By Daniel Walker
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I was inspired to write this paper by a troubling phenomenon that I have observed over the last several years, and in fact continue to observe today: The circulation of problematic understandings/representations of science in the Academy, especially those produced in the Humanities. Some of these poor representations have been employed as elements within cultural critiques of science and/or the "West."
I think that the representations have been problematic primarily because those producing them have failed to distinguish between science and scientism. I believe that distinguishing between science and scientism not only can clear up misunderstandings with respect to the two terms, but also can facilitate more effective performances of cultural criticism, make available a relatively more critical and more rigorous notion of science to those who might otherwise (perhaps unhappily and/or "irrationally") distance themselves from science, and, with respect to the study of literature, correct for certain mis-readings so that works once interpreted as featuring anti-science themes are seen as involving anti-scientism themes.
Considering this context will hopefully help the reader to view this paper as involving much more than a scientific apology, which is the last thing I want this paper to be read as. I insist that distinguishing science from scientism is a worthwhile enterprise that could serve many disciplines and should be taken as relevant, even critical, to forwarding many positive aspects of life.
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II. Scientism (and pseudo-science)
Just as there are many statements about science that can be used to contribute to a vision of what science is, so there are quite a few notions of scientism that can be gathered in the effort to better understand the Monster that it is. A serious difficulty exists with the gathering of statements about scientism, however, in that some statements about what scientism is carry an interpretive problem. Some statements on scientism feature an incomplete or even erroneous notion of what science is as that against which they contrast their idea of what scientism is. At the very least, statements on scientism have left the nature of science unclear. For example, in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas writes that with the "principle of scientism... the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures"
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For the purposes of this paper, then, I am going to begin offering an idea of what scientism is by starting with the following: Scientism is like science, but is corrupted by dogmatic attitudes and practices that remove many if not all critical qualifications that go into defining science as a way of constructing aspects of our knowledge about the external world that are dynamic, local, at times intuitive, particular, open, subjective, social, cultural, skeptical, demanding of observation, based on testing, overt, self-critiquing, and at times even revolutionary. Where science would admit that the external world is assumed and that the problem of the existence of the external world is something thousands of years of philosophy has yet to settle conclusively, scientism insists that the external world truly exists, absolutely, objectively.
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