I’ve written about scientism for several years, and have highlighted the many people, including Philip Kitcher, Massimo Pigliucci, Uncle Eric MacDonald, Steve Gould (in Rocks of Ages), and the flock of theologians who use the term “scientism” as a cudgel: an example of science overstepping its boundaries. The faithful also use it to say, ironically, “See? Science is just as harmful as faith.”
One of the problems has been the definition of “scientism,” which varies from commenter to commenter but is always pejorative. I take it to mean “science overstepping its boundaries” in the sense of Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria: scientists misusing science or technology to bad ends (racism or eugenics), claiming they will take over the humanities (as in E. O. Wilson’s notion of “consilience”), or making moral and political pronouncements that exceed scientific expertise or ambit.
The problem is that these accusations always exceed the crimes, and that’s evidenced by the failure of “scientism” critics to give examples of the sin. My responses would be that few scientists now misuse the field to support racism or other odious views, that in many ways humanities can truly benefit from using the methods of science—with science conceived broadly as “the use of evidence and reason (and often statistics) to support its claims”—and that almost no scientist thinks that our endeavors will engulf art, music, and literature.
Nevertheless, the criticisms burgeon, and Steve Pinker finally got fed up. His response appears today in the New Republic, in a four-page essay called “Science is not your enemy: an impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians”. This is a wonderful piece, written with Pinker’s characteristic logic and panache, and, since it’s free online, you have no reason not to read it. I implore my readers to go through this four-page piece. In fact, I’ll say it’s required reading for this website. You’ll also like the encomiums given to science and the denigrations of faith.
I won’t discuss the piece in detail since you must read it, but I’ll give a few excerpts to show where Pinker’s going. His main message is that scientism is largely a canard, but that people in the humanities and other areas outside “hard science” should welcome rather than fear the incursion of science into their fields.
One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.” The past couple years have seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone, together with attacks in Bookforum, The Claremont Review of Books, The Huffington Post, The Nation, National Review Online, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, and Standpoint.
. . . In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life. The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves.
. . . The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.
That, of course, is the besetting sin of religion, and why it’s incompatible with science as a “way of knowing.” It has no way to determine whether its assertions are wrong. While the caravan of science moves on, the dogs of theology bark but don’t tag along.
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities.
Pinker goes on to list the contributions of science to not only human welfare, but to the understanding of the universe—a litany of achievements that theology can’t hope to match, since it’s revealed nothing convincing about the cosmos. His list of what science has done will give you immense pride in what one highly cerebralized primate has been able to wrest from that cosmos. Theology, on the hand, brings me only a sense of shame that so many people have wasted their time on a nonexistent being when they could have been contributing to human progress. Pinker then proceeds to debunk the idea that science is responsible for dystopian social movements,
Finally, he lays out the variety of ways science can contribute to the humanities: by giving us a better take on human nature, by the use of statistics and data analysis to settle questions of social and political science, and by providing fertile new ground: the study of how the workings of the human brain, as revealed by science, provide more depth to the social sciences, literary analysis, and even studies of music. (He uses archaeology, linguistics and the philosophy of mind as successes in applying science to other areas.)
Read it now! I am not often a fanboy, but really, I find nothing to critique in this piece, though I’m sure some readers will. I see it as the definitive refutation of the scientism canard, converting it into a pressed duck. The final dorsoventral compression is achieved in the last paragraph:
And the critics should be careful with the adjectives. If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy siloes of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species.
This won’t be the end of the debate, of course. I’m sure that outraged theologians and humanities professors will try go get their licks in, so stay tuned.
As lagniappe, today’s Jesus and Mo was inspired by Pinker’s piece: