Scientism

SCIENTISM. - It is the conception according to which science (v.), as a type of knowledge distinguished from philosophy (v.) as well as from religious faith, is the only valid knowledge and is sufficient to solve all human problems.

The term s. (used especially with a pejorative meaning by those who polemicized against this position) refers especially to the attitude dominant in the second half of the 19th century among the French materialists and positivists. The materialism (v.) of Vogt, of Moleschott, of Büchner, the monism (v.) of Haeckel present themselves as definitive solutions given in the name of "science" to philosophical and religious problems. Science, as knowledge of fixed and immutable natural laws, postulates, according to this conception, determinism and materialism. In the polemical writing of C. Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (Giessen 1854) there is found the phrase, later often repeated, that thought stands to the brain as bile stands to the liver. In the monism advocated by E. H. Haeckel (v.) the theory of evolution is presented as the scientific explanation to be substituted for the myth of creation. The dogmas of what Haeckel calls dualistic philosophy and of traditional religion have been definitively refuted by modern natural science.

Positivism (v.), especially the French variety (Comte, Littré, Le Dantec), sought to provide the epistemological justification for such an absolutization of science. In itself, positivism, in asserting that it limits itself to the knowledge of facts, does not pronounce on the essence of reality, and therefore does not imply a materialistic conception, but often in fact presupposes one. For Comte (v.) theology and metaphysics are mythical forms of knowledge, corresponding to stages of humanity not yet evolved: the only valid knowledge is scientific knowledge: observation of facts and formulation of the laws that regulate them. In the scientific stage philosophy is nothing but the synthesis of the particular sciences. E. Littré (1801-81) considers as a result acquired from the philosophy of A. Comte "the immutability of natural laws, against theology which introduced supernatural interventions; the limitation of the speculative world, against metaphysics which pursues the infinite and the absolute" (cited by Bréhier [v. op. cit. in bibl.], p. 932). F. Le Dantec (1869-1917), who accepts for himself the label of scientistic, holds that the natural laws discovered by science express an absolute necessity, and that science, the only valid knowledge, implies a materialistic and deterministic conception of reality.

The critique of s. came in the first place from scientist-epistemologists, such as E. Mach, H. Poincaré, P. Duhem, who observed that science is not a perfect and definitive knowledge of reality: indeed according to Mach and Poincaré it has a purely economic value: scientific concepts are schemas for action. This theory of the purely economic value of scientific concepts was also accepted by B. Croce. Other philosophers such as E. Boutroux (La contingence des lois de la nature, Paris 1874) and H. Bergson (Matière et mémoire, ibid. 1896) criticized the one determinism (v.) and the other the materialism that scientists believed implicit in the conquests of science. The first decades of the 20th century marked a reaction to s. which now resurges in neopositivism (v.). This, which in its first proponents appealed to E. Mach (v.), has kept in mind the criticisms leveled at the old positivism and s., and does not claim at all that science has absolute value, in the sense of reaching the depths of reality. Wishing to purify science of every metaphysical presupposition, it prescinds from any judgment on reality and considers science as a complex of propositions that are divided into two great types: protocol statements (corresponding to what the old positivism called "facts") and the propositions that can be derived by induction from them, and, on the other hand, the principles, the axioms (e.g., the axioms of mathematics and the principles of logic) which are also conventions and serve as rules of transformation (commonly: demonstration) of propositions. The problems not solvable with the help of the axioms applied to protocol statements are pseudo-problems, the concepts and propositions not verifiable in experience are devoid of meaning. And it is precisely in these negations that the scientific character of neopositivism lies: in the negation, that is, of theoretical value to everything that is not experimental science (founded on protocol statements) or logico-mathematical (science of the conventions for the transformation of propositions). See also CONOSCENZA; LOGICA.

Sofia Vanni-Rovighi