Abstract
The topic of scientism is highly controversial, yet one of great importance. Scientism is originally proposed as a pejorative term towards those who would claim that science and its methods provide the only way of gaining knowledge.
My aim is to analyze the problem of scientism, i.e. what it is about, and to argue that scientism properly construed is to be accepted. As for the analysis, there are 3 related lines of inquiry.
What is science? One way to answer that question is to say that science is an inquiry using the scientific method. There is no single scientific method, rather, it is a loose cluster of variously related and/or unrelated methods.
The dispute between proponents and adversaries of scientism is over the scope of the definition of science. What science presupposes? The adversaries of scientism often claim that science presupposes something.
I will argue that, contra wide-spread opinion, science does not presuppose anything and I will briefly sketch how it can be so. What are the limits of science? Proponents of scientism deny the existence of any such limits based on the history of science, while adversaries list several things which they judge to be unsolvable by science (e.g. the nature of consciousness).
I will argue that any a priori limits on science are to be dismissed in the face of a bad history of such attempts, and that we have good reasons to be optimistic about the prospects of seemingly unsolvable problems that the contemporary science faces. Given the analysis of those three lines of inquiry sketched above, I will defend the conclusion that science broadly defined is indeed the only "way of knowing", that is, the only way to acquire knowledge about the world.
One of the consequences which might be hard to swallow for many is that art, religion and indeed some forms of philosophy do not give us genuine knowledge about the world.