It’s all meaningless, MEANINGLESS! The self-refuting consequences of logical positivism, empiricism, and scientism.
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3 Responses to The Despair of Scientism
Lerrrr October 16, 2012
I think extremes in either direction are not helpful, to be honest. It irks me when a lover of science tells me that science has the answers to every questions (more specifically every TYPE of question). But I must point out that pure rationalism and philosophy is no more intellectually honest or useful than scientism. When you obsess over empiricism you fool yourself into thinking that a discipline which relies on methodological naturalism can answer questions about what might lie beyond the natural world. When you reject empiricism entirely you run the very real risk of becoming, as a friend of mine put it, an “armchair warrior”. That is, you believe you can figure all useful things out about the world in your head by argument alone………without reference to the real world. Scientists, beware of scientism. Philosophers, beware of becoming an armchair warrior.
Robert October 16, 2012
It irks me when a lover of science tells me that science has the answers to every questions (more specifically every TYPE of question).
Given that such people misunderstand science (and philosophy of science) so badly, is it even accurate to call them “lovers of science”?
Gil Sanders October 17, 2012
I think extremes in either direction are not helpful, to be honest. It irks me when a lover of science tells me that science has the answers to every questions (more specifically every TYPE of question)
Well said. I do find pure rationalists rather rare though. Even so, I think there’s a tendency within philosophy to be too obscure in their rational thought. It may not be as extreme as an armchair warrior, but it is still a problem. A good balance needs to made where the different disciplines come to work together as one systematic whole. For example, to understand the metaphysical nature of the empirical world (such as change), we would need that observational fact that things change to arrive at that truth! So the two can work together and hopefully we can present it in a way that even the informed layman can benefit from.