The Future of Philosophy, the Seduction of Scientism
Susan Haack
[Susan Haack is a highly respected philosopher specializing
in philosophy of logic, epistemology and philosophy of science. Emphasis is mine. ]
Science is certainly a good thing .But, of course, it’s not
a perfectly
good thing, much less the only good thing, or even the
only legitimate form of inquiry. It’
Is a human enterprise and, like all human enterprises,
fallible, imperfect, and incomplete; moreover, there are many legitimate
questions beyond its scope. The sciences have achieved remarkable things;
but we shouldn’t allow respect for those remarkable achievements to transmute into
uncritical deference to anything and everything bearing the label, “scientific”.
That is scientism. Of late, the scientism that now seems ubiquitous
in our culture has come to threaten philosophy too. Self-styled “evolutionary
philosophers” and “neuro- philosophers” try to colonize ethics, epistemology, and
philosophy of mind; self-
styled “experimental philosophers” try to squeeze
substantial philosophical results out of psychological surveys; “radically
naturalistic”
Metaphysicians urge that the sciences hold exclusive authority
on all legitimate empirical questions; and evangelical atheists claim that
physics fixes all the facts, so that values
ethical, political, legal, aesthetic, epistemological, etc.
can be nothing but illusion. But scientistic philosophy
is badly flawed: at best, it ducks or flubs key philosophical questions; at
worst, it undermines the very science on which it relies, by denying the legitimacy
of standards of better and worse evidence or the reality of the human capacities
necessary for the scientific enterprise to be even possible. Why, then, has
it proven so attractive to so many? A key part of the explanation seems to be
an inchoate sense that something’s badly amiss with our
discipline, that we can’t just go on with philosophical business-as-usual. And,
indeed, something is rotten in the state of philosophy: the discipline becomes
every day more specialized, more fragmented into cliques, niches, cartels, and
fiefdoms, and more determinedly forgetful of its own history. More and more
journals are crammed with more and more unread and all too often, unreadable articles about
what X said about Y’s interpretation of Z’s response to W. Anyone with enough
frequent -flyer miles to upgrade to publication-by-invitation is relieved to bypass
a relentlessly conventional peer-review process often crippled by
tunnel-vision, cronyism, and self-promotion. I won’t even mention the decades
of over-production of Ph.D.s, or the disastrous effects of that horrible, and
horribly corrupting, “ranking” of philosophy graduate programs.
Combine this with the fact that the neo-analytic philosophical
establishment, though institutionally still pretty firmly entrenched, seems
close to intellectual exhaustion, and
it’s certainly no wonder that many are bored and restive,
casting around for something
new; and no wonder, either, that we’re beset by passing fads
and fashions—
prominent among them the scientistic fads and fashions.
Unfortunately, far from solving the problems of our profession, this
hydra-headed scientism makes things, not better, but worse; it seems to offer
quick and easy solutions to long-standing, knotty problems, but in the end it
is nothing but a confession of philosophical failure. None of this is very
surprising. For, these days, almost everything about the way universities
are organized conspires against the spirit of serious inquiry. The
professional administrators who now manage universities stress productivity,
the need for everyone to be research-active, and above all, anything and
everything that could possibly be described as “prestigious”……
Excerpted and adapted from Susan Haack,
Scientism and Its Discontents
(2017),downloadable free
athttps://roundedglobe.com/books/038f7053-e376-4fc3-87c5-096de820966d/Scientism%20and%20its%20Discontents/o:
University of Chicago Press,1998),188-208