Author's Introduction
- ‘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).
Author's Conclusion
- Now, philosophers who weaponise ‘scientism’ tend to find scientism threatening to non-scientific academic disciplines. Again, Haack is a case in point. In her paper ‘The Real Question: Can Philosophy Be Saved?’ (2017) she claims that ‘the rising tide of scientistic philosophy […] spells shipwreck for philosophy itself.’ However, there is a continuum between a dogmatic acceptance of science, or ‘science worship’, which is often mistakenly referred to as ‘scientism’, and a dogmatic rejection of science, or ‘science denial’. If a dogmatic acceptance of science is an epistemic threat, as academic philosophers who weaponise ‘scientism’ tend to claim, then a dogmatic rejection of science is an epistemic threat, too. In fact, a dogmatic rejection of science is a bigger epistemic threat than a dogmatic acceptance of science. Why? Because science is the most successful epistemic enterprise human beings have ever had, as almost all philosophers of science agree.
- As Anjan Chakravartty puts it in his entry on scientific realism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is a ‘widely accepted premise that our best [scientific] theories are extraordinarily successful: they facilitate empirical predictions, retrodictions, and explanations of the subject matters of scientific investigation, often marked by astounding accuracy and intricate causal manipulations of the relevant phenomena.’ In other words, the flip side of dogmatic ‘science worship’ is dogmatic ‘science denial’. Surely, both are misguided. But the latter is a much riskier mistake to make than the former.
- Rather than conceive of scientism in ways that could be weaponised, then, we should think about it along the lines I have proposed above. Epistemological scientism is the view that scientific knowledge is superior to non-scientific knowledge either because scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge we have, and so non-scientific knowledge is not really knowledge at all, or because scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge. Unlike pejorative conceptions of scientism, these neutral conceptions cannot be weaponised, and thus cannot become anti-science weapons of doubt and disbelief in the hands of anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, and others who harbour anti-science sentiments. This would allow us to keep the following question open and up for debate: what sort of attitude or stance should we have toward science? As far as this question is concerned, the term ‘scientism’ is a useful term, and it would be a shame to let this live and important debate get derailed by pejorative conceptions of scientism that do nothing but provide ammunition to science deniers.
Author Narrative
- Moti Mizrahi is associate professor of philosophy in the School of Arts and Communication at the Florida Institute of Technology. His books include The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), The Relativity of Theory: Key Positions and Arguments in the Contemporary Scientific Realism/Antirealism Debate (2020), and For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy (2022).
Notes
- I have no great objection to the author's thesis that there's nothing wrong with Weak Scientism, and I think philosophers and others working in liberal arts could do with being more modest. The logical positivists saw philosophy as the handmaid of the sciences.
- I also agree with the author's complaints about the 'weaponising' of objections to Strong Scientism for those wanting to escape from the inconvenient truths discorered by science.
- However, I have complaints about his methodology of determining the relative usefulness of the scientific and non-scientific disciplines - which is to base them on the numbers of scientific journal items published and cited. Maybe he's taken the number of participants into account, but I would hope that there are lots more researchers in STEM subjects than in the arts and social sciences.
- Also, a scientific paper can be on the minutiae of some niche area. Such are necessary, but distort the statistics. While there's some of this in philosophy, in general it deals with wider issues.
- As for philosophy papers, it's a consequence of the tenure-track system in academia that there are even as many as there are. It has been argued that philosophers should be paid not to write except when they've something important to say, to save wasting the time of those professionals who will be 'forced' to read their worthless productions in order to keep up with the subject.
- That said, science does seem to make real progress and to lead to real knowledge, both theoretical and practical, as the author evidences. This is why some scientists have doubts about those within their profession who go beyond the phenomena - what can be measured - to speculate about 'the underlying reality'. Someone - no doubt - needs to do this, and it might as well be properly-trained philosophers rather than the scientists themselves who should maintain their focus.
- Where scientism is a menace is to treat celebrity scientists as experts outside their disciplines and suppose they can pronounce authoritatively on the social and political issues of the day. Better they than footballers or pop or film stars; at least scientists have been trained to distingush fact from fiction.
- Finally, there's so much alalysis of history and culture that also supplies knowledge. It may not be 'new knowledge' that will help develop new technology, but it's important to reflect on how we got to where we are today, and what we should be doing. This isn't science properly so-called.
- The various books cited are usually far too expensize, though there's what seems to be a pre-print of "Mizrahi (Moti ) - What’s so bad about Scientism?" available on-line that I've downloaded.
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most successful epistemic enterprise in history"
- For the full text see Aeon: Mizrahi - Why not scientism?.
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- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
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