Six Signs of Scientism (2009) [pdf]
uta.edu
uta.edu
When people in my daily life do the "X ... for SCIENCE!" thing, or i see "science: it works, bitches" bumper stickers, or the like, I'm always a little sad.
I try to remind myself that the map isn't the terrain, and that humans are guaranteed to build little cargo cults just to form a hermeneutic and handle the world, but it's still disappointing to see the form of a thing being, frankly, worshipped, instead of the thing itself being used productively. The scientific process is (to abuse a phrase a little more) a wonderful servant , but a terrible master.
Hell, even Indiana Jones comes up sometimes: "Archaeology is the search for fact, not Truth. If it's Truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall."
I know that scientific fields are not even close to being alone in this, it's just a sobering reminder to keep myself on my toes. Feynman's point in "Cargo Cult Science" (1974)[0] remains very true: it is really super hard to avoid bullshitting yourself, even if you're aware that that's a thing that can happen and you try to prevent it.
[0]: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf
We make the jokes with anti vax people that just because a baby came out of you doesn't mean a PhD did. Yet, I don't think how many people realize how harmful it is to oversimplify these topics. We can't solve these big complex problems if we make them politicized and just pretend that there is a singular and simple solution to everything. And that everyone that deviates slightly from the accepted dogma is a heretic[1] (which ironically tends to include a significant number of scientists in the field of concern).
[0] As an example, there are many, even here, that think we just need solar and wind and we'll solve global warming.
[1] I say that these are armchair scientists armed with a baseball bat.
I've always hated that quote. If it were true, archaeology papers would be nothing more than photographs of things people found. As soon as the archaeologist points to something and says "tool" or "weapon", then opinion, interpretation and "truth" are part of the equation.
So much of archaeology has been thrown away as junk science. The artifacts on which that science was based have not been tossed, we have just reinterpret them. We no longer interpret dinosaur bones as evidence of mythical dragons any more than we see the Grand Canyon as evidence of Noah's flood.
In consideration, I just discovered this article, which I haven't read completely but seems to at least partially address this:
Imagine we all lived on a smaller planet and are star was going to blow up real soon now(tm) the only way we could save ourselves from extinction would be through science.
There's no other "method" of truth seeking and technological advancement to develop technologies to become space-faring race.
We can't believe the bible to mars. A better idea may be that the human brain is flawed in ways that human beings are unaware of because they are not scientifically informed enough about their own mind and its limitations and constantly think nonsense through no fault of their own.
Cargo Cult is the most apt description. It amazes me how blind and uncritical even highly "educated" people can be, outside their narrow areas of specialization.
1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.
2. Adopting the manners, the trappings, the technical terminology, etc., of the sciences, irrespective of their real usefulness.
3. A preoccupation with demarcation, i.e., with drawing a sharp line between genuine science, the real thing, and “pseudo-scientific” imposters.
4. A corresponding preoccupation with identifying the “scientific method,” presumed to explain how the sciences have been so successful.
5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope.
6. Denying or denigrating the legitimacy or the worth of other kinds of inquiry besides the scientific, or the value of human activities other than inquiry, such as poetry or art.
I (see upthread), a scientist myself, think it's absolute hogwash, and i'm certainly not abnormal among my peers in that.
There's something about being the person who not only watches how the sausage is made but has spent (ack) 14 years at this point making sausages of several kinds that kind of strips away overly idealistic expectations about How Pure And Right This Thing Must Be. If you're lucky, and i think i am, you learn enough humility to acknowledge the value of other people's sausage-makings. And, often, have the right state of mind to see and acknowledge the intellectual power and meaningful contributions of people well outside my field.
It is strange being in a group and seeing my group believe one thing but hearing people claim to be part of my group and telling me that I'm not doing it right. Even when I have the credentials and they don't...
On second reading, I think the author is objecting to the practice of denigrating respectable modes of inquiry as "pseudo-science" merely because they cannot match some idealistic standard of rigor.
Whereas under pseudo-science I considered Eugenics, a belief system finding that mankind would go extinct due to inferior breeding.
Nor can anybody else. At best, a field of study can enumerate multiple, irreconcilable answers to those questions. I'm not saying those fields aren't worthwhile, just that they're equally unsuited to solving problems beyond that scope.
> Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle.
* https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1174/
* http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/scientism-roundup.ht...
* http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/07/fallacies-physicists...
See also naturalism:
> According to Robert Priddy, all scientific study inescapably builds on at least some essential assumptions that are untested by scientific processes;[15] that is, that scientists must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions would then be justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions."[16]
Science-qua-epistemic-method does not require "that this world is governed by causal regularities." In such a case, the method would still work, it would just figure out that all claims of causal regularity were false. Comprehensibility likewise shows his theistic bias: whether or not we can understand the rules of the universe are irrelevant to whether or not we can use science to reject our incorrect/limited interpretations.
What science does require is that the scientist not be actively deceived, (e.g. if our senses were telling us there is a world external to our mind but there wasn't, that would be a form of deception that would defeat science.)
I suppose I don't see how "actively deceived" defeats science, but "universe not governed by causal regularities" doesn't? In both cases, we seem to be able to identify patterns and regularities in nature that are illusory.
I'm also going to take issue with Feser using the concept of causation in the first place. While physicists certainly still use the language of cause and effect, I don't think they need the concept metaphysically in the way theists do.
Its like how biologists might say something like "this species of butterfly evolved a longer proboscis in order to drink from this kind of flower" but metaphysically they would understand that the butterfly species never actually had the intent to make their noses longer (neither did evolution, nor mother nature.) So biologists might use teleological terms as a useful shorthand, while understanding that there is no actual teleology metaphysically speaking.
I think physics is in the same place with respect to causality. They may speak that way, but at the end of the day they just need the data to fit their models. So we could have acausal regularities, and science would work completely fine.
I think a lot of people have promoted scientism in an attempt to fight low superstition and other obvious bullshit, but I think that's a devil's bargain. You may get some superficial acceptance of "science" that looks like progress, but you are not actually teaching rational thought. You are just getting people to misuse science by placing in the same role as any other superstitious idol.
I also think it in part is responsible for the huge resurgence of "scientific" racism. That stuff looks like science and sometimes even is, albeit of a cherry picked and spun nature and interpreted in a way that is devoid of deeper philosophical consideration. To really refute it requires both a deep study of the real science and of topics like ethics, morality, history, epistemology, and language. It's hard for that kind of discourse to compete with a few graphs and color coded maps and memes that all say "science."
You also have things like "Plandemic" that I am personally seeing catch on among some who have a cargo cultish belief in "science" but no understanding of what it actually is nor desire to really learn. Those videos and memes also toot the dog whistles and pay homage to the shibboleths of scientism, but they are maybe even further from actual science than race/IQ dogma.
Cultish idolatry of any form biases the audience toward short simple catchy messages that pay homage to the idol and toot the right dog whistles. Longer form discourse loses, especially if it even tiptoes anywhere near questioning the idol or the cult. Even if an idolatrous cult starts from ideas and premises that are somewhat rational it will drift into lunacy over time.
Science has saved us from the plagues of gross superstition. Did many of those have kernels of truth? Well, sure. But how do we analyze them as to why? More superstition doesn't cut it. One needs a set of thought tools that can systematically tear it apart carefully. And physical tools facilitate that. And then add in measuring and reproducibility, and there's science.
But taken too far, and #5 of their list is violated. Not everything can be analyzed. And some things, I would dare say, shouldn't be analyzed.
Although, with the more we see IoT, internet tied hardware, machine learning, neural nets, and the like, the more our gross matter doesn't appear to follow science. Why does the IoT thing do X? Well an update last night no longer does that. Or, why does Google searches act completely different between 2 people? Once matter was programmable and reprogrammable, it becomes much more difficult to perform science on them.
And it's a well-known aphorism that "in carefully controlled conditions ... the experimental animal will do as it damn well pleases". And yes; it becomes more difficult to reason about the trajectory of that chicken when its internal motivations and factors like hunger, tiredness etc. are opaque to us. And I think that's directly analogous -- DNA and the processes of life have programmed and reprogrammed matter, and does make reasoning about them harder.
And it highlights the importance of metaphorically aseptic technique in the analysis of malware and computer interaction; and in doing so highlights the problems of "laboratory conditions" being distinct from real world ones since malware might detect the abnormal sterility...
(I'm not even sure whether I'm agreeing with you or disagreeing. But your post was thoughtprovoking.)
What is a kilogram? Is the idea the same as the base object? Should it have a physical representation at all? What happens when the kilogram changes? Can it change? What does it mean when/if it does? If we change it, are we still conducting science?
Of course, that sphere of metal is easy to pick on. But what about the "constant" of C, which we've seen other science studies showing it itself changes - which possibly indicates Planck's constant changes. But the solution was to state by fiat that C is an exact speed and move on. To me, this smacks as unscientific as Indiana defining pi as 3.
And as the meme goes, psychology > biology > chemistry > physics > mathematics. And yet each layer has its own findings and studies, but rarely do each group talk to each other. And such studies come into conflict.... But they're both right. What do we do then? More science? Less?
And there's falsified science. We don't talk much about that. It doesnt win studies. It doesn't get grants. Nor do failed studies get acolades and tenure positions. They should, but they don't. Knowing what areas don't have connection is just as important as those that do. It represents a map of understanding positive and negative.
And I don't think this is one of those agree/disagree.. at least I never took it that way. This is just one of those topics that goes to the root of our world. And we each are just a piece of it.
I think there's a lot of benefit to science as a methodology or process even in contexts where science might not seem readily applicable. The author takes as an example issues of justice. While it's true that there's something fallacious about trying to reason about oughts from scientific principles there is I think a lot of value in grounding these discussions in the scientific process. The reason for that is that scientific principles force people to avoid 'language games' or rationalisations and provide a common formalism to make 'progress'.
People often use 'scientism' as a pejorative for a sort of cold, broken calculator like mentality, but a scientific account of justice, grounded in biology, evidence about punishment and so forth would almost certainly be more humanistic, forgiving, and productive than say, religious debate or ad hoc moral justification, which has led to some of the more cruel treatments in our history.
The author also I think makes some basic mistakes about the nature of science, she says for example:
"But too often those elegant mathematical models turn out to be based on assumptions about “rational economic man” true of no real-world economic actors."
This is true, but not really a problem. As Milton Friedman put it: "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense) Why? Because such hypotheses and descriptions extract only those crucial elements sufficient to yield relatively precise, valid predictions, omitting a welter of predictively irrelevant details. Of course, descriptive unrealism by itself does not ensure a "significant theory"
Believing in the 'rational man' is no mistake of scientism but like believing in a perfect sphere. Somewhat absurd and evidently not found in the real world but nonetheless useful as a tool to form theories.
> I think there's a lot of benefit to science as a methodology or process even in contexts where science might not seem readily applicable. The author takes as an example issues of justice. While it's true that there's something fallacious about trying to reason about oughts from scientific principles there is I think a lot of value in grounding these discussions in scientific process. The reason for that is that scientific principles force people to avoid 'language games' or rationalisations and provide a common formalism to make 'progress'.
> People often use 'scientism' as a prejorative for a sort of cold, broken calculator like mentality, but a scientific account of justice, grounded in biology, evidence about punishment and so forth would almost certainly be more humanistic, forgiving, and productive than say, religious debate or ad hoc moral justification, which has led to some of the more cruel treatments in our history.
> The author also I think makes some basic mistakes about the nature of science, she says for example:
> "But too often those elegant mathematical models turn out to be based on assumptions about “rational economic man” true of no real-world economic actors."
> This is true, but not really a problem. As Milton Friedman put it: "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense) Why? Because such hypotheses and descriptions extract only those crucial elements sufficient to yield relatively precise, valid predictions, omitting a welter of predictively irrelevant details. Of course descriptive unrealism by itself does not ensure a "significant theory"
> Believing in the 'rational man' is no mistake of scientism but like believing in a perfect sphere. Somewhat absurd and evidently not found in the real world but nonetheless useful as a tool to form theories.
A lot of what you have stated appears to rest on the assumption that the other disciplines have no methodology, as well as inserting false dilemma.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that much of philosophical discourse, disagreement, in particular, concerns disagreement about fundamental methodology. I don't think that's even something philosophers would disagree with. Theologians, continental philosophers, analytical philosophers, postmodernists and so forth all have vast disagreements about what the tools, or even the purpose of philosophy is.
Likewise, when theories of justice are concerned, religious scholars and bioethicists don't primarily disagree about the results or evidence of some process, they disagree about fundamental assumptions on how to make inquiries at all. That's usually not the issue (or a secondary issue) in science.
It’s all appeal to authority or emotion, with some science going on, but mostly scientism.
edit: You can replace “intelligent folk” with “intelligentsia”, as to not imply any IQ difference. I’m contrasting “fringe communities” with the more mainstream “intelligentsia”. The difference at play is perceived intelligence, not actual.
Since I anticipate somebody appealing to the Flynn effect [0] or similar improvements in intelligence-testing scores across the recent centuries, I would head them off by mentioning Spearman's hypothesis [1]. The obvious reading of the hypothesis is horribly racist, but we can take its contrapositive: If there are largely no changes between humans in recent millennia, then the differences in testing scores are due to cultural biases in the construction of the test and the education of people. And it happens to be the case, due to pedigree collapse [2], that we can be mathematically confident in the homogeneity of humanity (to say nothing of confidence from molecular biology [3]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis
Not being sarcastic, I suppose things you see in IQ tests like spacial manipulation are culturally biased in that certain cultures give kids shape-in-the-hole toys, teach them shapes, have geometry classes, etc. You could say improvements in intelligence scores are teaching to the test. You could also say we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
It makes discussions with people who feel this way nearly impossible because when coming up against questions science can't answer, they reject all answers because no scientific "proof" has been provided.
Is spending eternity in the cramped room of Paleolithic life satisfying? (And by "eternity" I guess I mean the remaining lifetime of the Sun or biosphere[0].)
To me, it's not. I'd rather sacrifice my basic survival and that of the whole species for something greater. (Especially since "survival" is a zero-sum, doomed goal in the long-run anyway.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbbwrfp9toE&feature=youtu.be... unironically. xD
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...
Either way the human species are perhaps the most successful in fitness and survival of all thus far.
Remove that and you'll get a better reception.
It reminds me of a video I came across a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDu2dgTT5t4. It's a debate between an atheist professor (from University of Arizona?) and a christian professor (from MIT?) where they polled the audience at the end to determine a winner. The prompt was not "does God exist". The prompt was "does science refute God". The atheist spent the whole time trying to disprove God by saying he'll believe in a god if the stars align and send him a sign. The christian spent the time arguing that it doesn't matter whether anybody believes in god or not. Science is simply not a tool that can be used to make any statements on the metaphysical, whatsoever. And concepts like religion, morality, ethics, etc. only make sense in that realm.
My two takeaways were 1. how annoying it was that the atheist missed the subtlety in the prompt and insisted on trying to disprove God rather than discussing the actual prompt of whether science can actually study things that aren't observable. Perhaps maybe that's the definition of a true rationalist, though. And 2. how sad it was that the audience also seemed to miss it, voting for the pompous atheist at the end. As far as I could discern, the atheist failed to provide any argument leading to the conclusion that science can refute God, irrespective of whether anyone believes in a God or not.
Which brings me back to my point: things should not have to be scientific to be valid, socially. You should not have to argue that psychology, or economics is a pseudo/soft science in order to validate funding it. An archeologist or historian should not feel invalidated if they need to sprinkle in some interpretation to connect dots between the facts at hand. In fact, applying scientific method to domains where it does not apply is at best wasteful and at worst counterproductive. The whole "science vs the arts" mindset is a false dichotomy. There's a lot of useful knowledge to be gained that is neither rational nor strictly artistic. But if we reduce it to that socially, then you need to argue that you pursuit is someone rational and scientific in order to justify it to peers, etc. And I do blame the "asshole atheist" for that reductionist mentality.
I think everyone should read some Thomas Kuhn. It's interesting to look at what happens when the popular rational dogma itself changes. Rationalists and even atheists are equally susceptible to dogma. And sometimes it's not about whether you're right or wrong. It's having the humility to admit that there might be another way to skin the cat that ultimately leads to real progress.