vincentML
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Joined: 10/31/2009
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quote:
From where I sit, there is no intention to attack Science, either overtly or covertly. Actually, the attack on Science doesn't come from my perspective but in the distortion of science that enables Scientism. There is no basis in the scientific method for the claim that the scientific method is the only possible avenue to discovering truth. This claim is purely ideological - as such it cannot be part of a methodology. It is this claim, and the specific ideology that enables and necessitates it and the dangerous deceitful conflation of science with Scientism, that have been the sole targets of my critique, as I have specified several times.
Tweakabelle, the term 'Scientism' carries with it a post-modernist slander against science:
Scientism is a philosophical position that exalts the methods of the natural sciences above all other modes of human inquiry. Scientism embraces only empiricism and reason to explain phenomena of any dimension, whether physical, social, cultural, or psychological. Drawing from the general empiricism of the Enlightenment, scientism is most closely associated with the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798 1857), who held an extreme view of empiricism, insisting that true knowledge of the world arises only from perceptual experience. Comte criticized ungrounded speculations about phenomena that cannot be directly encountered by proper observation, analysis, and experiment. Such a doctrinaire stance associated with science leads to an abuse of reason that transforms a rational philosophy of science into an irrational dogma (Hayek 1952).
So, Comte's criticism of speculations ungrounded in perceptual experience is a doctrinaire stance? How is that? I am puzzled. Not really. I understand the political concerns of giving power to a scientific elite. However, I think that is a misguided position as evidenced by the popular pushback against UN Climate proclamations. Furthermore, the observation that 44% of Americans are certain of the second coming of Jesus within the next 50 years also testifies to the lack of danger from any scientific elite reigning supreme over public policy.
Criticism is carried to extreme in the following outrageous comment:
A scientistic culture privileges scientific knowledge over all other ways of knowing. It uses jargon, technical language, and technical evidence in public debate as a means to exclude the laity from participation in policy formation. Despite such obvious transgressions of democracy, common citizens yield to the dictates of scientism without a fight. The norms of science abound in popular culture, and the naturalized authority of scientific reasoning can lead, if left unchecked, to a malignancy of cultural norms. The most notorious example of this was seen in Nazi Germany, where a noxious combination of scientism and utopianism led to the eugenics excesses of the Third Reich (Arendt [1951] 1973). SOURCE
It wasn't science that fueled the eugenics excesses. It was a twisted political ideology that used medical sycophants and cowards to implement murderous practices. The Nazi card is a slander. If evil men use science for evil means does science become scientism? I don't think so?
So, what's going on here? Just my opinion of course but I see 'scientism' as a harmful and unsupportable post-modernist criticism that comforts, however unintended, the attacks against science from the fundamentalist religious right whose literalist reading of the bible and unswerving allegiance to the authority of those ancient books is threatened by science.
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RE: The Covert Messiah - 
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