by MOTI MIZRAHI
Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most successful epistemic enterprise in history
‘Philosophy is dead,’ Stephen Hawking once declared, because it ‘has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.’ It is scientists, not philosophers, who are now ‘the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’. The response from some philosophers was to accuse Hawking of ‘scientism’. The charge of ‘scientism’ is meant to convey disapproval of anyone who values scientific disciplines, such as physics, over non-scientific disciplines, such as philosophy. The philosopher Tom Sorell writes that scientism is ‘a matter of putting too high a value on science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture’. But what’s wrong with putting a higher value on science compared with other academic disciplines? What is so bad about scientism? If physics is in fact a better torch in the quest for knowledge than philosophy, as Hawking claimed, then perhaps it should be valued over philosophy and other non-scientific fields of enquiry.
Before we can address these questions, however, we need to get our definitions straight. For, much like other philosophical -isms, ‘scientism’ means different things to different philosophers. Now, the question of whether science is the only way of knowing about reality, or at least better than non-scientific ways of knowing, is an epistemological question. Construed as an epistemological thesis, then, scientism can be broadly understood as either the view that scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge we have, or the view that scientific knowledge is the best form of knowledge we have. But scientism comes in other varieties as well, including methodological and metaphysical ones. As a methodological thesis, scientism is either the view that scientific methods are the only ways of knowing about reality we have, or the view that scientific methods are the best ways of knowing about reality we have. And, construed as a metaphysical thesis, scientism is either the view that science is our only guide to what exists, or the view that science is our best guide to what exists.
Without a clear understanding of the aforementioned varieties of scientism, philosophical parties to the scientism debate are at risk of merely talking past each other. That is, some defenders of scientism might be arguing for weaker varieties of scientism, in terms of scientific knowledge or methods being the best ones, while their opponents interpret them as arguing for stronger varieties of scientism, in terms of scientific knowledge or methods being the only ones. My own position, for example, is a weak variety of scientism. In my paper ‘What’s So Bad about Scientism?’ (2017), I defend scientism as an epistemological thesis, which I call ‘Weak Scientism’. This is the view that scientific knowledge is the best form of knowledge we have (as opposed to ‘Strong Scientism’, which is the view that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge we have).
According to Weak Scientism, while non-scientific disciplines such as philosophy do produce knowledge, scientific disciplines such as physics produce knowledge that is superior – both quantitatively and qualitatively – to non-scientific knowledge. It is important to note that ‘knowledge’ does not refer to justified true belief (or any other analysis of knowledge, for that matter). Rather, ‘knowledge’ means disciplinary knowledge or the research produced by practitioners in an academic field of enquiry. All academic disciplines are in the business of producing knowledge (or research) in this sense. The knowledge of each academic discipline is what we find in the academic publications of the practitioners of an academic discipline. Proponents of Strong Scientism would deny that non-scientific disciplines produce ‘real knowledge’, as Richard Williams puts it in the introduction to the anthology Scientism: The New Orthodoxy (2014), whereas proponents of Weak Scientism would grant that non-scientific disciplines produce knowledge but argue that scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge along several dimensions.
Now, whether any of these epistemological, methodological and metaphysical theses – weak (‘best’) or strong (‘only’) – is true should be a matter of debate, not definition by fiat. Each claim needs to be put forward, examined, criticised and debated. It can’t be what some have unfortunately sought to do, which is to make scientism a misguided view by definition. Take the psychologist Steve Taylor who wrote in 2019:
One of the characteristics of dogmatic belief systems is that their adherents accept assumptions as proven facts. This is certainly true of scientism. For example, it is a fact that consciousness exists, and that it is associated with neurological activity. But the assumption that consciousness is produced by neurological activity is questionable.
Here, Taylor asserts that scientism is a dogmatic belief system. But why is that? None of the epistemological, methodological and metaphysical theses mentioned above is dogmatic. These theses can be questioned, of course. However, if merely being questionable were sufficient to make a belief dogmatic, then many if not most of our beliefs would be dogmatic. To see why, consider my (and, in all likelihood, your) belief that there is an external world, a world that is there independently of our minds. Our belief in the existence of an external world is notoriously difficult to prove, as any epistemologist will tell you, but that doesn’t mean that our belief in an external world is nothing more than mere (religious) dogma.
Likewise, in her book Defending Science – Within Reason (2003), Susan Haack asserts that, by definition, scientism is ‘an exaggerated kind of deference towards science, an excessive readiness to accept as authoritative any claim made by the sciences, and to dismiss any kind of criticism of science or its practitioners as anti-scientific prejudice’. But this runs into the same problem above. None of the epistemological, methodological and metaphysical theses mentioned above are exaggerated or excessive. To have an exaggerated deference toward something is misguided, and to have an excessive readiness to accept as authoritative any claims made by some source is foolhardy. After all, that’s just what the words ‘exaggerated’ and ‘excessive’ imply.
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