Scientism is, more or less, the position that all important questions of meaning, morality, and knowledge can be solved best through scientific methods. According to it, science has increasingly colonised those areas of enquiry that were once the preserve of philosophers and theologians, and that this trend will continue until the point where philosophy and theology have basically nothing left to contribute.
In this post I will discuss several problems with this position, and propose some possible solutions to those problems that may satisfy those who find scientism appealing.
The first problem with scientism is that there appear to be questions of value that are essentially unanswerable by any enquiry into facts. Consider what may be the bible of scientism, at least of the ethical variety, Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. In it, Harris proposes that it is possible to use neuroscience to determine, as a matter of fact, what states of affairs produce the maximum amount of ‘wellbeing’ for human beings. Setting aside the exegetical question of what Harris really means to say, I have seen many people interpret his work as demonstrating that there is no longer a need, or at least, there is an ever-diminishing need, for moral philosophy.
Yet there are several questions that need answering here for this to make sense:
- How do we define wellbeing and why is this particular definition better than another? Put differently, why should we care about wellbeing of one type over another?
- How do we deal with distributional issues? Consider the ‘utility monster‘ problem, or the ‘organ donor‘ problem?
These are strong challenges against utilitarianism, which appears to generally be the position that follows from this brand of scientism. Curiously enough, it is philosophers who try to answer these challenges. Perhaps there is at least an interim need for moral philosophy after all?
The second problem of scientism is that scientific enquiry itself involves all sorts of philosophical assumptions, and scientists themselves are usually unprepared and uninterested in discussing them. As the meta-methodological turn in the philosophy of science has shown , scientific research is only possible within methodological packages; that is, scientists do research on the basis of assumptions about what kinds of things exist (i.e., on the ontological status of the objects of enquiry) and how knowledge about them is possible (i.e., on the epistemological status of claims about the world). There is also the apparent fact that certain commitments are bound up in scientific practice, such as a commitment to establishing an open discourse on theories and to diligence in evaluating all claims. As Popper discussed, there is an affinity between the ideals of scientific enquiry and those of a liberal democracy. This doesn’t mean that such commitments cannot ultimately be justified with reference to their efficiency in truth-seeking, but the process by which scientists are socialised into their disciplines leads most to hold commitments as moral obligations rather than only as means to ends.
Oddly enough, many advocates of scientism I encounter still operate from the view that science either does or should proceed through naive falsificationism. This speaks volumes about their philosophical literacy, but also about the extent to which such people are actually themselves engaged in any form of scientific practice.
Nevertheless, there is a strong argument to be made that scientists do not have to think about their own philosophical assumptions – or at least not in the natural sciences  – because at a meta level, their methodological packages will emerge, transform, and be selected-for based entirely on how much empirical or cognitive traction they bring in studying the world. In other words, while philosophers of science may be interested in the metaphysics and epistemology of science, these interests bring no value-added to the actual process and progress of science. Hence the dreadful refrain, ‘philosophy has had two thousand years to progress, and I defy 