SCIENTISM. — It is the conception according to which science (q.v.), as a type of knowledge distinguished from philosophy (q.v.) as well as from religious faith, is the only valid knowledge and is sufficient to resolve all human problems.
The term scientism (used especially with a pejorative meaning by those who polemicized against this position) refers particularly to the dominant attitude in the second half of the 19th century among French materialists and positivists. The materialism (q.v.) of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner, and the monism (q.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 work of C. Vogt, Köhler, Glauber und Wissenschaft (Giessen 1854), there is the oft-repeated phrase that thought is to the brain as bile is to the liver. In the monism advocated by E. H. Haeckel (q.v.), the theory of evolution is presented as the scientific explanation to replace the myth of creation. The dogmas of what Haeckel calls dualistic philosophy and traditional religion have been definitively refuted by modern natural science.
French positivism (Comte, Littré, Le Dantec) sought to provide the epistemological justification for such absolutization of science. In itself, positivism, 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, though it often presupposes it in fact. For Comte (q.v.), theology and metaphysics are mythical forms of knowledge, corresponding to undeveloped states of humanity: the only valid knowledge is scientific knowledge—observation of facts and formulation of the laws that govern them. In the scientific stage, philosophy is merely the synthesis of the particular sciences. E. Littré (1801–81) considers as an acquired result of A. Comte’s philosophy “the immutability of natural laws, in contrast to theology which introduces supernatural interventions; the limitation of the speculative world, in contrast to metaphysics which pursues the infinite and the absolute” (cited from Bréhier [q.V. op. cit. in bibl.], p. 932). F. Le Dantec (1869–1917), who accepts the label of scientism for himself, holds that the natural laws discovered by science express an absolute necessity, and that science, as the only valid knowledge, implies a materialistic and deterministic conception of reality.
Criticism of scientism came first 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 merely an economic value: scientific concepts are schemes for action. This theory of the merely 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, 1886) criticized, the former determinism (q.v.) and the latter materialism, which scientism considered implicit in the achievements of science. The first decades of the 20th century marked a reaction against scientism, which now resurges in neopositivism (q.v.). This, in its early proponents, appealed to E. Mach (q.v.), and took into account the criticisms leveled against old positivism and scientism, and does not claim that science has absolute value in the sense of attaining the depths of reality. Seeking to purge science of every metaphysical presupposition, it refrains from any judgment on reality and considers science as a complex of propositions divided into two great types: protocol statements (corresponding to what old positivism called “facts”) and propositions that can be derived from them by induction, and, on the other hand, the principles and axioms (e.g., the axioms of mathematics and the principles of logic) which are also conventions and serve as rules for the transformation (vulgarly: demonstration) of propositions. Problems not resolvable with the help of axioms applied to protocol statements are pseudo-problems; concepts and propositions not verifiable in experience are devoid of meaning. And it is in these negations that the scientific character of neopositivism consists: in the denial of theoretical value to everything that is not experimental science (founded on protocol statements) or logical-mathematical science (science of conventions for the transformation of propositions). See also KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC.