As a card-carrying “scientismist” let me explain my position a bit. I take the worthlessness of non-scientific inquiry to be a point of scientific fact. Philosophy is, for me, about as likely as telekinesis. Brains just don’t do the sorts of things philosophers want them to. Nothing could. That your imagination can concoct an idea tells us something about your imagination and not the world. The noises that come out of your mouth and the marks you make on paper are just noises and marks. This is the position our account of the physical world puts us in. Computers don’t help; information processing doesn’t help; putting no amount of matter together gets you a closed machine that churns out truths about the world.
Science is unaffected by this. To do science you don’t need any cognitive magic and you don’t need to perceive the world in a particular way. To do science all you need is for perception and cognition to remain the same (or similar) through time and between scientists. As long as this is true you can make measurements and manipulate mathematical equations (i.e., as long as we all agree on how many seconds the clock ticked, or how many millimeters were measured, or that the litmus turned red, the relationship between the perceived objects and our perception of them does not matter).
The fact that scientists perform thought experiments and have arguments and so forth isn’t a problem; these things are part of our uniquely human approach to science (we’re also bipedal and have color vision; this isn’t strictly relevant to science either but you couldn’t explain much of what a human scientist does without it; an alien scientist who spent his sabbatical at Earth U probably wouldn’t be able to use any of the apparatus and our mathematical notation would no doubt be a source of endless frustration for him). To be sure, there are clearly behaviors that are necessary for science (dogs don’t make good scientists), but there’s no reason these need fall under some general category. Alien scientists might have a completely different cognitive make-up than our own.
What thinking and speaking and writing are for, the scientist realizes, are problem solving and communication. We shouldn’t confuse the scientists problem solving and the philosophers big-R Reasoning; the scientist couldn’t care less about normative strictures (correct reasoning) as long as the physical situation is accounted for. The scientist can therefore apply all the faculties of his mind to a problem (including all the supposedly irrational bits). When a scientist makes a statement, it is not a step in a philosophical argument, it’s merely a means to communicate. (Likewise, none of the above is a philosophical argument, it’s merely a description.)
As a card-carrying “scientismist” let me explain my position a bit. I take the worthlessness of non-scientific inquiry to be a point of scientific fact. Philosophy is, for me, about as likely as telekinesis. Brains just don’t do the sorts of things philosophers want them to. Nothing could. That your imagination can concoct an idea tells us something about your imagination and not the world. The noises that come out of your mouth and the marks you make on paper are just noises and marks. This is the position our account of the physical world puts us in. Computers don’t help; information processing doesn’t help; putting no amount of matter together gets you a closed machine that churns out truths about the world.
Science is unaffected by this. To do science you don’t need any cognitive magic and you don’t need to perceive the world in a particular way. To do science all you need is for perception and cognition to remain the same (or similar) through time and between scientists. As long as this is true you can make measurements and manipulate mathematical equations (i.e., as long as we all agree on how many seconds the clock ticked, or how many millimeters were measured, or that the litmus turned red, the relationship between the perceived objects and our perception of them does not matter).
The fact that scientists perform thought experiments and have arguments and so forth isn’t a problem; these things are part of our uniquely human approach to science (we’re also bipedal and have color vision; this isn’t strictly relevant to science either but you couldn’t explain much of what a human scientist does without it; an alien scientist who spent his sabbatical at Earth U probably wouldn’t be able to use any of the apparatus and our mathematical notation would no doubt be a source of endless frustration for him). To be sure, there are clearly behaviors that are necessary for science (dogs don’t make good scientists), but there’s no reason these need fall under some general category. Alien scientists might have a completely different cognitive make-up than our own.
What thinking and speaking and writing are for, the scientist realizes, are problem solving and communication. We shouldn’t confuse the scientists problem solving and the philosophers big-R Reasoning; the scientist couldn’t care less about normative strictures (correct reasoning) as long as the physical situation is accounted for. The scientist can therefore apply all the faculties of his mind to a problem (including all the supposedly irrational bits). When a scientist makes a statement, it is not a step in a philosophical argument, it’s merely a means to communicate. (Likewise, none of the above is a philosophical argument, it’s merely a description.)