All right, so this is scientism and these are some of the main varieties of scientism. Now let's look at what can be said for scientism, so let's look at some of the arguments that have been or could be leveled for scientism. I'm going to discuss seven arguments and what I'm going to do is I'm going to present them to you and provide one or two responses that you will find in the literature and then leave it to you to think about it and see what you find is convincing. So seven arguments, here's the first one and the most obvious one in a way, Science is very successful. Look at the world around you, iPhones, laptops, airplanes, science is everywhere. It has in fact, discovered all sorts of truths that have drastically changed our lives and more specifically, it has discovered some important truths that we would not have discovered without science. So, we would not have discovered that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around without science. Science is often extremely complex and detailed, so, think for instance of quantum mechanics, right, those are highly detailed and complex truths. And finally, another important characteristic of these truths is that they are often in a way, grand and unifying. So take for instance, Evolutionary Theory, so Neo-Darwinian selection, random mutation and natural selection, that mechanism can explain biological diversity all over the world, in the course of history. So it doesn't merely explain certain features of this animal over here or that animal over there, but it explains the features of animals all over the world, millions and millions, so, it's grand and unifying. All right, so this is what some people say and Rosenberg again is an example of this, he says, “the phenomenal accuracy of its prediction”, so of the prediction of science “and the breath-taking extent and detail of its explanations are powerful reasons to believe that physics is the whole truth about reality”. So only physics provides us with knowledge. Now, this seems to me quite right, but here's the main problem and the main response that people have been giving to this. They say, look, this will count in favor of science because look, science is grand and unifying and complex and detailed, but as such does not count against common sense, right? So yes, science does provide us with knowledge, but it does not mean that there's something wrong with non-scientific sources of knowledge, such as memory and introspection with moral intuition or maybe a religious experience or any of those other things. So, it's a good point, but it's not really an argument for scientism, that's the reply you'll find in your literature. So let's move on to the second argument, the second argument says this, beliefs based on science can be tested and science has safety mechanisms. So, we can repeat a certain experiment to check the truth of a certain scientific theory and science has safety mechanisms, so for instance, there are randomized controlled trials in Madison and we do peer review, anonymous peer review all over the place, including in the humanities. And this increases the reliability of science and the idea is it counts against non-scientific sources of knowledge. Here's Rosenberg again, he says, “in science, nothing is taken for granted. Every significant new claim, and a lot of insignificant ones, are sooner or later checked and almost never completely replicated. More often, they are corrected, refined, and improved on, assuming the claims aren't refuted altogether. Because of this error-reducing process,” that's a crucial word, “the further back you go from the research frontier, the more the claims have been refined, reformulated, tested, and grounded”. Now, here are two replies that people have been giving to this, first, many common sense beliefs, so beliefs that are not based on science, can be tested as well. So for instance, if I have a piece of paper here, I can see it, but I can also touch it, I won't do it, I could even smell it, and I can ask you, for instance, whether you also see this paper and I can ask you about it and so on. So, there are many ways, beliefs that are not based on science can still be tested, so, the fact that science does so doesn't count against common sense. And here's the second point, why would you think that only beliefs that can be tested are rational or only those beliefs count as instances of knowledge. One reason to doubt that this is the case, is to look at the basis of science, so, for instance, science assumes that there is an external world, right, an external material world, that is something that you cannot test, because, well, you can test it, but you will have to assume, again, that there is an external world, right. So there are many things that science takes for granted, that cannot be tested, but that doesn't mean that they are irrational or that they don't count as knowledge. So let's move on to the third argument, the third argument says, takes it a step further and says, look, science contradicts common sense. Here's Lewis Wolpert, again, a biologist, a British biologist, in his nice book, The Unnatural Nature of Science, here's what he says, “Both the ideas that science generates and the way in which science is carried out are entirely counter-intuitive and against common sense by which I mean that scientific ideas cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and that they are very often outside everyday experience. I would almost contend that if something fits with common sense it almost certainly isn't science”. And if you read more in the book, you'll find out that the basic idea is science goes against common sense, but science provides knowledge, hence, common sense doesn’t. And there are examples that might be taken to support this claim. So a colleague of mine from another university, so he's in the physics department at Leiden University, so he did an experiment, so this is in Geneva and he shot an electron from one side of the lake to the other side of the lake and he claims on the basis of science, it's never been in between those two places. So you shot it from here to there but it's never been anywhere in between, but it's the same electron and that clearly counts against common sense one might think, right? Because we think, look, if I've got a watch over here and at some later time it's over here then it must have traveled that distance. Here's a reply one might give to this, do people really hold beliefs about this? So people do hold beliefs about the fact that a watch cannot go from here to there without having been in between those two places. But do people hold beliefs about, what are electrons can move from one place to another without having been in between? Do they hold beliefs about the possibility of curved space on a large scale or other things that go against common sense? It seems to me that most people will hold beliefs about these things on a daily life basis and not when it comes to electrons or other, in a way, weird phenomenon that we find in natural science. If you ask them, they might find it counterintuitive, but they don't really hold firm beliefs about this. So, even though the point is valid, one might think, it's not a good argument for scientism. So, let's move on to the fourth one, the fourth one says basically this, we understand the genesis of scientific knowledge, so we understand how scientific knowledge comes about. We do this experiment, we check it and we check it again and you can check it for yourself, we can look through the microscope and find something out, and that's how we acquire knowledge. However, when it comes to non-scientific sources of knowledge, or of alleged knowledge, we don’t know how that’s supposed to work, so, for instance, when it comes to God, people claim that they know that God exists or that they know who God is, but how is that supposed to work, we don’t really know how that works. Or take morality, so people think they know the truth of certain allegedly objective moral facts or moral statements, but how is that supposed to work? We don't really know but if we don't really know it, then we can't have moral knowledge and we can't know that God exists. But in the case of science, we do have knowledge, that's the basic idea of the argument. So is it convincing? Here's two replies to them, first, if you look at the philosophical literature, you will find lots of theories about how knowledge of the supernatural, about God or knowledge about moral statements, how did it come about. So Alvin Plantinga, for instance, in the philosophy of religion, has developed certain models, he calls it the Aquinas/Calvin model, the AC Model, of how knowledge about God could come about. He's defended this in detail. And similar theories, you'll find in ethics and in metaethics, so it's maybe a little too quick to say that there's nothing to be said there. And second and I would say equally importantly, science is based on certain sources of knowledge for which it is not entirely clear or entirely unclear how such knowledge is supposed to come about. So a well known example here is mathematics, if you ask mathematicians, most of them will say that there are objective mathematical truths out there. But how could we ever know such extremely complex mathematical truths as we find in mathematics nowadays? How is it supposed to work? There are certain theories out there, but it's certainly something at least slightly mysterious. So it's not always clear how scientific knowledge comes about.
