Scientism
Scientism is the view that the natural sciences are the only or the best source of genuine knowledge, with all other forms of inquiry either reducible to science or epistemically inferior.
The term is almost always used pejoratively, including by many people who hold something close to the underlying view. It comes in a strong form (only scientific claims count as knowledge; ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics produce no real knowledge of their own) and a weak form (science is by far the most reliable source of knowledge about the natural world, and other disciplines should defer to it where their claims overlap). The strong form is hard to defend; the weak form is widely accepted across the analytic mainstream.
The strong form runs into a self-reference problem: the claim “only science produces knowledge” is itself not a scientific claim, and so by its own standard does not produce knowledge. This is the classic refutation, due originally to philosophers like Edmund Husserl and pressed in our era by people like Alvin Plantinga and Edward Feser. Most working scientists who get accused of scientism (Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) hold something between the strong and weak forms and respond to the charge in different ways.
Critics from religious traditions often use “scientism” as shorthand for a perceived overreach: scientists making metaphysical and ethical pronouncements as though those pronouncements followed from the science. This complaint is sometimes well-targeted (when the pronouncement does not in fact follow from the science) and sometimes a deflection (when the pronouncement does follow, or follows from science plus uncontroversial premises, and the critic does not want to engage).
Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape (2010) is the most prominent contemporary defense of something close to scientism in ethics: he argues that moral questions are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures, and so are in principle empirical questions for psychology and neuroscience. Most philosophers, even atheist ones, have rejected the argument as conflating descriptive and normative claims, but the broader question — how much of philosophy and ethics ultimately reduces to natural science — remains live.
Sources
- Massimo Pigliucci, “New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy (2013)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Naturalism
Related terms
- Metaphysical naturalismMetaphysical naturalism is the view that the natural world — the world studied by physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences — is all that exists; there are no gods, souls, or supernatural realms.
- Methodological naturalismMethodological naturalism is the working principle that scientific inquiry should look only for natural causes — not because the supernatural is ruled out as impossible, but because invoking it would prevent the inquiry from going anywhere.
- NoncognitivismNoncognitivism about religious language is the view that statements like "God loves us" don't make factual claims at all — they express attitudes, emotions, or commitments rather than describing states of affairs that could be true or false.