In defense of scientism
James Ladyman’s and Don Ross’s arguments in Every Thing Must Go are framed as criticisms of what they call a priori, neo-scholastic, or pseudo-scientific metaphysics. These terms refer to much contemporary analytic metaphysics, which often undertakes metaphysics as though it is a separate discipline, independent from science, with its own standards of epistemological justification. In their book, they outline an alternative metaphysical program in which metaphysics is a meta-scientific discipline that provides a unified picture of the world based upon the details of scientific research. Their metaphysics is naturalized in virtue of the way that metaphysical claims are directly and explicitly indexed to scientific ones.
This conception of metaphysics places Ladyman and Ross within the Quinean traditional of scientific naturalism. Naturalism requires that all claims concerning the nature of reality should be motivated by the output of scientific practices, norms, and institutions since these are our only epistemologically reliable sources of beliefs. Following Charles Sanders Peirce and Willard van Orman Quine, they propose a Pragmatist form of verificationism that serves as a heuristic guide to linking metaphysics to science.
Two claims, one meta-methodological and one epistemological, motivate this Pragmatist, rather than Positivist, verificationism. First, Ladyman and Ross deny the existence of a scientific method, which they define as a set of positive injunctions followed by all and only scientists. Second, since science just is a set of practices, norms, and institutions that function as error filters upon our everyday experiences, science is our exclusive epistemological authority. Together, these claims inform their Principle of Naturalistic Closure, the heuristic principle they put forth to distinguish good from bad metaphysics:
Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be motivated by, and only by, the service it perform, if true, in showing how two or more specific scientific hypotheses, at least one of which is drawn from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypotheses taken separately…
My interest lies in the relation of epistemology and philosophy of science, so I restrict most of my arguments to this aspect of their work. I intend to identify and criticize any philosophy masquerading as science.
Scientism is inconsistent
With that said, scientism is inconsistent. One cannot claim that science is the sole means of providing epistemological justification for claims about reality because this claim itself cannot be verified scientifically. This flight to scientism is considered necessary because traditional epistemology (i.e. concerns about the nature of epistemic justification, the proper criteria for justification, the possibility of knowledge, etc.,) has failed. If a universal standard for knowledge cannot be articulated, why not throw in with the best program going, namely science and restrict the range of allowable questions to those addressed by it? However, the fact that scientism’s central epistemological claim elicits justification from a standard that is external to science demonstrates that it is engaged more deeply in traditional epistemological questions than it’s advocates either realize or care to admit.
Through science to epistemology
There is much to value in Ladyman’s and Ross’s philosophy of science that I want to extricate from their inconsistent epistemology. A new epistemological model can replace the old one without negatively impacting the core, scientific insights of their work. However, rather than offer an external critique of naturalism from the perspective of traditional epistemology, I offer an internal critique by assuming that naturalism is true and that science has established its reliability as a means of providing epistemological justification. The logical structure of scientific justification can be articulated by examining the operations of scientific inquiry. The practices, norms, and institutions that guide scientists reveal the standards of judgment that are innate to science. These standards of judgment manifest certain common features and characteristics that can be abstracted and formulated as the general structure of scientific justification.
Nevertheless, the general structure of epistemological justification within science is not merely identical to these practices, norms, and institutions. It guides scientific practice, though not as an a priori structure imposed from without. Because this structure of justification is innate to scientific inquiry, it preserves the independence of scientific justification from the external, extrascientific standards of justification which the naturalist rejects. Moreover, this descriptive account of scientific justification functions as a normative heuristic for future scientific inquiry.
I correct Ladyman’s and Ross’s epistemological inconsistency by adopting the same technique that Bernard Lonergan uses in his pedagogically structured work Insight. Therein, Lonergan demonstrates to the reader than she is a knower by explicating the cognitional processes that are inherent to her intelligent engagement of the world. Lonergan’s procedure is to answer the following questions:
- What am I doing when I am knowing?
- Why is doing that knowing?
- What do I know when I do that?
At this point, I have already begun to follow the same procedure. I have begun to address the first question through the preceding analysis of scientific operations above, which has demonstrated the logical structure of justification inherent to scientific inquiry. I continue to address the first question by making explicit the cognitional structure at work within those scientific operations and the scientific logic of justification.
A new model for epistemology
Rather than define knowledge as justified true belief, Lonergan’s intentionality analysis examines the dynamic structure of human knowing as a set of repeating cognitional process. This shift from knowledge as product to knowing as process brings together the context of discovery and the context of justification, which were disconnected by Frege and the logical positivists when they disassociated epistemology from psychology. However, separating justification from discovery is only necessary if one wishes to analyze knowledge as a product separate from the broader cognitional process that brings it about. Analyzing the logical structure of knowledge solely as a product becomes problematic when this aspect of epistemology is mistaken for the whole epistemological endeavor.
A successful account of epistemological justification can only be given by treating knowing as a process. In providing such an account, I address Lonergan’s second question. However, providing such an account requires demonstrating addressing the original, anti-psychologistic motivations of Frege and the logical positivists. Criticisms of psychologism will be presented and assessed. Yet, such problems do not deeply concern naturalists, who already follow Quine’s model of naturalizing epistemology. Once the criticisms of psychologism have been addressed, I demonstrate how the cognitional structure identified in scientific justification is also operative outside of scientific inquiry.
Strangely, this argument against scientism demonstrates that the naturalist fails to naturalize epistemology thoroughly enough. Quine was correct to reintegrate psychology and epistemology, though he mistakenly attempted a simple reduction of epistemology to psychology. Alternatively, Lonergan’s intentionality analysis demonstrates that treating knowing as a set of cognitive processes that are subject to empirical examination establishes cognitive theory as essential for successful epistemology. Additionally, unlike Carnap’s rational reconstruction, which Quine correctly identified as an extrascientific standard being imposed upon science, Lonergan’s intentionality analysis is a “cognitive reconstruction” that employs cognitive science and empirical psychology in precisely the way naturalism demands.
The relation between commonsense and science
With Ladyman and Ross’s scientific epistemology replaced, I turn to the relation between commonsense and science in their work. They assert that commonsense descriptions of the world are answerable to scientific descriptions of the world. However, this understanding of the relation between commonsense and science treats the two perspectives as epistemic rivals from the outset. Alternatively, I contend that these are two different modes of engaging the world which only become epistemic rivals when they are regarded as images of the world. Rather than treat them as images, or whatnesses, I treat them as different modes of engagement, or hownesses. I continue to follow the principles of naturalism by examining the work of recent cognitive scientists. This demonstrates that contemporary cognitive- and neuroscience supports a two-mode paradigm. More specifically, I review the work of Jordan Peterson, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, and Iain McGilchrist regarding the two-mode paradigm and the hierarchical relationship that exists between the two modes.
Having established the two-mode paradigm as a viable scientific pattern, I examine several treatments of commonsense and science in philosophy. Carnap, Sellars, and Dewey have all considered the relationship of commonsense to science from different perspectives and have drawn different conclusions. None of these philosophical treatments is adequate; however, for Lonergan, the two different modes of engagement constitute two divergent realms of meaning which are not epistemic rivals and cannot be reduced one to the other. Given the previously demonstrated inadequacy of scientism as an epistemology, traditional attempts to eliminate commonsense descriptions in favor of scientific descriptions fail as well.
The general empirical structure of metaphysics
Lastly, my argument against scientism demonstrates that successful epistemology is not scientistic, but simply empirical. Additionally, Lonergan’s argument that commonsense and science constitute two realms of meaning demonstrates that our cognitional processes operate on divergent, non-reducible aspects. This further establishes that human knowing is generally empirical in nature rather than narrowly scientistic. Still, this general structure applies to more than commonsense and science. After a brief discussion of its operation in mathematics, I turn to its operation in metaphysics, thereby addressing the last of Lonergan’s questions: what do I know when I am knowing?
I discuss the isomorphic relation between knowing and being, showing how the ontological structure of what is known parallels to cognitional structure operative in our knowing. Then, I argue that the scope and method of metaphysics is generally empirical in character, contrasting it with Ladyman and Ross’s naturalized, scientistic metaphysics. I show how Lonergan’s General Empirical Method in metaphysics resolves several of Ladyman and Ross’s concerns about traditional metaphysics while also providing better explanations of several of their metaphysical successes. In particular, I discuss why their insistence that the talk of individuals as ontological fundamental must be eliminated is unnecessary, as well as why they are correct to emphasize the continuity of mathematical structures in scientific theory change, but incorrect to suggest that only these structures are “real”.
Dissertating Outloud 