- Share
-
-
arroba
So there is something to discuss. From Thomas Cortellesi at Quillette:
Scientism is often ridiculed as an appeal to excessive reductionism that “restricts human inquiry.” This notion is predicated on a view of science as purely reductionist, a charge that betrays a deep misunderstanding of scientific practice. Science is a way of demonstrating the deep connections between the smallest of parts and the largest of systems. Contrary to how it is often portrayed, the scientific project is not strictly reductionist. Reductionism is the belief that understanding complex phenomena comes ultimately from breaking them down into their simplest parts. This approach is made by isolating variables, refining the precision and accuracy of observations, and extracting from them fundamental laws, which in turn can be used to make predictions. The purely reductionist approach to science had its heyday during the Enlightenment, when Newton’s clockwork universe reigned triumphant, able at last to provide a rigorous explanation not only for the motion of celestial bodies, but everything under the sun. This was the spirit of the times – scholars imagined all aspects of the universe, human ones, to be reducible to axioms and blueprints; even Thomas Hobbes imagined his Leviathan as akin to an automaton, with “springs and wheels.” More.
The problem is that naturalism is simply not true. Either it will survive or science will.
See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down