Augustus
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The level of abstraction is not, imo, particularly helpful. You seem to be pretty much using it to talk about the sciences anyway, as you exempt things like philosophy from being part of "The Activity". I also think the point you are getting at is the result of you misunderstanding the most basic point of my entire argument (as will be explained later, although it has been explained many times before).
If I were to use your definition, for me, "The Activity" would include things like literature, history, politics, philosophy and so forth. Terms like humanities and science may be flawed, but I prefer the ability to differentiate the category including history and literature from that which includes chemistry and physics.
I also don't really see much of a payoff for the level of abstraction. Saying people may overestimate the ability of the (current) methods of the (what we now call the) sciences to produce accurate results in many areas of enquiry describes a real phenomenon which is not removed simply by changing the terminology we use and defining it out of existence.
Yours is more a normative prescription for the future whereas I'm describing a positive feature of modern society.
I would, again, really advise against shifting the "can not" into "should not" as this would be to create a strawman rather than to address the point being made. I have tried to explain this many times, and am not really sure as to why you remain fixated on the idea that "can not" and "should not" are identical in meaning.
If I said to someone in the 17th C "you can not build a functioning aeroplane", that would have been factually correct. It would also be very different from saying "you should not [try to] build a functioning aeroplane", as this is a prescriptive limitation on behaviour rather than a description of fact. If someone were to argue that they were the same thing, this would be to misrepresent and misunderstand. I'm sure you understand with this example, but again the magical effect of the word "scientism" comes into effect and people suddenly can't agree with things they would normally agree with.
Using current accepted definitions of the term:
There are questions that can not be answered scientifically (What is science? What is knowledge?) because they can not be tested or falsified by empirical experimentation or observation. In addition there are other areas that science can certainly play a limited role in, but we cannot ultimately answer the question, for example "What was the historical Muhammad really like?" This is because most of the evidence that exist is very incomplete, literary and often legendary, and can only be interpreted subjectively even by the most rigorous investigator.
There are also areas of science that produce very unreliable outputs due to their nature and the limitations this puts on scientific methodology. Maybe these methods can be improved in the future, maybe they are to an extent insoluble, but that is irrelevant to whether or not at present this is an accurate description of factual reality.
Nothing there relates to "should not". There is no call to ban social science because it is horrendously inaccurate. No one suggests banning medical research because over 90% of new drugs never reach the marketplace. But as we know many new drugs are unsafe, we are very sceptical about how we proceed and use these new medicines. We would caution against overconfidence in their likely efficacy and safety.
Creating a boundary between The Activity and fortune telling is an artificial boundary, or creating a boundary between golf and tennis is an artificial boundary. Words themselves are artificial boundaries.
The science/social science distinction is not even a hard category boundaries as things often overlap, they are loose, general classifications of things that help aid clarity and understanding.
No one proposes that we can't combine philosophy and neuroscience (in fact its not uncommon for philosophy graduates to move into fields like neuroscience at postgrad level). I'm more than happy to consider science a subset of philosophy if it helps remove boundaries.
The idea we can understand happiness in the same way we can understand chemical reactions makes little sense to me though, and it seems almost obtuse to not want to notice the methodological difficulties that come with studying happiness that make it a fundamentally different proposition to studying the reaction of potassium and hydrochloric acid.
Happiness doesn't exist, although it describes something real. It is a combination of the presence of some things and the absence of others combined with a whole host of subjective evaluations and predictions. It can only be accessed via a series of linguistic concepts and assumptions.
If someone takes an ecstasy pill they will become euphoric, is this the same as becoming temporarily very, very happy or is it something different? How would we balance the happiness from the drug with unhappiness caused by coming down off the drug or mental and physical side effects? What amount of happiness is worth a period of severe unhappiness? Is it better to be slightly happy all of the time, or experience a range of emotions?
While we can recognise and better understand some neurological processes that correlate to happiness, happiness cannot be reduced to observing neurological processes via fMRI or equivalent.
Now let's expand to the question of societal happiness, and ask "Which ethical system produces the greatest amount of happiness?", an exponentially more complex question. Even if falls in the remit of "The Activity", it still makes sense to see it as a fundamentally different thing to studying the reaction of potassium and hydrochloric acid which naturally and objectively exists independently of human conceptualisation, classification and observation.
There are multiple layers of complex and insoluble subjectivity in one but not the other and this makes a massive difference.
Again, and I don't know how to make this any clearer, no one is proposing "pushing science out of the social sciences" whatever that is supposed to mean. This is simply something you have incorrectly inferred due to the magical power of the word scientism to conjure up all kinds of nefarious connotations even when none exist.
