Objectivism's Definition and Views On Scientism and Politicized Science

[Alchemy]

As a student of Objectivism and one who grew up around a scientist and an engineer, I have not really encountered an in-depth discussion of these topics. 

I have encountered multiple definitions for scientism, but none of them seem to sufficiently define what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint. Also, most of the discussions and critiques I've found on scientism approach it from a religious/mystical perspective. While they seem to make some valid points, their arguments are ultimately based upon faith rather than reason....which can basically be boiled down to the infamous "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" trope. My own definition of scientism would be the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen. This attitude can be found in those who, devoid of any objective view on ethics, profess a "belief" in science or in the edicts of individual scientists concerning highly complex political and social issues. These are the people who ponificate about "following the science" or who champion tyranical altruism in the name of "scientific concensus". As someone who grew up loving science and finds especially the earth sciences endlessly fascinating, scientism is a particularly infuriating issue. 

This, of course, leads into the discussion of corrupted and/or politicized science which is already a serious problem. 

Thoughts?

[Boydstun]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/

Quote

 

One of the earliest iterations of this debate occurred during the so-called Methodenstreit between members of the Austrian School in Economics and the German Historical School. However, members of the “first generation” of the Austrian School, such as Carl Menger, were atomists (Menger defended his individualistic method in terms of conceptual gains achieved by “reducing complicated phenomena to their elements” [Menger 1883, 93]). It was only members of the second generation, first and foremost Friedrich von Hayek, who would explicitly identify themselves with the Weberian doctrine of methodological individualism and defend it through reference to the demands of interpretive social science. The key text is Hayek’s paper, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” serialized in Economica (1942–44), and later published as the first part of The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955).

In Hayek’s view, the desire on the part of social scientists to emulate the physical sciences creates an exaggerated fear of teleological or “purposive” concepts. This leads many economists to eschew any reference to intentional states and to focus purely upon statistical correlations between economic variables. The problem with this focus is that it leaves the economic phenomena unintelligible. Take, for example, the movement of prices. One might notice a constant correlation between the date of the first frost and fluctuations in the price of wheat. But we do not really understand the phenomenon until it has been explained in terms of the rational actions of economic agents: an early frost reduces yields, leading to less intense price competition among suppliers, more among consumers, etc. Thus Hayek insists that, in effect, all macroeconomic analysis is incomplete in the absence of “micro” foundations.

 

 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/

Quote

The issue Hayek concerns himself with in The Counter-Revolution of Science was the wrong turn in the philosophy and history of ideas that confused the current generation about the nature of the social sciences and the institutions of liberalism and the principles of justice. His sustained explorations of legal philosophy and political theory sought to counter excessive formalism, excessive aggregation, and a naïve empiricism that in his mind conspired to produce the intellectual dead-end of scientism: that is, an inappropriate and uncritical application of the methods of the natural sciences to the problems of social science. In articulating his critique, Hayek would stress over the next several decades the case for methodological dualism, and the method and approach for the sciences of complex phenomena.

 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/

Quote

 

In the early 1990s, Feyerabend worked up a course of lectures he had previously given in Berkeley into a series of five lectures entitled ‘What is knowledge? What is science?’. These were originally delivered to a general audience, but later edited and published by Eric Oberheim as a book entitled The Tyranny of Science [Feyerabend 2011].

The main themes of the book are as follows. Scientists and philosophers sometimes present science as a unified worldview, a monolith (or a monster, depending on one’s preferences). It is not. Science is both incomplete and quite strongly disunified. It does not speak with a single voice, therefore appeals to the abstraction ‘Science’ are out of place. The ideology known as objectivism, or scientific materialism, which takes science to be our ultimate measure of what exists, is therefore ungrounded. Its defenders, who portray themselves as the defenders of Reason, are often the kind of intellectual imperialists whose attitudes and advice in the past led, or would have led, to the destruction of first-nation communities.

Other equally popular philosophical claims about science are also flawed. The idea that science is successful needs interrogation. Science does have some successes, but these can be detached from the ideology that seems to support them. The idea that science starts from facts, and eschews theories until the facts are gathered, is a myth. The same can be said of the idea that science is value-free, and also of the idea that scientific results are relevant to urgent social problems.

One aspect of the disunity of science is that ‘scientists’ should not mean merely theoreticians: science also (and essentially) features experimentalists. In their work the importance of hands-on experience, and of what Michael Polanyi called ‘tacit knowledge’, is most obvious. But in fact these sorts of experience and knowledge play an important role throughout the sciences, even in their most obviously theoretical parts. The Platonic-rationalist picture of science as pure thinking about the nature of reality is a distortion.

Perhaps the book’s central complaint is that a particular abstract, theoretical, ‘objectivist’ kind of science, together with an associated kind of thinking about science, now dominate our thinking, excluding more human modes of thought. Scientism, the belief that science has the answer to all meaningful questions, is also a target. Feyerabend’s typical strategy is to take some hallowed idea (e.g., that the success of science is due to observation and experiment), and ask: how did it arise? Tracing its ancestry back to ancient Greek thinkers (usually Plato, Parmenides, or Xenophanes), he assesses their arguments for it, and finds them eminently resistible. His complaint is not that their arguments are invalid, though—that would be already to take on a quasi-scientific mode of assessment. Instead, Feyerabend makes it clear that he prefers ‘stories’ (or even ‘fairytales’) to arguments, and that rival stories are to be assessed in terms of how interesting, appealing, or revealing they are. The sorts of stories the ancient Greek tragedians told, being more obviously human, fare better on such measures than those of the ancient Greek philosophers, so we should not assume that philosophers are our best guides in such matters.

 

Ayn Rand 1966:

Quote

 

Observe that the attacks on the conceptual level of man’s consciousness, i.e., on reason, come from the same ideological quarters as the attacks on measurement. When discussing man’s consciousness, particularly his emotions, some persons use the word “measurement” as a perjorative term—as if an attempt to apply it to the phenomena of consciousness were a gross, insulting, “materialistic” impropriety. . . .

 . . . The old-fashioned mystics proclaim that you cannot measure love in pounds, inches or dollars. They are aided and abetted by the Neo-mystics who—punch-drunk with undigested concepts of measurement, proclaiming measurement to be the sole tool of science—proceed to measure knee-jerks, statistical questionnaires, and the learning time of rats, as indices of the human psyche.

Both camps fail to observe that measurement requires an appropriate standard, and that in the physical sciences—which one camp passionately hates, and the other passionately envies—one does not measure length in pounds, or weight in inches.

. . .

The motive of the anti-measurement attitude is obvious: it is the desire to preserve a sanctuary of the indeterminate for the benefit of the irrational—the desire, epistemologically, to escape from the responsibility of cognitive precision and wide-scale integration; and, metaphysically, the desire to escape from the absolutism of existence, of facts, of reality and, above all, of identity.

 

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by Boydstun

[DavidOdden]

“Scientism” is a sufficiently niche term that I don’t see how you can determine “what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint”. You define it as “the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen”, Wikipedia says that is “is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality”. Clearly, one of you must be wrong. Let me proffer a third definition, that it is the belief that governmental lawmakers are to be chosen on specific technical expertise. How would we decide which definition is correct?

Rand discusses the problem of definitions in ITOE, but her discussion is at a much higher level, where there is no dispute over the actual referent of a concept, it is merely a question of the cognitively most-suitable definition. What we’re faced with here is a fundamental dictionary question – what does “scientism actual mean”?

So, perhaps you can offer some concrete evidence that you’re using “scientism” in “the standard way”. This will be hard to do, since this is an obscure word of English.

[Alchemy]

27 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

“Scientism” is a sufficiently niche term that I don’t see how you can determine “what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint”. You define it as “the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen”, Wikipedia says that is “is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality”. Clearly, one of you must be wrong. Let me proffer a third definition, that it is the belief that governmental lawmakers are to be chosen on specific technical expertise. How would we decide which definition is correct?

Rand discusses the problem of definitions in ITOE, but her discussion is at a much higher level, where there is no dispute over the actual referent of a concept, it is merely a question of the cognitively most-suitable definition. What we’re faced with here is a fundamental dictionary question – what does “scientism actual mean”?

So, perhaps you can offer some concrete evidence that you’re using “scientism” in “the standard way”. This will be hard to do, since this is an obscure word of English.

I have no concrete evidence that my definition is the standard one nor did I argue for anything of the sort. My personal definition comes from my own observations and experiences along with the conclusions drawn from such. The entire point of my original post was to try and get a more objectively accurate understanding of the concept, knowing that my own was most likely lacking. 

[InfraBeat]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

"[...] measure knee-jerks, statistical questionnaires, and the learning time of rats, as indices of the human psyche." [Ayn Rand]

What actual research is she talking about?

Edited July 22, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Boydstun]

InfraBeat, likely this would be part of it. I know questionnaires are still used for things like making correlations between certain sorts of people and happiness. Long ago I recall them being used to show that homosexuals were less happy than other folks. More recently showing financially successful folk are not the happiest of people. The American Journal of Psychology is probably still a good place to look for experimental methods in psychology today. I used to dig into that at libraries, although not so much as I dug into Cognition and other journals on early cognitive development. In those measuring things like looking times are productive under more recent models (of infant behaviors tied to perceptions and cognitions), but Rand/Branden did not write about this sort of research (nor Piaget) underway in their era, and this area and its methods have continued to expand since then. I have a good book on history of psychology, which I'll try to locate tomorrow, to see if there is more one can surmise on what Rand had in mind in this criticism.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Boydstun

[DavidOdden]

1 hour ago, Alchemy said:

My personal definition comes from my own observations and experiences along with the conclusions drawn from such.

Good enough, but what are you observing? How do you know that you have observed an instance of “scientism”? Are you observing e.g. “How ‘scientism’ is used in academic publications on philosophy of science”, or “How ‘scientism’ is used on Fox news”?

I am inclined to take this as my starting point. This would lead me to click Boydstun's link, or go directly to Hayek 1964. IMO when a person coins a term, we are obliged to stick with the concept that they have identified, rather than change the definition. So we know what Objectivism is and it doesn't change everytime someone feels like changing the term. In other words, what exactly did Hayek mean by scientism? Is that not what you are asking?

[InfraBeat]

58 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

part of it

A lot to sort out there. But let's start with knee jerks. What research is she referring to that indexes human psyche by knee jerks?

[InfraBeat]

28 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

IMO when a person coins a term, we are obliged to stick with the concept that they have identified

I don't know who first came up with the word 'logic', but the Objectivist definition of it is its own definition.

[InfraBeat]

3 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

the actual referent of a concept

Ordinarily something is a referent of a word or phrase, and a concept is a referent of a word or phrase, such as the concept of beauty is the referent of the word 'beauty'. In what sense do you think of something being the referent of a concept?

Edited July 22, 2023 by InfraBeat

[DavidOdden]

17 minutes ago, InfraBeat said:

I don't know who first came up with the word 'logic', but the Objectivist definition of it is its own definition.

We could start with λογική, if you would like. How do you see the Objectivist concept of logic being different from Aristotle's? Concepts are more stable as the things that unify referents (units), because of polysemy. Sometimes, a word subsumes more that one concept.

[InfraBeat]

8 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

How do you see the Objectivist concept of logic being different from Aristotle's?

Did Aristotle state the Objectivist definition of 'logic'? Or where in the history of logic do you find the Objectivist definition?

[InfraBeat]

32 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

Concepts are more stable as the things that unify referents (units), because of polysemy. Sometimes, a word subsumes more that one concept.

I don't see how that answers the question. Of course a word may have different referents. That doesn't entail that a concept refers to referents. And I don't know what you mean by 'unify referents'. 

May I take it that you agree that words refer to referents? And that some words refer to concepts, so that those concepts are referents of the words? At least it's not a usual notion that concepts are the things doing the referring. 

Edited July 22, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Boydstun]

7 hours ago, InfraBeat said:

A lot to sort out there. But let's start with knee jerks. What research is she referring to that indexes human psyche by knee jerks?

As I said last night, I don't know. I offered to look at some history today, and possibly conjecture on source(s) of those examples. I'm not sure now however, if you'd be interested in that. I've always assumed the knee-jerk counting was made up, like making up something by way of communicating some message in a fictional story, such as Rand making up a Board of Directors meeting in Atlas. Only in non-fiction, the made-up stuff is for ease of some of her readers and flair and interest-capture for her audience attracted to her writing style from reading her fiction. Of course, it is reasonable to guess that such elements in her non-fiction are also from time constraints and running out of energy for the library research necessary to find actual cases for what one is trying to convey from one's impressions. I take what I find valuable in all thinkers, regardless of their shortfalls in such things as their lack of references, which I have always been fanatic about in my own essays. Rand did write a piece about B.F. Skinner and a popular book of his that was out at the time. I'll leave it to you to chase that down (in Philosophy – Who Needs It) if you are that interested in the question you had posed to me. If you have read Atlas Shrugged, you likely recall her talk of "Mystics of Muscle" in the exposition of her vista (philosophy [and soft culture/psychology talk worthy of Nietzsche and, well, not me]) she gives in Galt's Speech. She indicated later in non-fiction (the essay on Skinner, if I recall correctly) that under MM she was talking not only of Marxism, but Behaviorism. 

6 hours ago, InfraBeat said:

I don't see how that answers the question. Of course a word may have different referents. That doesn't entail that a concept refers to referents. And I don't know what you mean by 'unify referents'. 

May I take it that you agree that words refer to referents? And that some words refer to concepts, so that those concepts are referents of the words? At least it's not a usual notion that concepts are the things doing the referring. 

I for one have always thought (e.g. 1990) that thinking of words as referring to concepts was a myopic view. Rather, words, in use, mark concepts, and concepts together with words in the use-situation refer. 

Edited July 22, 2023 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

As an example of algorithmic ‘serendipity’ , YouTube presented this video to me on Whitehead and though not touching on any politicization of science and obviously nothing on O’ist definitions, the lecture speaks to the connection of science to metaphysics and the role philosophy should play in distinguishing a hierarchy with a view toward how western science has made progress to rational understanding but underscores ,I think, a divide or in-congruency that could lead to “scientism”.

Though I do not know the O’ist stance toward Whitehead ‘officially’ , listening to the lecture is a good exercise in detecting similarities and differences in theories and explanations eg the mechanisms of concept formation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2vDesht8o

 

[DavidOdden]

The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”.

In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”.

Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior.

One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu.

Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.

[InfraBeat]

On 7/21/2023 at 10:40 PM, Boydstun said:

what Rand had in mind

Of course there may be many instances of poor application of certain methods. But I'm wondering what specific research she was referring to and such that those instances discredit any use of those methods.

But, especially, I'm wondering what she is referring to about knee-jerk testing indexing the human psyche.

Edited July 24, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Boydstun]

23 minutes ago, InfraBeat said:

Of course there may be many instances of poor application of certain methods. But I'm wondering what specific research she was referring to and such that those instances discredit any use of those methods.

But, especially, I'm wondering what she is referring to about knee-jerk testing indexing the human psyche.

On 7/22/2023 at 7:42 AM, Boydstun said:

As I said last night, I don't know. I offered to look at some history today, and possibly conjecture on source(s) of those examples. I'm not sure now however, if you'd be interested in that. I've always assumed the knee-jerk counting was made up, . . .

That is to say: You already asked that a few days ago, and I took some time to compose a response. Then you post as if the previous exchange never took place. How is this worthwhile? I'll not bother further with this trivia and "talking to hear your teeth rattle."

Edited July 24, 2023 by Boydstun

[InfraBeat]

1 minute ago, Boydstun said:

I don't know.

Right, I'm not putting you on the spot to personally document on her behalf. 

3 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

I've always assumed the knee-jerk counting was made up

Then I would take it that it was a strawman.

[DavidOdden]

2 hours ago, InfraBeat said:

Then I would take it that it was a strawman.

I suspect that the problem is that you are unaware of the nature of scientific research into the human mind in the relevant era, when behaviorism held sway. The solution is to read actual psychological research, between the 30’s and the late 60’s, if you are skeptical. It is hard to grasp the depth to which psychology descended in those days, when nowadays people would take for granted that people have minds and can use their faculty of reason to make choices, so you would never imagine the intellectual horror of logical positivism and behaviorism.

Knee jerks are automatic non-cognitive responses of the human nervous system – a short circuit from the patella to the spinal chord, existing in a number of mammals, and in no way involving the mind. Behaviorism reduced all human behavior to variations of that mechanism. Rand’s criticism of behaviorism isn’t a peer-reviewed refutation of “scientific” results, it is an appropriate and metaphorical dismissal of a self-evidently false view of the nature of humans. It is not “made up”: it simply was not ever proffered as a scientific refutation, it was a philosophical dismissal. The scientists provided the requisite refutation.

[InfraBeat]

9 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

I suspect that the problem is that you are unaware of the nature of scientific research into the human mind in the relevant era, when behaviorism held sway.

You suspect incorrectly. I am only asking which specific research Rand is referring to.

9 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

Behaviorism reduced all human behavior to variations of that mechanism.

I don't think behaviorism claimed that all human behavior is accounted for by the reflex of the knee. Again, I'm only asking what specific research Rand is referring to. And I didn't ask for any peer reviewed writings of hers.

[InfraBeat]

13 hours ago, Boydstun said:

post as if the previous exchange never took place

I didn't pretend you hadn't posted what you posted. I replied though to make clear that what interests me is what specific studies Rand was referring to. If the answer is that it is not known what specific studies she was referring to or that it would take too much research to find out, then so be it. I don't expect you to research to document on her behalf.