... And also towards fields that are very close, like the famous characterization of the appearance of group theory in particle physics as Gruppenpest. (Lev Landau was perhaps the last of the physics greats to share this view, but he still made it live on as the absence of a standard group theory course in physics curricula throughout the ex-USSR. Of course, the problem is not that Landau was somehow especially shortsighted, but that keeping a university curriculum essentially unchanged for half a century is stupid and that a single school of theorists, however mighty, should not be able to dictate the course of a field in the whole country.)
I know the term scientism came to be used as a pejorative in humanities discourse and consequently in journalism, but I’d prefer not to use it here, both because of the contemptuous connotation and because it was originally coined to mean something much more interesting: a counterpoint to a naive, maximalist sort of positivism, of attempts to dismiss any picture of how the world actually is as unverifiable and therefore the question itself as meaningless. (This is the pop culture impression of Popper, though AFAIU Popper realized the problem and said far more nuanced things than that.)
The argument went along the lines of, “if talking about the ‘real world’ is meaningless and science is exclusively about experiments in labs, then it sure is peculiar that those experiments appear to be so remarkably coherent, even with things outside of labs—almost as though there actually is something worth calling the ‘real world’ and that science is in fact about that thing?” Thus, scientism.
(Cf. Liberalism Unrelinquished[1] on a similar issue of terminology.)
I know the term scientism came to be used as a pejorative in humanities discourse and consequently in journalism, but I’d prefer not to use it here, both because of the contemptuous connotation and because it was originally coined to mean something much more interesting: a counterpoint to a naive, maximalist sort of positivism, of attempts to dismiss any picture of how the world actually is as unverifiable and therefore the question itself as meaningless. (This is the pop culture impression of Popper, though AFAIU Popper realized the problem and said far more nuanced things than that.)
The argument went along the lines of, “if talking about the ‘real world’ is meaningless and science is exclusively about experiments in labs, then it sure is peculiar that those experiments appear to be so remarkably coherent, even with things outside of labs—almost as though there actually is something worth calling the ‘real world’ and that science is in fact about that thing?” Thus, scientism.
(Cf. Liberalism Unrelinquished[1] on a similar issue of terminology.)
[1] http://liberalismunrelinquished.net/