of entities/situations where they will apply).
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".
Mathematics is based on logical deduction. You start with a set of rules and you prove additional rules.
Science is based on (lots of things but primarily) empirical induction. You observe some phenomena, decide that they are of the same type, generate a model that predicts how all phenomena of that type behave. By necessity you observe an infinitesimal fraction of the phenomena in your type.
In math proofs are universal and timeless and complete. There is no additional observation to be made. A proof can be wrong, but if we conclude that it is logically correct then that's it.
Scientific models are approximations of reality(very good approximations often!) but they get tweaked as new observations come in. Or just wholesale thrown out(or at least become obsolete), see Newtonian orbital mechanics vs relativistic orbital mechanics. Newton was right-ish, but relativistic solutions are right-er(possibly fully correct?)[1].
With deductive reasoning you are expanding a definition. With inductive reasoning you are guessing at connections between observed events.
Whatever we need to take for granted in order for a scientific experiment to mean anything at all. Most of mathematics and logic would fall into this category: we can't falsify 1 + 1 = 2 by experiment, but if we throw it out, we won't have any science at all.
A lot of people believe that fundamental principles of ethics also belong there. For example, we may be able to demonstrate whether or not something is a net benefit to the combined happiness of sentient beings, but I cannot see how one might even attempt to falsify the hypothesis that sentient beings matter at all.
1+1=2 is falsifiable as it relates to an experiment. You could show that in an experiment that when you "add" a "one" and another "one" together you do not get "two".
If it doesn't aid in understanding the world then I'm not sure it qualifies as knowledge.
How do you go about testing the hypothesis that 1 + 1 = 2? Not just showing that a particular physical representation obeys the logical laws of arithmetic, but to test the actual laws themselves.
When you add 1kg of some stuff to 1kg of another stuff and end up with 1.97kg instead of 2kg, have you really falsified 1 + 1 = 2, or have you just confirmed that some portion of your material was vaporized in the reaction?
What does the number 1.97 even mean in a world where 1 + 1 ≠ 2? When you falsify 1 + 1 = 2, you also end up denying the validity of the experiment. If a hypothesis can only be falsified by invalid experiments, does it count as falsifiable?
Probably T <= 0, multiple universes, inside a black hole, etc. You also can't run an experiment on your own life, not really, since you only have one life and that's not a large enough sample. So questions like "what is true for you, uniquely?"
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?
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.
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.
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