To Be Scientistic or to Advocate Scientism: That Is the Question

How is the significance of the doctrine Scientism to be understood? To answer that question, it will be necessary to distinguish three stances towards scientific activity. This can be done by developing distinctions already delineated between Relativistic, Methodological and Dogmatic Scientism. In the present paper, the first two senses are best characterized as the scientistic: Scientistic Relativism and Scientistic Methodologism. Dogmatic Scientism arises in two forms: a Janus-faced Scientism and an Essentialist form. The former can be understood as advocating a public tolerance of behaviourism in relation to other people’s responses, cast as spatio-temporal events whilst adopting, at the same time, a private existentialism so that one’s own first person evaluations remain valid. An Essentialist form sustains a predictive and normative stance where any human action or communication is cast as “a natural object of investigation of the empirical sciences”. After distinguishing these four ways of interpreting scientific activity, Ladyman and Ross’s own contribution to this debate can be elucidated through examining five theses carried by their text Every Thing Must Go, and ideas forwarded subsequently in Ladyman’s article “Scientism with a Humane Face”: (1) the attack upon conceptual analysis; (2) the defence of metaphysics; (3) the advocacy of scale relative ontology; (4) the rehabilitation of Peirce’s philosophy; and (5) the rejection of a traditional conception of materialism. It may then become possible to ascertain how far their approach to scientific activity can be identified with either a Scientific Methodologism or some form of Scientism itself.

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