The Roots of Scientism?

Scientism in philosophy did not begin with scientific empiricism. Beliefs about the surpassing practical benefits, intellectual rigour and objectivity of science, beliefs about its central position in learning or culture, were widely shared by philosophers long before the twentieth century. Indeed, it is sometimes held that what I am calling scientism in philosophy is traceable to a number of related philosophical mistakes that were made by the early modern philosophers of science, figures such as Bacon, Descartes and Locke. ¹ Tailoring their conception of the mind to what they believed suited the mind to science, these philosophers are supposed to have been attracted to foundationalism in epistemology, introspective theories of the mental in the philosophy of mind, and an exaggerated rationalism in the philosophy of science. Tailoring their conception of the mind to what science required, they put into circulation a deeply misleading metaphor for the mind, the metaphor of the mirror of nature. The mind was a medium for accurate representation of the world. In the scientific empiricists, a similar claim is made about language. It, too, is principally and essentially a medium for accurate description, as are some forms of pictorial representation, and the fact that the aim of accurate description can be found in painting as well as poetry, and in metaphysics as well as physics, shows that no sector of culture is entirely cut off from science. Von Mises, as we have seen, even reverts to unreconstructed talk of mental representation where he describes the common aim of metaphysics and science. In this way the excesses of scientism seem to be traceable to a seventeenth-century conception of the mind. In opposition to this account I shall suggest that as taken up by Descartes and Bacon the metaphor of the mirror of nature is largely harmless. I shall then 25suggest a different source in these philosophers for the scientism expressed in our century.