Okay, so I keep promising a post on scientism, specifically on whether or not it’s self-refuting. Now I’m finally going to answer that question.

As a quick warning, “scientism” isn’t a recognized philosophical position, it’s more of a cuss-word along the lines of “godlessness.” However, it does get used in association with certain ideas about the status of science. Vic Reppert, for example, associates it with Bertrand Russell’s claim that “what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.” Reppert suggests that this is self-refuting since it’s not a scientific claim, and therefore if true would be unknowable. Edward Fesser says the same thing in The Last Superstition. Keith Ward, in Is Religion Dangerous? takes a similar line, though his target is the view that “the only reasonable beliefs are those that can be confirmed by the methods of science” and he doesn’t call it scientism. Ward insists this argument is “absolutely conclusive”–no need to worry about whatever assumptions he’s making, or whether they’re justified!

Critics of scientism, though, do make some important assumptions. In Reppert’s case, one assumption is based on a misreading of Russell. The Russell quote comes from an essay of Russell’s titled “Science and Ethics,” which Russell introduced with a disclaimer that the essay is “my personal belief, not the dictum of science.” Russell later says that he does think that there are good arguments for his view. Reppert’s implicit assumption, which Russell would reject, is that if something is knowledge, it can’t have anything going for it short of “being knowledge.” Reppert even acts as if things that aren’t knowledge can’t be worth asserting, though from what I know of his philosophical views I doubt he believes this.

Reppert also talks as if it were just obvious that Russell’s claim could never be scientifically verified, even mentions insisting on one point “over and over again until I’m blue in the face,” as if the color of his face were supposed to provide proof of his rightness. Here’s one good reason to think otherwise: as Russel argues in the afterward to his Problems of Philosophy, disciplines of human knowledge start off as philosophy when we don’t know much about them, and become science when we learn something definite. This is why philosophers often seem to know so little. This fact gives us reason to hope that things that are currently mere “philosophy”–beliefs justified by some argument, that fall short of being knowledge–may one day have hard science behind them. Oh, and how is this belief of Russell’s justified? By looking at the history of the issue–in other words, by evidence.

That’s a funny thing about this debate. The anti-scientism folks keep insisting that certain “philosophical” questions are to be decided without reference to evidence, but when these topics come up, normal people reflexively look to the evidence. In debates about science, they look to the history of science. A good example of how if you work under an assumption long enough, it can seem so obvious as to not be worth spelling out in an argument, even if normal people would never consider it anything close to obvious.

By the way, I think the “some questions involve no evidence” view may have been what was really driving Richard Chappell in his response to my post on empiricism and induction. In the comments, Richard claimed empiricism can be refuted if epistemic principles are knowable, but I don’t know how that argument’s supposed to work unless you assume “if epistemic principles are knowable, they are knowable a priori.“