Limits of Science

Where science ends and where scientism begins

Subject Area: Philosophy

Epistemic status: I am not a philosopher, but I like to think about things like the subject of this essay, so naturally, I have done some reading about the subject, and the positions espoused here shouldn’t be alien to (professional) philosophers.

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Preamble: can we be a realist wrt. an antirealist?  – Beyond physics – Epistemological fractures, everywhere.

Preamble: can we be a realist wrt. an antirealist?

In my very first essay published on this blog – What Things Exist, I took on various philosophical positions such as solipsism, scientific realism, and scientific antirealism, attempting to briefly highlight some landscape about what exists, what is true, etcetera. While coming in ~18 months later, this essay can be taken as a continuation of that essay.

I ended by discussing the position of a scientific antirealist. Briefly, someone who believes that scientific theories should only be believed when they make predictions about observables, not so much about the unobservables [1].

I quote.

“Leptons, quarks, electrons, do they really exist as such? A scientific realist will say, "absolutely!". However, an antirealist will disagree with the word 'absolutely.' To put it a bit more precisely, a modern antirealist will be agnostic with regard to the 'reality' of an unobservable entity.”

If there are already controversies at this stage, what are we to do with the unobservable (unobservable with a capital U) features of the world?

Beyond physics

I repeat, what are we going to do with the realities beyond physics? In this case, some folks have specific stringent rules, historically, some have called them the empiricists, but I think a naturalist is the correct label. Empiricism is the theory that knowledge comes primarily from sense-experience, and right off the bat, you see that empiricism accommodates perfectly metaphysical features of the world: beauty, morality, mind, and all those things. However, a (scientific) naturalist would have a complicated relationship with these features of our world.  A much widely known position is the denial of the existence of a supreme being, think high-octane atheism, as Alvin Plantinga will put it.

So, who exactly is a naturalist?

A naturalist professes to believe that all that there is, is the material world, and the only way to know the truth about all that there is (i.e., the material world) is through science. In this way, naturalism intersects scientism  – i.e., science is the only way to know anything about the world, all other ways are just plain invalid.   

Let's take on the first claim: "all that there is, is the material world." This simply implies that the only thing which exists is what we know to be true empirically (empirically circumscribed in the word 'material'). By this provision, a naturalist is also a materialist; for example, she will think that a person consists solely of matter. However, we also have a naturalist, non-materialist position (which I will get to in a second.)

Claim two: "the only way to know the truth about all that there is (i.e., the material world) is through science." a.k.a scientism. Here, a naturalist could go further and say that all that can be said to exist is only discoverable through science, even if we don't know it to be true now.

A naturalist who is a non-materialist will be fine with the following statement: there are other things that are not material (breaking away from the traditional position), only that science needs to somehow re-work its framework to admit those things. However, this position is quite elusive, so we will leave this for now and restrict ourselves to the traditional naturalist position that I have stated: the naturalist—materialist that subscribes to claims one and two.

Epistemological fractures, everywhere

Even a cursory look at those claims reveals some epistemological fractures.

Suppose a belief system exerts that all that can be said to exist is only discoverable through science. In that case, one could make a kind request, namely that the naturalists should show us how science shows that “all that can be said to exist is only discoverable through science” (since all things include the belief of naturalism itself.)

In order words, 1) if all things are discoverable only via science, then 2) it has to follow that it is discoverable via science that all things are discoverable only via science. However, since it is not discoverable via science that all things are discoverable only via science, then scientific naturalism has to be false. This position, at best, has to be adopted on a faith basis, a characterization a scientific naturalist will detest.

And the reader must not miss the apparent self-defeating motif.

What am I saying here? I am saying that if this were to be a soccer game, a naturalist would have scored at least an own goal. In other words, if naturalism is taken to be true, then it must be false, a shot in the head, that kind of thing.

And the problem is that for the scientific realist, we just slid into the metaphysical realm, far, far beyond the reach of science. To be explicit, science here refers to the scientific method, the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) model.

But we mustn't let go that fast. Claim two, again: "the only way to know the truth about all that there is (i.e., the material world) is through science." This is the same as saying: Thou shalt reject anything that is not a product of science (again, for emphasis sake, we are speaking to the H-D model). Then the question is, what the heck are we going to do with mathematical axioms and logical truths? How about our intuitions and introspection?

And, of course, staring in our faces are the questions about the ultimate nature of reality (metaphysics) – and such questions as Why does the natural world exist and what is the ultimate purpose? These questions, in the framework of scientific naturalism, are utterly meaningless, and yet the meaninglessness of the question in the framework cannot automatically invalidate it. These questions are outside the scope of science and must be approached through philosophy or theology.

There is more to say on this subject, but I will leave that for other entries for some other day.

Footnotes

[1] Unobservables are entities or phenomena that cannot be directly observed or measured but are postulated as part of a scientific theory in order to explain observable phenomena, for example, atoms and subatomic particles, magnetic fields, and dark matter. Observables, on the other hand, are entities or phenomena that can be directly observed or measured (tables, chairs, and trees, as well as observable phenomena such as light, sound waves, and temperature.)