Does science explain everything?

William Shakespeare

Scientism is the philosophical theory that affirms that science is the only valid source of human knowledge. Taken literally, this statement sometimes leads to absurd conclusions. Perhaps the following case is an example of scientism. I’ve taken it from a recent article by Joseph Pearce entitled Shakespeare and Science.

Kathryn Harkup, British doctor in chemical sciences and science communicator, has published several books analyzing various literary works from the point of view of science. I don’t know if Harkup is a case of scientism, but her emphasis on science makes me think that perhaps she is. She has recently published a book titled Death by Shakespeare, where she criticizes how Shakespeare presents death in his plays, based on what she believes science modern knows about death. Pearce highlights two examples, which show some of the absurd conclusions caused by basing only on science.

Contradictions of naturalism

Mary Midgley

Several times I have pointed out some of the contradictions stated by naturalist philosophy and its different variants: materialism, reductionism, physicalism, scientism, etc. In the previous post I pointed out that Raymond Tallis has detected two important contradictions that he calls darwinitis and neuromania. In this post I am going to bring together a few more, because when one sees them together their power is multiplied. Here are those I have selected:

• Science is the only valid source of human knowledge: Which science has reached this conclusion? Physics? Biology? None of the sciences. Therefore, if what this statement says is true, this statement must be false. We arrive at a contradiction. On the other hand, if this statement is false, there is no problem. Ergo, this statement is false. Therefore, scientism (and thus naturalism) is false.

Naturalism or naturalisms

La cosmovisión naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview) is a monumental book, written in Spanish by Moisés Pérez Marcos, about naturalist philosophies. As with the multiverse, of which there are many different theories, usually incompatible with each other, there are (almost) as many naturalistic philosophies as there are naturalistic philosophers. In other words, they don’t agree among themselves.

The first thing to do when confronted with naturalism is to try to define it and differentiate it from related worldviews:

Science and Scientism

Allegory of science
Attributed to Sebastiano Conca

The Dictionary of Oxford Languages defines science as follows:

The systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

This definition is complete, because it covers the three branches in which scientific knowledge is normally classified: theory (reasoning), observation and experimentation. We could add applied science (technology), which is often classified separately.

On the other hand, scientism is defined thus:

The belief that scientific methods can be applied to all problems, with the consequent application of inappropriate scientific methods in unsuitable circumstances.

The enigma of the natural order

In 2019 a book I wrote was published and distributed with the Spanish newspaper El País in a collection dedicated to the popularization of mathematics. The translation into English of my book title is Everything is Number: Is Reality Mathematical?

I addressed the problem of whether mathematical ideas correspond to an external reality, or if on the contrary they are arbitrary and vary with our current mentality. In other words, the question is whether mathematics is discovered, or invented. In one of the posts in this blog I dealt with this issue in relation to the real existence (or not) of the digits of number π (pi).

In the last chapter of that book I addressed a related issue: whether scientific theories, especially those proposed by physicists, are true (in the sense that they represent an underlying reality independent of us), or if are they mental or social constructs unrelated to a reality that could be unknowable (such as Kant's noumena) or even non-existent. I suppose my readers won't be surprised if I say that my personal position is clearly realistic, as is that of many physicists, while supporters of the anti-realist hypothesis tend to be predominantly philosophers.