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    Scientism, psychologism, and psychoanalytic newspeak
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    Scientism unreasonably extends the scientific mode of understanding the natural world, to claim that it should always override any other mode of understanding that conflicts with it. The pluralistic approach accepts that science is the best guide to facts, but not to the historical, moral, personal, political, or religious evaluations of the facts. Also, science aims to provide a non-anthropocentric understanding of the facts, but evaluations are unavoidably anthropocentric and go beyond facts. Philosophical problems caused by conflicts between modes of understanding cannot all be reasonably resolved in favor of scientific understanding because other modes of understanding have other aims than knowledge of natural facts. Conflicts between different modes of understanding are perennial because they are caused by dispute about the significance of agreed upon facts.
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    This chapter examines two recent views that have self-consciously been labeled by their authors as “scientism.” Alexander Rosenberg’s scientism is the view that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything. This view faces many counterexamples, Rosenberg’s arguments in its favor are weak, and the view is self-referentially incoherent. Don Ross, James Ladyman, and David Spurrett’s scientism as propounded in Every Thing Must Go is the view that science is our only guide to the objective features of the world. It includes an institutional criterion that demarcates bona fide science from non-science, a non-positivist form of verificationism, and the notion that scientism is not a thesis but a stance. The chapter argues that this view, too, faces counterexamples. It also points to problems with the institutional demarcation criterion, the proposed verificationism, as well as the notion that scientism is a stance.
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