Nope. This disagrees with dictionary definitions of the word:
Merriam-Webster, sense 2: “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)”
Not sure disagees is the right assessment. We are obviously dealing with a case of polysemy. The two definitions you have cited are also quite different from each other in what they signify.
That one is called an ad hominem fallacy, your mask is slipping.
No it is not, since it is directed precisely at the argument you made. Scientism, like deities, has only ever been seen to exists in the imagination of those championing them.
That is directed precisely at me without addressing my argument at all, it is a textbook example of ad hominem. As of course is that puerile insult in the first sentence.
Disagree. They both point in the same direction, as an exaggerated belief/trust in the scientific method. My own personal encounters with the word scientism, as mentioned earlier, is its usage as a slur, to dismiss scientifically based arguments without any good reason. I have never seen it used the way you propose.
Again, I disagree. You’ve made a definition to explicitly exclude one academic discipline. It is contrary to all usages I have encountered. Philosophy can be useful if used properly, but it can also be used as a highly verbose and almost impenetrable bullshit generator.
You can start by identifying your own use of ad hominem, and your posts are now coming pretty close to trolling as well. Quoting your own ad hominem to troll, is not debate.
It speaks volumes about the arguments / beliefs you presented, that you descend to this as soon as your claims are challenged for evidence, and where your arguments were challenged as irrational.
What else can one infer, but that you are like all the apologists who came before you, are holding an empty bag. Not least as you have not even attempted to address the question in the thread OP, I shan’t even feign surprise.
“Scientism…religious leaders, have also adopted it as a pejorative term”
Just as you did here to @Keith77 posts above of course, smarting that he had criticised religions, but instead of offering a cogent objection, or attempting to address the question in the OP, you resorted to throwing around pejoratives aimed at the person who made the post. I have only ever seen the word scientism used in just this way, as ad hominem.
Your posts have doubled down on that use of ad hominem as well, as anyone can see.
The inability of apologists to evidence any deity or deities in any remotely objective way, has naught to do with the efficacy of science at understanding reality, though it’s astonishing success is manifest in the results.
And you are now resorting to ad hominem in private messages it seems…here’s a glimpse
I am reaching out here, because I don’t know what your performance in the forum is about. But it isn’t intelligent debating.
If you are genuinely looking for insightful conversation, then I can teach you how to do that."
Well thanks for the offer, but you should concentrate on that intelligent debate as petty name calling doesn’t remotely qualify.
Try evidencing some of your claims, or addressing the fallacious arguments you’ve used elsewhere, or answering the thread question. You won’t provoke me into name calling, that’s for people who have no credible answer to the questions they’re asked.
You are ambiguous and/or obfuscating and/or not providing enough information content here for me to decode it, so I don’t know quite what to extract from these sentences. Can you be more concrete and explicit?
The insults continue via private message from @TheMetrologist
"You are super driven here! You’ve been on here for years, contributing I don’t know how many posts over the years. You present it as a primarily intellectual position, but it is see through thin. Anyway, I am curious.
When you actually want to talk. Reach out."
Still no attempt to address the many questions put to him, or the thread OP, or to address the rational objections to his arguments elsewhere.
It is unerringly true that when people start using the word scientism as an accusation, they are generally trolling.
Anyway insults to my intellect, like appeals to my intellectual vanity will always fail, as I have no such pretentions. No remotely objective person would judge an argument based on who offered it, but always on its own merits.
It seems you were stung by the rational criticisms of your own fallacious claims in another thread, and rather than argue cogently against them, resorted to ad hominem.
Scientism could mean excessive trust in the method of one set of academic disciplines, say “the sciences” or it could be extended to all sorts of academic disciplines, to include excessive trust in the methods of philosophy, social sciences, history, theology, whatever… I don’t know the full semantic history of that word, but this is a very reasonable extension. This multiplicity of meanings is unproblematic for my use of the word.
Thank you for the clarification. Your use of the word scientism, in your own polysemic context, is a definition that seems designed to lead to a predefined conclusion. It is preloaded with premises I do not accept and a usage I have never encountered before. I refuse to discuss on such terms. Why not make up your own word instead? Like “antiphilosophism” or “philosophobia” (they probably already have definitions/meanings, but I can’t be arsed to look them up). But I’m sure you can think of something better.
Is it because “scientism” as I am using it is a pejorative word? But “philosophobia” would also be pretty pejorative too… It also would not express very well what I primarily signify by the word. The attitude towards philosophy is a consequence - a property if you will - of the view as I am understand it.
I do think it’s the most common usage though. Surely I have defined it in an usual way, with the list of propositions I produced. It was not meant as real, exact definition, but an ostensive, “starter” definition, open to further exploration. However, I don’t mean to diverge common usage.
A perfectly fine response. Happy to try to come to terms. But what was being debated here? Or perhaps, what debate do you want to get into? I was just pointing out that there exists a view, I called it “scientism” and tried to characterize it. I was anything but neutral about it, I flat out said that it was my “black beast”. A productive debate would perhaps require returning to a specific claim or concern we can discuss.
That does not mean there isn’t an appropriate use of the term.
The canonical example for me is that science tells us how to built nuclear bombs but cannot tell us whether we should build them, or if or when to use them. That would be the realm of philosophy, in particular, ethics. “Scientism” would be the belief that we need only science to function as a society.
So for me it comes down to questions of morality and ethics – what to do with knowledge and expertise once we acquire it.
Religion would claim that we must regulate all this with god’s alleged perfect moral code. I would argue that morality is based in, defined by and mediated by the demands of human empathy and nothing else. The golden rule, which predates Christianity, is all we have ever needed; we simply don’t follow it.
So in other words “scientism” is really technology without sufficient moral consideration in its deployment.
However Sheldon you are correct, in practice, I don’t know anyone who uses the term in that way. It has been appropriated by people who need to elevate belief over actual understanding by any means necessary.
The problem as I see it, is that a genuine objection to scientific hubris doesn’t need a pejorative word of its own, as it is particularly rare, and of course when apologists use this word their objections are seldom specific or accurate.
That is the canonical, readily understood example. I would extend this to other dimensions of philosophical enquiry, for example epistemology. Metaphysics - the study of the most general notions and most common features of the world - is also to be included. These are just the one I care about and attend to the most.
Arguably, the term scientism could also be extended to those who reject supernatural revelations or religious teachings merely because they are not justified by way of the scientific method, supposing that the scientific method - often inappropriately reduced to mere hypo-deduction (aka hypothesis testing) - is the only way we come to know the world. A belief which is not, to point out the obvious, susceptible of being tested in this way.
It is clearly the most successfully, and the assumption that anything exists beyond the physical world would need to be demonstrated with something beyond bare assertion, before science can be blamed for not detecting it.
Read the thread title, offer the best reason you have. hopefully it is far more compelling than the subjective assertions and logically dubious arguments you’ve presented thus far.
Mm, IDK that I agree. The whole environmental crisis for example is because of a combination of scientific, capitalistic and general human hubris. We do things because we CAN do them and the ill effects aren’t immediately apparent and/or we don’t connect the dots. If we had the ethical framework that all new tech should have to be assessed regarding side effects both initial and ongoing, then we wouldn’t be in these straits. And that is tech (applied science) without any ethical framework.
I will say that it s not purely a matter of scientific hubris and it can be argued that it is more basically just human arrogrance and short-sightedness, partially expressed through science and technology decisions.
Also: it’s fair to critique religious hubris as part of the problem. The notion that man has god-given “dominion over” the earth has been used to say that for example puny man could not change the climate, that man is lord of all his domain and should use it as he pleases.
