I lifted this from Wikepedia, as I find this topic to be of interest. Honeys are good, too.
Reviewing the references to scientism in the works of contemporary scholars,
Gregory R. Peterson[12] detects two main broad themes:
- It is used to criticize a totalizing view of science as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things;
- It is used to denote a border-crossing violation in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. Examples of this second usage is to label as scientism any attempt to claim science as the only or primary source of human values (a traditional domain of ethics), or as the source of meaning and purpose (a traditional domain of religion and related worldviews).
According to
Mikael Stenmark in the
Encyclopedia of science and religion,
[13] while the
doctrines that are described as scientism have many possible forms and varying degrees of ambition, they share the idea that the boundaries of science (that is, typically the natural sciences) could and should be expanded so that something that has not been previously considered as a subject pertinent to science can now be understood as part of science (usually with science becoming the sole or the main arbiter regarding this area or dimension). In its most extreme form, scientism is the
faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science
alone. This idea is also called the
Myth of Progress.
[14] Stenmark proposes the expression
scientific expansionism as a synonym of scientism.
E. F. Schumacher critiqued this form of scientism as an impoverished world view that not only leaves unanswered, but denies the validity of all questions of fundamental importance to human existence.
[15]
:grumpy: 