? Is it irredeemably ignorant, arrogant, and smug? Well, mostly. Even usually. But there is perhaps one small way in which it captures an approach to the world that I find helpful.
I like to take a problem-driven approach to enquiry. What this means is that I do not see it as some attempt to find ultimate truth, but rather to solve pressing dilemmas in accomplishing whatever it is I feel like doing. This sounds prosaic, but it has significant implications. When I am going about doing science, for example, what I feel like doing is making claims about the world that satisfy my standards for descriptive accuracy. And this is a dilemma, in that I can’t just say anything, but rather have to follow certain procedures and engage in certain kinds of directed research. When I am doing ethics, I am recognising that I can’t just do anything to anyone, but rather have to find ways of juggling competing or mutually exclusive obligations, desires, and courses of action that have interpersonal significance. Proponents of scientism often seem interested in the practical nature of science: scientists don’t spend aeons debating whether the smallest things are made of substances or processes, for example, but just get on with finding stuff out about the world so that it’s less confusing and so that we can do new things. This is certainly a problem-driven view of enquiry, even if we recognise that many of the problems that scientists want to solve are influenced not just by method  but also by social concerns .
According to the above view, there is actually a way to view philosophy as a kind of science, and a progressive one at that. The pragmatist philosopher of science Larry Laudan argues that science consists of attempts to solve conceptual and empirical problems occurs within ‘research traditions':
A set of beliefs about what sorts of entities and processes make up the domain of inquiry [and] a set of epistemic and methodological norms about how the domain is to be investigated, how theories are to be tested, how data are to be collected, etc.
As Laudan explains:
A theory solves an empirical problem when it entails, along with appropriate initial and boundary conditions, a statement of the problem [and] a theory solves a conceptual problem when it fails to exhibit a conceptual difficulty of its predecessor.
In an important way, philosophy as it is done by academic philosophers also conforms to this model. As you will see from a quick scan of philosophy journals, philosophers are responding to current problems and debating matters of method and concept in a way that cumulatively sorts good solutions to philosophical problems from bad ones and leaves a body of accepted knowledge in its wake, albeit one that is confined to particular research traditions. If we set aside for a moment the term ‘science’ and think instead about ‘enquiry’, we find common ground in the epistemic nature of what chemists do and what moral philosophers do. This doesn’t exactly vindicate the scientistic notion that all research should be ‘scientific’, but it does suggest that there is something deeper about what scientists do that makes their enquiries into the world especially conducive to the production of good knowledge, and that one doesn’t need to use special instruments or mathematics to follow their lead on many issues not typically thought of as falling within the domain of science.
In other words, the notion that science will bring us all the answers is unforgivably ignorant and daft. But thoroughgoing, self-conscious, critical problem-solving carried out within a community of investigators committed to producing a kind of public knowledge need not be the sole province of STEM practitioners, but can provide a model for tackling all sorts of puzzles and dilemmas, including those that cannot be resolved in any final sense by reference to empirical fact.
As exemplified by Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Larry Laudan, who all wrote extensively on the nature of scientific practice.
 In the social sciences, where theorising does not take place entirely within on