Tag: “Scientism”

  • You might learn something

    Gosh, that was a lively discussion. It was sometimes rather…cryptic, though. When Dan L asked Michael, “where’s the dividing line? Where does philosophy stop and science start?” Michael said it was a tough question, and rather than answer it himself, pasted in a long excerpt from a post by Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking last November. It wasn’t the most helpful excerpt from that post that he could have chosen – there’s a more relevant one later on, for instance:

    So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?

    Do Dawkins and Coyne say anything so crude and stupid as “science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs”? No. They both know perfectly well, and say, that there are religious beliefs that are nebulous and internal enough to be immune from criticism, and they also don’t talk about “mounting attacks” as if they were Vikings. And is there some place where either of them refuses to admit that the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy? Not that I know of, and I thought both of them did just that.

    Massimo is very angry with Dawkins and Coyne, for some reason, and he says hostile and exaggerated things about them as a result. He said rude things to Coyne on the earlier thread. I wish he would stop doing that, and be reasonable, instead.

    Update: I did a post on that post of Massimo’s at the time – last November. Another round of useful comments.

  • Scientism on stilts

    Carlin Romano goes after the annoying scientistic arrogant smug Galileo-wannabe whatsits that get on everyone’s nerves so much.

    A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn’t want to feel that sense of power and rightness?

    You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by

    By…one of the new atheists it must be? This should be good. By?

    by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.

    Yes! Massimo, the scourge of the scientistic scientists! Being scourged for being so god damn scientistic. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks.

    …it mixes eminent common sense and frequent good reporting with a cocksure hubris utterly inappropriate to the practice it apotheosizes…Pigliucci offers more hero sandwiches spiced with derision and certainty…Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.

    Does that remind you of anyone? No, I won’t rub it in – it’s too cruel.

    The problem with polemicists like Pigliucci is that a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as “philosophers of science” and “science warriors.” Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself

    They don’t, do they?! That’s so unsophisticated! If only they were philosophers, they wouldn’t do such silly things. But isn’t M – now now, none of that.

    Pigliucci similarly derides religious explanations on logical grounds when he should be content with rejecting such explanations as unproven.

    Okay – that’s all. It’s too funny; I don’t want to do myself an injury.