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Clarifying Scientific Concepts Part 14: Scientism

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Scientism Six Signs of Scientism Can someone dogmatically adhere to science at the expense of other methods of inquiry? We will look at Six Signs of Scientism to answer this question. Susan Haack’s central objective in Six Signs of Scientism is to demarcate scientism from legitimate science; not in the naïve sense of drawing a boundary around science proper (a move she explicitly critiques as itself scientistic), but rather to expose a cluster of intellectual temptations in contemporary culture that inflate the authority, epistemic reach, or rhetorical prestige of science beyond its proper bounds. Early on, she defines scientism as “a kind of over-enthusiastic and uncritically deferential attitude toward science, an inability to see or an unwillingness to acknowledge its fallibility, its limitations, and its potential dangers”. Her task is not to attack science, she explicitly defends its value, but to identify when admiration becomes uncritical worship. She warns that scientism...
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Clarifying Scientific Concepts Part 13: Pseudoscience

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Science and Pseudo-Science Demarcating science from non-science is quite difficult. There are obvious exemplars of pseudo-science and many prototypical examples of real science but there haven't been any necessary and sufficient conditions identified that can be used to categorize any particular example into a clearly defined bucket. Nevertheless, there are common features shared across many disciplines we deem scientific. These attributes form clusters; examples on the peripheries become harder to classify because they share features with canonical examples of pseudoscience. If you are familiar with Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance then this might make sense to you. You can also think about it in terms of network clustering. In the diagram below, you can think of the edges between nodes as defining some common relation and distance measuring some degree of closeness. A two dimensional view might look something like this: In the middle of the large cluster we m...
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Clarifying Scientific Concepts Part 12: Objectivity

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Scientific Objectivity: How Science Learns to Correct Human Subjectivity “Science is objective.” That sentence is familiar, powerful, and often misunderstood. In ordinary conversation, objectivity usually means something like neutrality, factuality, or freedom from personal opinion. Subjectivity, by contrast, is associated with perspective, emotion, taste, bias, or preference. On this common picture, science is objective because it deals in facts, measurements, experiments, and evidence, while subjective judgments belong to the realm of taste, feeling, ideology, or personal belief. There is something right about this contrast. Science really does aim to produce knowledge that is not merely private, idiosyncratic, or dependent on individual preference. A scientific claim is supposed to be testable, criticizable, repeatable, and accountable to evidence. It is supposed to be more than someone’s impression. But the simple contrast between objectivity and subjectivity breaks down qu...
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Clarifying Scientific Concepts Part 11: Systems Thinking

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Systems Thinking: Structure, Feedback, Boundaries, and Intervention Why Complex Systems Behave the Way They Do Systems thinking is a way of understanding the world that focuses not on isolated events, but on relationships, patterns, feedback, boundaries, adaptation, and change over time. It asks a different set of questions from ordinary linear analysis. Instead of asking only, "What caused this problem?" systems thinking asks, "What structure keeps producing this pattern?" This distinction matters because many of the most important problems in the world do not behave like simple machines. Traffic congestion, climate change, organizational dysfunction, addiction, economic inequality, public health, education, social media, urban design, and ecological collapse all involve many interacting parts. They unfold over time. They contain delays. They generate unintended consequences. They resist simple fixes. A central insight associated with thinkers like Donella M...
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