Does science have all the answers? (Irish Times Interview) (2016)

This paper was written in response to the election of Donald Trump, referred to in the text as TGT (The Great Twitter). The “Crisis of Science” refers to the public’s loss of faith in the moral leadership of science, and the author discusses the options for regaining it while avoiding the root symptom, the appearance of an intellectual ruling class. In today’s anti-intellectual political climate both the ideology and ideals of science are under attack, yet they are two separate issues bundled as one. Science in the service of power is under no threat, while the ideals—and those who cherish them as the basis of an ideology—are at very great risk. The final two pages discuss developing the cross-discipline of Axiology (theory of valuation), which is proposed as one way out of the crisis which clearly, in 2024, still looms large. The author points out that the dominant scientific ideology is little more than the legacy of Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity, while the ideals of science are derived from logic requiring independence from any governing theory, hence, from any ideology. The battle is unfortunately being waged against both ideals and ideology, by a united front against what is perceived as the power of an ”intellectual elite.” It is (still in 2024) almost word-for-word taken from the rhetoric and cant of a mostly forgotten 1970's pundit, Ayn Rand.

Metascience, 2021

“Science, scientism, and never-ending myths about the scientistic stance.” Metascience, book review Ridder, Jeroen de; Peels, Rik; Woudenberg, René van (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, 320 pp., $58.43 HB

2014

This chapter argues that Paul Feyerabend's philosophical views on the relationship between science and society, and his conception of the purposes of the discipline of philosophy of science, was shaped by the Cold War in two ways. First, Feyerabend was reacting against the artificial confinement of the agenda and professional identity of the philosophy of science that the Cold War had imposed; the exclusion of the socially engaged aspects of that discipline prompted Feyerabend to engage, albeit dramatically and hyperbolically, with questions about the value and authority of science that had, alas, been stifled. The second way reflected the role that science played in the ideological ‘clash of ideas’ that marked the intellectual dimension of the Cold War. Feyerabend argued that ideological struggles for the honorific status of being a scientific society were premature in the absence of robust answers to the question what science is, and what’s so great about it, but that insistence provided the foundations for a much wider claim. Feyerabend steadily expanded the scope of critical citizenship to encompass not only science, but any other intellectual, cultural, or political traditions, values, and ideals one might consider. Taken together, these point to what one might call 'critical citizenship' - a conception of political and epistemic freedom in terms of informed consent to a cognitive and cultural authority, rather than to zealous adoption of whatever ideology happened to prevail in one’s society at the time—even the liberal democratic ideology of a scientific culture. To ask 'what's so great about science' is therefore not the motto of an anti-science radical, but a invitation to critically reflect upon the dominant cognitive authority of late modern cultures.

A relatively recent phenomenon in human history, 'Scientism' is a bold yet unsubstantiated conviction that modern " science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge " (Ian Hutchinson). Thus, anything that cannot be directly verified or falsified by scientific methodology, does not constitute 'real knowledge', and should ultimately be discarded. In congruence with Charles Taylor's criticism of what he calls the " immanent frame " and David B. Hart's critique of scientific naturalism (scientism), I argue that this very statement is not a scientific but rather a philosophical belief, an a priori assumption, a metaphysical statement that cannot be verified or falsified by scientific methodology. Scientific thinking, too, is an epistemological activity, consisting of predicting, modeling, and confirming theories based on their correspondence to the cognitively perceived (and experienced) reality. The metanarrative framework within which we exercise our epistemological activities determines much of their methodology, scope, and general character (Thomas Kuhn), including the nature and content of ensuing ethical deliberations.

The term 'scientism' is applied to a variety of positions about science that includes the views that the only legitimate questions about reality are those answerable by science and that, to the extent that anything can be known about reality, science alone is capable of providing that knowledge. Critics of religious, New Age, spiritualist, and other, popular forms of divine or supernatural belief are often accused of scientism by their proponents, with the accusation typically involving the thought that critics have crossed a line or boundary demarcating those topics or subjects that are the proper province of science, and those that are beyond its capacity to adjudicate. The accused are often found guilty of hubris, of an arrogant failure to recognize that there are 'more things in heaven and Earth' than are dreamt of in their philosophy, of supposing science is best placed to answer questions that, in reality, can only be answered by employing other disciplines, forms of inquiry, or 'ways of knowing'. Within discussion of religious, spiritual, New Age, and popular divine or supernatural beliefs, this boundary marking the 'limits of science' is almost always supposed to play an immunizing role: to explain why science constitutes no threat to such beliefs. 'You scientists', say the believers, 'may come this far, but no further.'