SCIENTISM. — This is science (v.), as a 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 in a pejorative sense by those who polemicized against this position) refers particularly to the attitude dominant in the second half of the 19th century among French materialists and positivists. materialism (v.) of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner, 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 C. Vogt’s polemical work, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (Giessen 1854), one finds the phrase, subsequently 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 French positivism (Comte, Littré, Le Dantec), sought to provide the epistemological justification for this absolutization of science. In itself, positivism, asserting that it limits itself to knowledge of facts, does not pronounce upon the essence of reality and therefore does not imply a materialistic conception, although it often presupposes one in fact. Comte (v.), theology and metaphysics are mythical forms of knowledge, corresponding to stages of humanity that have not yet evolved: the only valid knowledge is scientific knowledge—observation of facts and formulation of the laws governing them. In the scientific stage, philosophy is nothing more than the synthesis of the particular sciences. E. Littré (1801–81) regards as a result achieved by 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 from Bréhier [V. op. cit. in bibl.], p. 932). F. Le Dantec (1869–1917), who accepts the designation scientistic for himself, 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 criticism of s. came first of all from scientist-epistemologists such as E. Mach, H. Poincaré, and 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, there 1896), determinism (v.) and the materialism which scientists regarded as implicit in the achievements of science. The first decades of the 20th century marked a reaction against s., neopositivism (v.). This, which in its early proponents appealed to E. MARCHE (v.), took into account the criticisms directed against the old positivism and s., and makes no claim at all that science has absolute value, in the sense of reaching the depths of reality. In seeking to purify science of every metaphysical presupposition, it refrains from any judgment concerning reality and considers science as a complex of propositions divided into two major types: protocol statements (corresponding to what the old positivism called «facts») and propositions that can be derived from them by induction, on the one hand, and, on the other, principles and axioms (e.g., the axioms of mathematics and the principles of logic), which are likewise conventions and serve as rules for the transformation (vulgo: proof) of propositions. Problems that cannot be solved with the aid of axioms applied to protocol statements are pseudo-problems; concepts and propositions that cannot be verified in experience are meaningless. And it is precisely in these negations that the scientific character of neopositivism consists: namely, in denying theoretical value to everything that is not experimental science (founded on protocol statements) or mathematical logic (the science of conventions for the transformation of propositions). V. CONOSCENZA; LOGICA.