Who here believes in "Scientism"?

[YoursTrue]

Here; try this:

Interactive Map Shows Where You'd Pop Up If You Dug Straight Through The Earth

Interactive Map Shows Where You'd Pop Up If You Dug Straight Through The Earth

www.iflscience.com

Thanks. That was discouraging or encouraging, depending on how you look at it -- I guess I won't try anymore. If I knew that as a child, I guess I wouldn't have tried digging to the other side of the earth.

 

[Audie]

Scientism is the conviction that science can answer all important questions about utuexistence. Those kinds of people exist. They don't recognize the limits of empiricism. Empiricism can tell you many powerful things and continues to do so. But observance, and mathematics can't reveal intrinsic fundamental nature of reality. It can't tell you about inner qualities of being, nor can it tell you about why things are the way they are. It can only reveal how things behave as appears to the senses, and is calculated in math. It can't tell you exactly what nature and existence is intrinsically. So it is superficial explanation to think that science can answer all important questions of existence. Extrinsic behavior is nothing but scratching the surface of reality.

And religionism is about the belief that everyth[ng is
best explained with magic?

 

[osgart]

I'm not sure I can agree with your logic. Not sure why it is a necessity for intellect (however you are defining that) to have always been in order for new intellects to arise. If you subscribe to the Theory of Evolution, that there was a point on earth when no life existed, that not all life exhibits "intellect", that human beings evolved from life that had no intellect yet humans do have intellect, then at what point and in what way does pre-existing intellect play a role in human intellect?

Intellect serves many purposes for those that have it. The body, mind, and heart of humans works together with great efficiency and conveniently. Intellect exists for reasons and those reason are to survive, learn, explore, remember, use things in the environment, reason about things, make use of the senses for multiple purposes, to question, to conceive, to come up with ideas, to sustain life, to work in the environment, to solve problems, to form relationships, to motivate and do all kinds of things, to communicate, to invent. To call it a mindless fluke of evolution is a big stretch.

Intellect solves problems, and intelligence is a byproduct of intellect. I would venture to say intelligence is something built into nature to generate life forms through evolution. Intelligence may in fact be the natural phenomenon at work without a pre existing intellect driving the intelligence. Like an auto run infinite loop program that goes about solving problems on its own. It may come from intellect originally, but intelligence manifests in nature and works entirely on its own purposing and repurposing to solve problems for life to grow.

Intelligence, life, intellect all exist as latent potentials of existence and when the opportunity for life comes up intelligence capitalizes on the opportunity.

 

[Augustus]

I stipulate that it is because those engaged in what remained of philosophy did not wish to be held to the standards and principles that were being established within science to mitigate human error in the inquiry process.

This seems to be a curious inference from the available evidence as many scientists are also philosophers. When Einstein engaged in the philosophy of science was he doing so because he though it offered genuine value to the scientific process or because he just wanted to avoid having his ideas held up to scrutiny?

Much of philosophy is outside of the areas that can be established using scientific methodologies, yet are integral for the scientific process

What is science and what is not science? What is knowledge and on what grounds is it justified? Does science reveal the truth (or close to the truth) about the physical world or is it simply about identifying information that has utility? When we observe things, are we simply observing what we see or is what we see contingent on a whole load of other theories that we, perhaps implicitly, accept? etc.

There is no way of doing science that is free from numerous philosophical assumptions, these are often disputed and they can't be settled using scientific methodologies. This is not because people are being obtuse, or that they deviously want to promote "woo" or argue "... therefore Jesus", just because it is the nature of certain aspects of our reality.

As such it doesn't seem logical to assume the people who are interested in such issues (many of them scientists), are only doing so to avoid being held to "the standards of science".

The same with things like ethics or the philosophy that underpins other academic disciplines such as history or language, these are not areas that can be "solved" via scientific methods, yet clearly offer some form of value to our understanding of our environment and experiences. Why we would assume people only do them because they are too feeble to do "proper science"?

 

[MikeF]

This seems to be a curious inference from the available evidence as many scientists are also philosophers. When Einstein engaged in the philosophy of science was he doing so because he though it offered genuine value to the scientific process or because he just wanted to avoid having his ideas held up to scrutiny?

Much of philosophy is outside of the areas that can be established using scientific methodologies, yet are integral for the scientific process

What is science and what is not science? What is knowledge and on what grounds is it justified? Does science reveal the truth (or close to the truth) about the physical world or is it simply about identifying information that has utility? When we observe things, are we simply observing what we see or is what we see contingent on a whole load of other theories that we, perhaps implicitly, accept? etc.

There is no way of doing science that is free from numerous philosophical assumptions, these are often disputed and they can't be settled using scientific methodologies. This is not because people are being obtuse, or that they deviously want to promote "woo" or argue "... therefore Jesus", just because it is the nature of certain aspects of our reality.

As such it doesn't seem logical to assume the people who are interested in such issues (many of them scientists), are only doing so to avoid being held to "the standards of science".

The same with things like ethics or the philosophy that underpins other academic disciplines such as history or language, these are not areas that can be "solved" via scientific methods, yet clearly offer some form of value to our understanding of our environment and experiences. Why we would assume people only do them because they are too feeble to do "proper science"?

Hmmm. Today we have a distinct split within modern academic institutions between what is considered to be Philosophy and the questions that Philosophy can address and Science and the questions that Science can address.

Was there ever a time in which the questions that today are addressed by Philosophy and Science all fell under the same overarching category?

 

[Augustus]

Hmmm. Today we have a distinct split within modern academic institutions between what is considered to be Philosophy and the questions that Philosophy can address and Science and the questions that Science can address.

Was there ever a time in which the questions that today are addressed by Philosophy and Science all fell under the same overarching category?

In the past, natural philosophy was part of philosophy, and science just meant any field of learning.

Natural philosophy later became the natural sciences, as fields became far more specialised and diverse across the board (most courses at a modern uni probably didn’t exist 125 years ago).

Assuming someone who is interested in one specialised discipline must be doing so because they are not intellectually honest enough to be interested in another specialised discipline seems very faulty logic.

Natural philosophy was only one branch of philosophy though, so as disciplines became more specialised some philosophers became scientists based on their area of interest.

That other people remain within the boundaries of philosophy is not that they are feeble minded dilettantes who aren’t up to the challenge of “doing science”, it’s that their areas of enquiry are those that were never part of natural philosophy in the first place and are not amenable to study via scientific methods (although there may be some degree of overlap at times in some fields).

 

[vulcanlogician]

Would it be your argument, then, that those who advocate a scientific approach to discovering and establishing objective information about reality categorically deny the value of literature as you have described simply by virtue of their advocacy of science? Can a scientist or science advocate not be moved by a good work of fiction or a piece of art?

First let me say, yes. Obviously scientist can enjoy art and literature.

You're looking at my position in reverse, I think. Let me explain.

*I* am an advocate of science and empiricism. If you ask me the best methodology that humans have for learning about the world, I'd say science! And I'd say it emphatically. And I'd even put it at the very top of the list of most valuable sources of knowledge that we have. (Way higher than philosophy... even though philosophy was my chosen field of study).

I think you assume that I look at things like this: "there are all kinds of sources of knowledge. And science is no better than literature, art, or philosophy."

I'm NOT saying that. You and I agree. Science is the best and most reliable source of information we have.

Let's take Charles Dickens for example. He wrote novels and short stories that sometimes dealt with the horrid health conditions workers faced in England during the industrial revolution. If it were possible to send futuristic satellites back n time to run long distance medical scans on people, that would be a more reliable source than Dickens on the matter. In fact, we could toss aside Dickens's account on it being too rudimentary and basic. At least compared to the satellites' data, and a biologist's analysis.

Dickens might be an okay historic source in some sense. But I'm not arguing that. What I'm arguing is: after we have all the scientific data, there is still something left to know. We can can learn about the human experience in a way we could never know strictly via observation of the brain and body. True, one could infer the quality of a person's experience via access to knowing their physical and neurological states. But, I'd want to argue (passionately if I may) that Dickens communicated something that science simply can't. And not via "magic." It's just that literature can do things science can't.

The experience of human suffering in the industrial revolution. How people were expected to put on a brave face and power through it. How sending children to work in factories destroyed them psychologically by dismantling their ambition, hour by hour, as they toiled on the factory line. Some of that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet.

Even if you don't buy into Dickens moral suppositions on the matter, you could at least recognize that people's experience of suffering has repercussions in reality. They may even be seen as a causal force. (Though that's drifting into metaphysics, which we probably shouldn't do.)

Long story short, I think that knowledge is a kind of modal thing. And science is the best "mode" because of it's superior accuracy, reliability, and ability to identify its own mistakes and correct them without outside help.

But literature and philosophy are other modes. And though they are more problematic than science in terms of reliability, in certain cases, they are able to apprehend things that science cannot. These are fringe cases, perhaps. But cases nonetheless. And that's a nail or two in scientism's coffin.

I personally agree that art and literature has the capacity that you describe. I would also say that it also has the capacity to resonate with our established biases as well as reinforce or inflame our prejudices. Would you agree?

Yeah. I mean, good point. Nazi propaganda is a such thing too. Not just well-debated and well-appreciated literature.

Literature as a device is not to be trusted at face value. And it can certainly get sticky as to what to trust and what not to trust. That's an excellent question to ask of all literature and philosophy imo. Science has fairly firm boundaries and demarcations. There is some debate about demarcation... but the amount of agreement far outweighs the disputes. So I think we can say that science is fairly well demarcated. A few philosophers have questions about it... but don't they always?

I've been emphasizing the potential truth value of a piece of literature or philosophy, but it is equally important to examine its untruth value. I think philosophy does a pretty good job at this (even though it will never be as certain as science on a given matter). Literature is a little more murky. Philosophers (at least in the Western tradition) tend to try to stick to logic. And that gives some kind of standard-- or demarcation --to it. But the boundaries, demarcations, and indeed the philosophical positions themselves, are admittedly more vague.

But clarity had nothing to do with my critique of scientism if you remember. I never said philosophy or literature are more clear than science. And I never will! They simply aren't. But I will say that philosophy and literature do something, as far as giving us knowledge, that science cannot.

One of the things I think proponents of scientism do sometimes, is that they take an empirical observation, and they analyze it and think about it. So far so good. But where I think proponents of scientism slip up is that they don't realize that they do a little philosophizing before they arrive at their ultimate conclusion. But the amount of philosophizing they do is so insignificant, that it fails to register on their dials. They presume that their conclusion came directly from science, but it didn't. They thought for themselves for a moment in there. And they didn't adhere to the scientific method. They brute forced it with logic and sound premises.

 

[Augustus]

*I* am an advocate of science and empiricism. If you ask me the best methodology that humans have for learning about the world, I'd say science! And I'd say it emphatically. And I'd even put it at the very top of the list of most valuable sources of knowledge that we have. (Way higher than philosophy... even though philosophy was my chosen field of study).

I think you assume that I look at things like this: "there are all kinds of sources of knowledge. And science is no better than literature, art, or philosophy."

I'm NOT saying that. You and I agree. Science is the best and most reliable source of information we have.

I agree.

But literature and philosophy are other modes. And though they are more problematic than science in terms of reliability, in certain cases, they are able to apprehend things that science cannot. These are fringe cases, perhaps. But cases nonetheless. And that's a nail or two in scientism's coffin.

For me, the most useful definition of scientism is "excessive belief in the accuracy and scope of scientific methods when applied to all areas of enquiry". Rather than it being used to denigrate science or advocate "woo" as many here seem to imagine, it is basically a call for intellectual humility and good science.

When you recognise that science has an excellent track record in some areas, and a much more dubious one in others, we can't simply "trust the science" or consider it objectively beneficial to expand the scope of science into any area and assume it will offer an improvement.

Also, a lot of science relates to human behaviour and society. In fields like psychology and some of the social sciences it may be the case that more than half of published research is incorrect. There are often too many variables at play, and human ability to understand complex domains with nonlinearities and dynamic feedback loops is pretty terrible.

An astute judge of human society, perhaps a philosopher, journalist, novelist or whatever, might make astute and useful observations about human experience that, perhaps in theory could be 'proved' scientifically, but in reality falls into a domain where most published research is wrong, and we lack the sophistication (at leats at present) to study things with the accuracy of the natural sciences.

Sometimes subjective observation is the best we can do, and some of these do reveal truths about the world, and also communicate them far better than scientific tracts.

Other areas of knowledge can also be combined with scientific ideas to yield a better understanding (as you note above). If someone posits a theory on human psychology, we can look at old literature or histories to see if people noticed this phenomenon. If no one has previously observed this, we might be particularly sceptical that it describes something that really drives human behaviour as we would expect to see evidence of this somewhere.

We may acknowledge an expert salesperson may understand aspects of human psychology better than a university professor, or a trader may understand the markets better than an economist.

The idea only formal science produces useful knowledge, and that scientific understand ing of any field must be the most accurate and reliable seems to me dangerously wrong, even if we accept that, on average, it is the best method, and many areas are highly reliable.

Personally, I consider that the value of science is that it produces useful knowledge, not that it produces (near) objective truth. As such any area of knowledge that offers utility should be taken seriously as something that can benefit humanity.

Many of those who fall prey to scientism seem to want certainty and bemoan that "it's just an opinion", but many opinions are correct and sometimes we just need to make a decision which ones we are going to trust as being useful even if we can't demonstrate they are "objectively" true.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Personally, I consider that the value of science is that it produces useful knowledge, not that it produces (near) objective truth. As such any area of knowledge that offers utility should be taken seriously as something that can benefit humanity.

I disagree with this part.

Science (in principle) is capable of producing, or elucidating objective truth. I don't think a good way to criticize scientism is to attack science. Better to stick to criticizing scientism itself, because science itself is pretty solid.

I agree petty much with the rest.

 

[Aupmanyav]

That is what the OP wanted the topic to be limited to.

 

[Augustus]

Science (in principle) is capable of producing, or elucidating objective truth. I don't think a good way to criticize scientism is to attack science. Better to stick to criticizing scientism itself, because science itself is pretty solid.

Why do you see that as attacking science though?

It is one of the 2 main perspectives from the philosophy of science.

Scientific realism holds that scientific theories are approximations of universal truths about reality, whereas scientific instrumentalism posits that scientific theories are intellectual structures that provide adequate predictions of what is observed and useful frameworks for answering questions and solving problems in a given domain.

Realism, instrumentalism, and scientific symbiosis: psychological theory as a search for truth and the discovery of solutions - PubMed

Scientific realism holds that scientific theories are approximations of universal truths about reality, whereas scientific instrumentalism posits that scientific theories are intellectual structures that provide adequate predictions of what is observed and useful frameworks for answering...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[MikeF]

In the past, natural philosophy was part of philosophy, and science just meant any field of learning.

Natural philosophy later became the natural sciences, as fields became far more specialised and diverse across the board (most courses at a modern uni probably didn’t exist 125 years ago).

Assuming someone who is interested in one specialised discipline must be doing so because they are not intellectually honest enough to be interested in another specialised discipline seems very faulty logic.

Natural philosophy was only one branch of philosophy though, so as disciplines became more specialised some philosophers became scientists based on their area of interest.

That other people remain within the boundaries of philosophy is not that they are feeble minded dilettantes who aren’t up to the challenge of “doing science”, it’s that their areas of enquiry are those that were never part of natural philosophy in the first place and are not amenable to study via scientific methods (although there may be some degree of overlap at times in some fields).

Well, you seem to agree with my position that for most of the history of Western Philosophy, all areas of intellectual inquiry fell under this broad umbrella called Philosophy. And of course within such a broad category, sub-categories naturally arose, we human beings being the way we are, grouping similar lines of inquiry into what became to be seen as distinct subject areas. Yet all of it was part of this main overarching pursuit, to understand both man and the world in which we exist. Further, a philosopher did not simply specialize, say, in morals or epistemology or metaphysics, the philosopher had to concern themselves with all of it because all of it was required to explain how the world worked and our role in that world. All these sub-categories of philosophy had to integrate and support every other subcategory in order to create a unified philosophical understanding of how the world worked and our place within that world.

This requirement for integration has not changed. You seem to want to argue that the subcategory of natural philosophy, understanding the natural world, simply underwent a name change in the 19th century, that despite the new name ‘science’, it is still the same old natural philosophy, restrict to cataloging rocks and species, and maintaining a dualist order if you will, of man as separate and above nature, a thing unto itself, residing in the world but not of the world.

But it wasn’t simply a name change, was it. It was a revolution of thought, approach, of epistemology. Yet this revolution was cut of from the integrated body of philosophy and the wound cauterized, sealing off this revolution from the rest of philosophy, creating a hard line between the questions that this new revolutionary approach would be allowed to address and those questions that were to be shielded from this new approach, the most vulnerable being theology and the philosophy of religion.

You say that the philosophy of today addresses those areas that are not amenable to science, but that is based on your (and others) attempts to enforce an unjustified restriction on which questions this revolutionary approach shall be allowed to address, of putting science in a nice safe box, preserving space for those who wish to maintain the illusion that they can argue subjective opinion and say it is more than opinion, that they can claim a priori knowledge without being properly challenged, that intuition is sufficient justification, to argue that there are universal ideals that are more than subjective opinion, all done in an environment free from standards and principle necessary to mitigate human flaws and fallibilities.

If Metaphysics is the study of reality, how is that not a purely scientific endeavor? Why are there still philosophers addressing the question of mind and consciousness? Surely that falls under the domain of science. What about epistemology? Epistemology seems fundamental to science, yes? It would seem to me, any question in which one wishes to control for human bias and error, this revolutionary philosophical approach born out of natural philosophy and metaphysics should be applicable.

What then is left? Purely analytic abstract systems, subjective preference/opinion, or those who wish to speculate beyond the current limits of scientific inquiry with an air of authority. That is what is left of Philosophy today.

 

[MikeF]

First let me say, yes. Obviously scientist can enjoy art and literature.

I knew in my heart you felt this way, I just had to get it on the record.

If you ask me the best methodology that humans have for learning about the world, I'd say science!

I'd even put it [science] at the very top of the list of most valuable sources of knowledge that we have. (Way higher than philosophy... even though philosophy was my chosen field of study).

Science is the best and most reliable source of information we have.

Yikes! Aren’t you afraid of being charged with advocating scientism?! Seems to reflect blatant scientism if I understand the views of some on RF correctly.

Let's take Charles Dickens for example. He wrote novels and short stories that sometimes dealt with the horrid health conditions workers faced in England during the industrial revolution. If it were possible to send futuristic satellites back n time to run long distance medical scans on people, that would be a more reliable source than Dickens on the matter. In fact, we could toss aside Dickens's account on it being too rudimentary and basic. At least compared to the satellites' data, and a biologist's analysis.

Dickens might be an okay historic source in some sense. But I'm not arguing that. What I'm arguing is: after we have all the scientific data, there is still something left to know. We can can learn about the human experience in a way we could never know strictly via observation of the brain and body. True, one could infer the quality of a person's experience via access to knowing their physical and neurological states. But, I'd want to argue (passionately if I may) that Dickens communicated something that science simply can't. And not via "magic." It's just that literature can do things science can't.

The experience of human suffering in the industrial revolution. How people were expected to put on a brave face and power through it. How sending children to work in factories destroyed them psychologically by dismantling their ambition, hour by hour, as they toiled on the factory line. Some of that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet.

Even if you don't buy into Dickens moral suppositions on the matter, you could at least recognize that people's experience of suffering has repercussions in reality. They may even be seen as a causal force. (Though that's drifting into metaphysics, which we probably shouldn't do.)

Long story short, I think that knowledge is a kind of modal thing. And science is the best "mode" because of it's superior accuracy, reliability, and ability to identify its own mistakes and correct them without outside help.

But literature and philosophy are other modes. And though they are more problematic than science in terms of reliability, in certain cases, they are able to apprehend things that science cannot. These are fringe cases, perhaps. But cases nonetheless. And that's a nail or two in scientism's coffin.



Yeah. I mean, good point. Nazi propaganda is a such thing too. Not just well-debated and well-appreciated literature.

Literature as a device is not to be trusted at face value. And it can certainly get sticky as to what to trust and what not to trust. That's an excellent question to ask of all literature and philosophy imo. Science has fairly firm boundaries and demarcations. There is some debate about demarcation... but the amount of agreement far outweighs the disputes. So I think we can say that science is fairly well demarcated. A few philosophers have questions about it... but don't they always?

I've been emphasizing the potential truth value of a piece of literature or philosophy, but it is equally important to examine its untruth value. I think philosophy does a pretty good job at this (even though it will never be as certain as science on a given matter). Literature is a little more murky. Philosophers (at least in the Western tradition) tend to try to stick to logic. And that gives some kind of standard-- or demarcation --to it. But the boundaries, demarcations, and indeed the philosophical positions themselves, are admittedly more vague.

But clarity had nothing to do with my critique of scientism if you remember. I never said philosophy or literature are more clear than science. And I never will! They simply aren't. But I will say that philosophy and literature do something, as far as giving us knowledge, that science cannot.

One of the things I think proponents of scientism do sometimes, is that they take an empirical observation, and they analyze it and think about it. So far so good. But where I think proponents of scientism slip up is that they don't realize that they do a little philosophizing before they arrive at their ultimate conclusion. But the amount of philosophizing they do is so insignificant, that it fails to register on their dials. They presume that their conclusion came directly from science, but it didn't. They thought for themselves for a moment in there. And they didn't adhere to the scientific method. They brute forced it with logic and sound premises.

You say: “Science is the best and most reliable source of information we have.”

And you say: “Literature as a device is not to be trusted at face value.”

So where does that leave us? What is it that we are talking about? To me, what literature has that science does not, is the power to change peoples mind. I think that this is the non-magical power of literature that you are trying to describe. We have touched a little on the fact that literature can simply conform and play into bias and prejudice, which requires no effort. What is hard is overcoming or circumventing confirmation bias. Simply presenting a set of facts can have little to no impact on strongly held belief or emotionally charged issues. What literature can do is hold the attention and sympathies of the reader while presenting material that creates cognitive dissonance, that challenges held beliefs, but within a mental space that has been rendered more open to *seeing* the conflicting material, and thereby providing opportunity for that conflicting material to be given a fair evaluation.

This is where I feel the value of literature lies. It is not a source of truth or path to truth, for as we both agree, this tool of literature can just as easily be used to the opposite effect. What is true or false has to be determined elsewhere. The value of literature is that it can change people's mind.

 

[vulcanlogician]

I knew in my heart you felt this way, I just had to get it on the record.

Yes. And also, badgers feel pain. I just felt like I needed to get those two things off my chest. Thanks for facilitating that.

Yikes! Aren’t you afraid of being charged with advocating scientism?! Seems to reflect blatant scientism if I understand the views of some on RF correctly.

I am not afraid of being pegged as a scientism sympathizer.

But I always thought proponents of scientism thought that any valid knowledge MUST come from science. I disagree with that nonsense.

But if acknowledging that science is the most reliable discipline epistemologically counts as scientism, then I suppose I need to be welcomed into the fold. I guess I never opposed scientism after all. I was one all along. But doesn't it mean something that I think you can get genuine knowledge outside of science? Doesn't that put me at odds with scientism in some way?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Philosophy from the Greek, Philo - love, Sofia - wisdom, meaning literally the love of wisdom. In what way does science deal with either love or wisdom?

Science is the pursuit of knowledge:

This hasn't changed, although the meaning of the word science is now generally thought to be what professional scientists do in laboratories and observatories.

"An etymological fallacy is an argument of equivocation, arguing that a word is defined by its etymology, and that its customary usage is therefore incorrect." Sometimes, meanings evolve.

How do the words knowledge and wisdom relate? For me, wisdom is a type or subset of knowledge. Knowledge is the collection of demonstrably true ideas about how one's world works, most of which are acquired empirically by living life, such as where to get a good Italian meal. Wisdom, for me, is the collection of demonstrably correct ideas about how to be happy. Scientific knowledge is a different kind of knowledge.

This is a very common misconception among the scientism crowd. They have elevated science in their minds to such an extent that for them it has become the pinnacle of all human understanding and truth. So that science is mathematics, and science is philosophy, and science is the art of applied reason and logic, and science is ... well ... just EVERYTHING good!

You continue to imply that you can acquire knowledge in a way other than empirically, but you cannot, which is why you never produce even a single idea that deserves to be called knowledge that you didn't acquire empirically. You refer to Shakespeare and Beethoven, but whatever knowledge you have about who those people were, what they did, and how it affects you was acquired empirically.

All it really is, and all it ever was, is a means of ascertaining the mechanisms of physical functionality.

What else is there? We learn about how the world works, how that affects us, how we feel about that, and what to do to maximize conscious experience EMPIRICALLY. The rest is reverie, fanciful thinking, useful for nothing.

The pictures being painted in our minds in response to the sounds we are hearing. Art is the voice of cognition, itself, speaking to us, and to each other. It's not about the mechanisms, it's about the CONTENT resulting from those mechanisms. You know, the stuff the scientism crowd dismisses as 'make-believe'.

Everything you know on the subject was learned empirically. And although the mechanism by which your brain generates an esthetic response to a work of art might not be interesting to you, it's also a part of reality and how the world works from the perspective of a rational mind interpreting the evidence of the senses. One learns EMPIRICALLY how a piece of art makes one feel and learns EMPIRICALLY whether he liked it and would like to repeat the experience or the opposite.

Let's call those "natural laws" what they really are. They are a set of possibilities and impossibilities being imposed on the expression of existential reality. But imposed from where? By what? To what purpose? These are the questions that science cannot ask because science is limited to eploring the physically interactive mechanisms of those imposed possibilities and impossibilities.

Sure scientists can ask such questions, but they can't determine the answers. Neither can religions, nor you. Just because you let your imagination run free doesn't mean that you have learned anything about the world outside of your skin. It's the rejection of such claims, which you call scientism, that irritates you and causes you to continually complain about a strictly rational and empirical epistemology using that word. It's odd that you think others should regard those fanciful beliefs the way you do.

If that's all you can see in it, I sure do feel sorry for you.

You see no more. You imagine that you do. You claim that you have. But you NEVER produce any evidence in support of that - nary a useful idea that you acquired with your alleged other way of knowing that isn't empiricism.

Yes, but many of us don't want to recognize those limitations. We want to create false idols and pretend they can tell us the real truth of things.

It's you that's pretending to have truth. If it were more than pretending, you could show us what you know using these other ways of knowing.

The Glorious Quran tells us to believe in unseen as part of the pillars of Faith.

Why should one do or believe that?

I don't believe, I know and have seen the unseen, even the impossible, God Himself (by His Grace).

No, you haven't. You make the claim, but you can't support it. What did this god look like and how did you see it? You have no useful answers to any of that.

Your assertions are based on a stupid interpretation of religious texts

LOL. Pot, meet kettle.

are you as stupid to also assert that only the 'physical' universe is real?

Are you so stupid to claim that there is more absent supporting evidence?

I testify that there is no god or deity but God, and that there is no god or deity worthy of worship but God, and that God is the Greatest. I look away with terror from your atheism and everything about it...

That sounds like a you problem. Go ahead shivering and recoiling in terror at unbelief and those who are comfortable living without god beliefs or religions. And your "testimony" means nothing if you can't support your claims with evidence except that you are willing to believe in gods and magic without it.

And really, if there's a wreck here to look at on these threads, it's not the atheists, whose posting shows that they are content, levelheaded, constructive, and rational. They're not the ones with their hair on fire, agitated that their beliefs aren't accepted or respected by others. Looking at them doesn't terrify me. I'd choose a different verb.

 

[vulcanlogician]

Why do you see that as attacking science though?

I guess I was coming at it from a strictly epistemological standpoint. If we're talking metaphysics, then yeah, I'm a realist to the bone.

 

[vulcanlogician]

@Augustus Your argument was perfectly fine and valid. But it focused on science's weaknesses. No need to go that route. Science simply isn't universal. We can say that and end the debate there.

 

[exchemist]

I disagree with this part.

Science (in principle) is capable of producing, or elucidating objective truth. I don't think a good way to criticize scientism is to attack science. Better to stick to criticizing scientism itself, because science itself is pretty solid.

I agree petty much with the rest.

There are actually different views, among scientists themselves, about whether or not it produces objective truth, cf. “Shut up and calculate!”

Science produces predictive models of the physical world, which are by their nature never final. It has been said that in science, all truth is provisional. So if we speak of “objective truth”, in the context of science, we need to qualify quite a bit what we mean by that.

By which time we are doing philosophy, of course…….

 

[Augustus]

You say that the philosophy of today addresses those areas that are not amenable to science, but that is based on your (and others) attempts to enforce an unjustified restriction on which questions this revolutionary approach shall be allowed to address, of putting science in a nice safe box, preserving space for those who wish to maintain the illusion that they can argue subjective opinion and say it is more than opinion, that they can claim a priori knowledge without being properly challenged, that intuition is sufficient justification, to argue that there are universal ideals that are more than subjective opinion, all done in an environment free from standards and principle necessary to mitigate human flaws and fallibilities.

You keep going back to this strawman. It clearly clouds your judgement as you continually make the same incorrect inferences about what the point being made and the motivations behind it.

Anyway, it’s not “a” methodology but many. To demarcate which methodologies can be considered scientific is a matter of philosophy though. There is no scientific experiment you can do to demarcate science from “not science”, but the question is certainly relevant to the scientific endeavour.

I don’t really see how there should be any problem with acknowledging this.

Not because people want to be obtuse and do whatever intellectually dishonest thing you seem fixated on imagining them doing, but because science requires a philosophical framework as it is a human construct and we are an animal with limited capacities living in a world we only ever partially understand.

As it was raised earlier, what science reveals is also not something that can be determined scientifically either:

Scientific realism holds that scientific theories are approximations of universal truths about reality, whereas scientific instrumentalism posits that scientific theories are intellectual structures that provide adequate predictions of what is observed and useful frameworks for answering questions and solving problems in a given domain.

Or for example, this philosophical discussion between 2 of the most influential modern scientists:

Heisenberg asserted that only observable magnitudes [facts] must go into a theory and chided Einstein that he himself had stressed this in formulating the theory of gravity. Einstein's response was classic: "Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has observed. But on principle it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe [the facts]"


None of these issues can be solved scientifically, but are relevant to the practice of science (and just to be clear, this is the good kind that you advocate, not some nefarious trick woo version that you seem to want to imagine others favour).

 

[MikeF]

First let me say, yes. Obviously scientist can enjoy art and literature.
You're looking at my position in reverse, I think. Let me explain.

*I* am an advocate of science and empiricism. If you ask me the best methodology that humans have for learning about the world, I'd say science! And I'd say it emphatically. And I'd even put it at the very top of the list of most valuable sources of knowledge that we have. (Way higher than philosophy... even though philosophy was my chosen field of study).

I think you assume that I look at things like this: "there are all kinds of sources of knowledge. And science is no better than literature, art, or philosophy."

I'm NOT saying that. You and I agree. Science is the best and most reliable source of information we have.

I agree.

Excellent.

For me, the most useful definition of scientism is "excessive belief in the accuracy and scope of scientific methods when applied to all areas of enquiry". Rather than it being used to denigrate science or advocate "woo" as many here seem to imagine, it is basically a call for intellectual humility and good science.

Isn’t the problem of excessive belief in the accuracy and scope of any field a problem? That is the foundational problem, it is human beings who are stating these beliefs, human beings that are inherently imperfect and fallible. I see the issue as not one of some holding erroneous beliefs or making erroneous claims regarding some discipline or other, the problem lies in whether the field has mechanisms in place to address and mitigate them.

When you recognise that science has an excellent track record in some areas, and a much more dubious one in others, we can't simply "trust the science" or consider it objectively beneficial to expand the scope of science into any area and assume it will offer an improvement.

Also, a lot of science relates to human behaviour and society. In fields like psychology and some of the social sciences it may be the case that more than half of published research is incorrect. There are often too many variables at play, and human ability to understand complex domains with nonlinearities and dynamic feedback loops is pretty terrible.

An astute judge of human society, perhaps a philosopher, journalist, novelist or whatever, might make astute and useful observations about human experience that, perhaps in theory could be 'proved' scientifically, but in reality falls into a domain where most published research is wrong, and we lack the sophistication (at leats at present) to study things with the accuracy of the natural sciences.

Isn’t this where experimentation comes in? We give things a try and see how they work? Of course a clever idea can come from anywhere regarding social systems, be it social scientist, philosopher, or journalist. But we will not know the value of the idea until it is put into practice and observe any advantages as well as unforeseen consequences that might result from the clever idea.

But at the core, it certainly comes down to understanding how this organism, Homo sapiens, and its unique central nervous system works, and this to me seems clearly a job for science.

The idea only formal science produces useful knowledge, and that scientific understand ing of any field must be the most accurate and reliable seems to me dangerously wrong, even if we accept that, on average, it is the best method, and many areas are highly reliable.

Personally, I consider that the value of science is that it produces useful knowledge, not that it produces (near) objective truth. As such any area of knowledge that offers utility should be taken seriously as something that can benefit humanity.

Many of those who fall prey to scientism seem to want certainty and bemoan that "it's just an opinion", but many opinions are correct and sometimes we just need to make a decision which ones we are going to trust as being useful even if we can't demonstrate they are "objectively" true.

I think you are trying to put science into a box that is not applicable. First, to my mind, science or a scientific approach at its core is about mitigating human fallibility in our pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Second, it is about demarcating between what can be considered in TRUE/FALSE terms and what of the human experience is purely subjective preference and the need to manage conflicting preferences.

My counter-criticism to your last point would be that there are those in other fields who try to pass off opinion as objective truths.