The sin of scientism - Thinking About Science

The United States is characterized by a peculiar mixture of science-worshipping and anti-intellectualism. On the one hand, America is the clear world leader in science and technology, boasting achievements such as landing a human on the Moon (or, more questionably, inventing and using nuclear weapons). On the other hand, almost half of the American people don't "believe" in evolution, and many espouse all sorts of doubtful or downright silly beliefs in paranormal phenomena. How is this possible?

Many explanations have been proposed, and undoubtedly several are needed. As is often the case with complex sociological phenomena, many factors are at play simultaneously, and there is no simple answer to the problem. I'd like to focus here on what I think certainly is one of these factors, which when mentioned finds scientists and skeptics immediately on the defensive: the intellectual hubris of scientism.

Scientism is not a philosophical position that people espouse of their own choice. There is no National Association for the Advancement of Scientism, and in fact there is not even a word to label a person who engages in scientism (engaging in scientistic behavior doesn't make you a scientist). Indeed, the word is often hurled at people as an insult, especially by philosophers at other philosophers, or by creationists at evolutionary biologists and other scientists.

Scientism is essentially an ideological position implying that science is the only key to solve any problem worth addressing, and that--given enough time and resources--science in fact will solve those problems. Let us consider philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland's rather radical idea that emotions do not exist. Their notion of "eliminativism" (see Armstrong, D.M., 1999. The eliminativist theory, pp. 91-99 in The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado) aims at reducing all psychological talk to terms of neurobiology, and the idea is that when one thinks of neurons and electrical potentials, one does not need to bring up cumbersome and vague concepts such as emotion. One could object that if there is a problem when attempting to translate the complexities of human mental phenomena into current neurobiological parlance, perhaps it is the latter that is at fault for being too simplistic. The Churchlands, on the other hand, have faith in the fact that eventually psychology will be absorbed into biology, just as chemistry is now considered largely a branch of physics. Perhaps, but the jury is obviously still out, and it seems premature to be too dogmatic on the matter.

Another example of scientism can be found in the ambitious program that E.O. Wilson set up for himself when writing his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In it, the famous biologist (already controversial enough for wishing to straightforwardly extend the sociobiology of ants to that of human beings) attempted to present the broad picture of a "consilience," i.e., a unification, of all branches of human knowledge, from science to history, from religion to art. The problem was that rather than a unification, Wilson's project increasingly took the shape of a program of academic imperialism in which science would eventually reduce and explain everything else.

Skeptics have their share of scientistic tendencies, real or perceived, as on those occasions in which they dismiss out of hand (i.e., without serious consideration, or based only on armchair investigations) new or unusual phenomena. We should always remember that plenty of currently accepted scientific discoveries were once thought to be "impossible" or to contradict established scientific principles (heliocentrism, the theory of evolution, and continental drift immediately come to mind).

What, exactly, is wrong with scientism? I maintain that there are two categories of problems with it, which every serious skeptic should ponder from time to time. First, it is philosophically untenable. Just because science has been such a successful activity in the past, it simply does not follow that it will continue to be so in the future, or that it will work in any particular case. To think otherwise is to put an unsubstantiated amount of trust in the method of induction (the idea that one can generalize from past experience), a principle that in itself cannot be justified on scientific grounds (see the May/June 2003 "Thinking About Science" column).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, adopting a scientistic attitude is likely to result in very bad publicity with the average citizen. The essence of science is the application of critical thinking to empirically verifiable questions, and the last thing one should do in order to foster such attitude is to engage in what other people justly perceive as an argument from authority ("believe me, I have a Ph.D. in the sciences ..."). What we often fail to convey to the public is not that science is incredibly effective at solving a wide variety of problems--it obviously is. We fail to present science as an open-ended inquiry, a process of continuous revision of its own findings, a metaphor of the never-ending quest for human knowledge and wisdom. Scientism is the secular equivalent of religious bigotry, and it does no good to either society or to science itself.