As the editors note in their introduction (p6), this book represents another entry in the growing philosophical literature on scientism (Williams and Robinson 2015, Beale and Kidd 2017, Haack  2007, 2017, Boudry and Pigliucci 2018). Scientism, at first approximation, valorizes science and denigrates traditional philosophy to an excessive degree (Haack 2007, p17-18). But one might wonder what counts as excessive, or how scientizers (to borrow Stenmark’s term for scientism’s proponents) can be distinguished from naturalists, such as W.V.O. Quine or Wilfrid Sellars, who also take science as a paradigm of knowledge and justification, tend towards iconoclasm with respect to traditional philosophy, but who by now form a venerable philosophical tradition in its own right. It comes as no surprise, then, that much of this volume deals primarily with the question of how to define scientism: each of the editors’ papers, their co-authored introduction, plus contributions by Mikael Stenmark, Ian James Kidd, Alvin Plantinga, and James Ladyman, address the issue head-on. At stake is the extent of scientism’s supposedly negative consequences, not just for philosophy, but for society at large: Law and order would be affected if hard determinism were taken for granted; mind-brain reductionism would motivate a medicalized model of psychiatry; moral nihilism would be more defensible, and public trust in science could be eroded, too.

Of course, the scientific consensus may not entail all of these, and even if it did, it is not hard to find traditional philosophers defending similar positions on independent grounds. But scientism might also be construed as an attack on philosophy as such. Certainly, as the editors note, there is a cottage industry of “scientistic pop-epistemology” (p4) which has almost no overlaps with academic philosophy, but many associations with so-called “New Atheism”, for example Harris (2004) and Dawkins (2006). But this aspect is only touched upon in detail in Kidd’s excellent paper on scientism as an “epistemological vice”. Instead, the editors’ papers focus in identifying types of scientism and getting clear about its philosophical commitments: according to Stenmark’s contribution, for instance, there are four types of scientism, while in Peels’ paper there are as many as fifteen; in both cases they are identified by the extent of their expansionism or imperialism with respect to other disciplines. Really serious scientizers, however, will just insist on the pointlessness of Peels’ scholastic approach, and deny that they have fine-grained philosophical commitments either. The epistemic viciousness of this response need not be understated, but identifying scientism as a vice falls short of refuting it: scorn and disinterest towards philosophy might fall out of other commitments that could be defended philosophically, if scientizers so desired. (One might compare the hostility sometimes seen in Analytic philosophy towards its Continental counterpart, which can be traced to fundamental disagreements over the importance of formal logic to philosophy in the early 20^th Century; Heidegger, for example, will appear irrationalist from within a strict Analytic metaphilosophy, and thus unworthy of serious refutation).

However, I have reservations about the way in which would-be defenders of scientism are boxed in by the editors, along with Stenmark and Plantinga, who all treat scientism essentially as an errant form of foundationalism, which must deduce its commitments from first principles, and even solve the (interminable) demarcation problem. This attitude is summarized in the introduction by appeal to “the fundamental problem”:

Here, the idea is that the basis or foundation of science is itself nonscientific. It consists of all sorts of beliefs based on perception, memory, introspection, and so on. If these beliefs were not rational, then the science that is based on them could not be rational either. Hence, either they are rational and scientism has to go, or both scientific and nonscientific beliefs are equally irrational (and scientism has to go as well).  (18)

Variations of the fundamental problem appear throughout this volume (Stenmark, p63-6; van Woudenberg, p170, 175, 179-83; de Ridder, p190-4; Plantinga, p223, 225-6; Buckwalter & Turri, p280). The problem is taken by these authors to have the following entailments, although they could just as well be viewed as presuppositions of the argument itself: that there is a fundamental difference between scientific and non-scientific beliefs, that the latter are either foundational to, or necessary conditions of, scientific beliefs, that science is grounded in the rational and perceptual faculties of individuals, not groups, and that there is no important difference between non-scientific beliefs based on perception, memory, etc and those based on metaphysical intuitions.

These points in turn strengthen the related, but more obviously question-begging, argument from counterintuitive consequences (Introduction, p17; Peels, p28): that scientism must be dubious if it denies that belief in e.g., moral facts, free will, persisting conscious selfhood, or the existence of tables, can constitute knowledge; culminating in Plantinga’s argument against scientism on the basis that it denies Christian articles of faith (p230-1). One doesn’t have to be a scientizer to reject this line of attack: Kant famously gave transcendental arguments for empirical realism, against wholesale skepticism, but not transcendent metaphysics, and the most sophisticated basis for defense of a fundamental difference between scientific and non-scientific beliefs –phenomenology – inherits Kant’s anti-metaphysical slant.

De Ridder’s paper, at least, builds a more nuanced case off the back of the fundamental problem, one that takes up the burden of demarcating science over and above common sense (which the Introduction had argued was scientism’s problem to solve, p12), and succeeds in illuminating scientizers’ positions as well. Rosenberg, for example, leans heavily on the “reflective” model of science as the means of uncovering the grounds of our beliefs (p88-9), and subsequently runs into the kinds of problems which for de Ridder motivate a more limited epistemic role for science. It soon becomes clear, though, that de Ridder thinks of science as built on foundations of ordinary observations, and of theories as a matter of ‘good’ observations made by many individuals. In portraying science this way, de Ridder gets to the nub of disputes between scientizers and their critics, namely, the importance of human experience to metaphysics and epistemology, which underlies worries that scientism (which supposedly ignores its own foundations in lived experience) is cold and inhuman.

Against the argument from counterintuitive consequences, scientizers will reply that we neither know how we know non-scientific truths, nor which of them are true, even if some must be; addressing these questions could well fall to science itself. To the fundamental problem, it seems open for them to insist that common sense is already proto-scientific: “values such as ontological simplicity, coherence and explanatory power are among the brain’s most basic criteria for recognizing information, for distinguishing information from noise” (Churchland 1989, p147). Ladyman and Ross (2007, p29) similarly demarcate science as no more than the application of these values at an institutional level, with a greater degree of rigor than individual observers can muster. The editors may be right that these kinds of replies are ultimately self-refuting, but I would have preferred to see more engagement with established naturalist epistemology in order to establish such a conclusion.

In fact, Peels concedes that the fundamental problem is really only applicable to the most “universal” forms of scientism, whereby science, unaided by philosophical argument, is supposed to justify the turn to naturalised epistemology, and the rejection of metaphysical or “armchair” intuitions. Such views are open to charges of self-refutation and circularity, as Stenmark, Plantinga, and van Woudenberg forcefully argue. However, this still leaves more restricted claims to the effect that all knowledge about specific domains of existence comes from science (Peels, this volume, p34-6), or that science is to be regarded as more reliable than some areas of common sense (Peels 2018, Conclusion). And it’s not clear that the scientizers contributing to this volume intend to be read as making any stronger claims than that: Ladyman calls “the idea that science tells us that all knowledge comes from science, and the idea that the latter claim is uniquely self-justifying … idiotic and dogmatic” (113), and distances himself from scientistic pop-epistemology which would supplant mainstream philosophy (p107). Even Rosenberg’s eliminative materialism, if true, would leave most everyday knowledge intact, such as what day of the week it is. Moreover, his position also leans on thought experiments, such as the possibility of having ‘all’ the physical facts (p84-5), and John Searle’s Chinese Room argument against functionalism (p97-8); examples of the kind of methodology which Ladyman and Ross dismiss as unscientific (2007, Chapter 1).

It soon becomes clear, then, that scientism means something different to its proponents than it does to its critics. According to Rosenberg, “Scientism is pessimistic or … disenchanted naturalism” (p84), by which he means naturalism that has given up the project of reconciling experience and common sense with science, and instead seeks to eliminate the former from its ontology altogether. Rosenberg’s definition of scientism is recognizably extreme, and so avoids much of the ambiguity in the previous chapters’ taxonomies. However, it’s not at all clear that his attempt to do away with intentionality can avoid charges of self-refutation, and he admits that an eliminativist conceptual scheme is little more than a pipe dream at present (p103).

Ladyman’s paper, meanwhile, adopts a more conciliatory brand of scientism than either Rosenberg or Ladyman and Ross (2007), emphasizing the scientific enlightenment’s benefits to civilisation. This is not entirely a rhetorical device, due to Ladyman’s characterisation of scientism as a “stance”; a set of attitudes and heuristics that one recommends others to adopt, rather than a rigid doctrine which can only be true or false. The scientistic stance is supposed to be uniquely self-critical (p113-4), but Ladyman does not demonstrate this exclusivity. (Scientism does at least seem to be a distinctive position by comparison to the “physicalist” stance advanced by Alyssa Ney, however; as she puts it, a good stance sticks its neck out (p269), but physicalism as she defines it does not do so clearly.) It is not clear how belief in multiple stances avoids the charge of relativism, if a stance is foundational to one’s epistemology. Ladyman does not assuage these worries, and emphasizes the “voluntarist” nature of stances (p111). As van Woudenberg argues, this seems to make the choice of scientism arbitrary (p188). William Fitzpatrick rightly emphasizes the role reasons play in deciding one’s choice of stance, even if the stance cannot be deduced from them (p254). Those reasons are mostly explored by other contributors. A more comprehensive survey of reasons to adopt the scientistic stance (or not) comprises the other major theme of this book, alongside the fundamental problem.

I have already noted that Kidd’s paper is exemplary in this respect, and Rosenberg’s effort surely qualifies as an interesting thought experiment (though this is the second time it has appeared in print: see Boudry & Pigliucci, 2018). Hilary Kornblith’s critique of the reliability of introspection sketches what, to my mind, is the most plausible line of argument for would-be scientizers. If Kornblith is right, then it is the scientific community whose methods meet the criteria of enabling rational deliberation, not first-person reflection, with the consequence that it is neither here nor there whether any non-scientist personally believes in the scientific consensus. This strongly suggests that scientism, if true, will be as elitist and insensitive to human experience as its critics say. Fitzpatrick’s paper, meanwhile, is an equally powerful rejoinder to similar efforts by others to debunk areas of moral philosophy as nothing but folk psychology. If he is right that the scientific facts marshalled by debunkers are only plausible if one has already adopted a scientistic stance, and if the scientistic stance could only be motivated by appeal to unbiased evidence against the reliability of personal experience, then scientism will be in trouble.

To conclude: this is a rich volume, with many promising lines of enquiry that deserve fuller treatment. However, it is also an uneven one, with several papers that tend toward the polemical. But that is to be expected when faced with a subject as controversial as scientism.

 

References

Beale, Jonathan and Ian James Kidd. eds. 2017. Wittgenstein and Scientism. London: Rourledge.

Boudry, Maarten and Massimo Pigliucci. eds. 2018. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press.

Haack, Susan. 2007. Defending Science within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Haack, Susan. 2017. Scientism and Its Discontents. Open Access e-book, available at https://roundedglobe.com/.

Harris, Sam. 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton.

Ladyman, James, Don Ross, David Spurrett, John Collier. 2007. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford University Press.

P. M. Churchland 1989, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. London: MIT Press.

Peels, Rik. 2018. “The Fundamental Argument Against Scientism.” In Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism, edited by Maarten Baudry and Massimo Pigliucci, 165-184. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Richard and Daniel Robinson. eds. 2015. Scientism: The New Orthodoxy. London: Bloomsbury.

 

 

© 2019 George Carpenter

 

George Carpenter