= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wilder comments on Rationality Quotes February 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (401)
Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance
Curious to know why this was downvoted. Many philosophers use 'scientism' as a term of abuse, and Luke has written about reclaiming the term here. I found this a rather pithy rallying call that antedates Rosenberg's.
Apologies if this is gratuitous but it was my first post!
The quote doesn't seem to actually say anything.
I suppose it's one of those statements that says a good deal in context and rather less outside it. 'Scientism' usually refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the tools of science in understanding the world. It is so understood by two camps, one who views it as an intellectual failing, the other a virtue. Wilson's point is that the latter camp should not cede any ground to the former -- not even terminological ground.
Edit: by context here I don't mean the book in particular. More like, reading too much contemporary philosophy.
Unfortunately, the word "scietism" does describe a real set of related failure modes that people trying to be "scientific" frequently fall into, as I discussed in more detail in this thread.
Unscientific does that job already, while the '-ism' suffix denotes, in this case, belief in science. Why let them have a perfectly good word?
I think "scientism," "unscientific," and "pseudoscientific" all have different and necessary meanings: respectively, "attempting to use scientific epistemology but misunderstanding it", "using bad epistemology," and "using bad epistemology but making a deliberate effort to look like one is being scientific". The word closest to meaning what you want "scientism" to mean is probably "Bayesianism".
No. It also cover people who don't even try to be scientific.
Agree with that. There is a finer-grained distinction worth drawing -- with some other word!