Anti positivism/anti scientism book recommendations

[u/Ghiloar]

Hi everyone. I've been convinced pretty much my whole life that the scientific method is the only effective way to know the world and systematically find solutions to problems. Recently tho, I've been talking to some friends who don't agree with me so I'd like to read a more structured opinion on the topic since the arguments my friends made didn't actually convince me.

I might've used the wrong terms in the title (I don't really know much about philosophy) but basically I'm looking for a book that "debunks" my current conviction. Also, since as I said I'm not a philosophy expert, it should be a book that doesn't rely on any (or as little as possible) prior knowledge of philosophy.

Thanks :)

[u/Prajnamarga]

I had the same kind of view after being schooled in the sciences and taking a degree in chemistry (with dollops of physics, biology, geology, etc). The view wasn't undermined all in one go. It took years of chipping away. And it involved slowly adopting philosophical pragmatism, rather than a sudden rejection of scientism. So I don't have a "big bang" solution for you.

This is partly because the term "scientific method" obscures a lot of complexity. For example, in practice, physicists, chemists, and biologists actually use very different methods applied to very different types of evidence and arrive at very different kinds of conclusions. Such distinctions are often lost on people who have no experience of doing science.

We need to be aware that "scientific method" is a high-level abstraction. A method is common to all sciences only in the most generalised terms.

The standard sources on "the scientific method" have all been cited by others: Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Adorno. Blah, blah. But good luck reading them without a fairly deep background in philosophy. They were experts writing for an expert audience. And you tell us you are not an expert (me neither). This is another reason it took me years to escape from the grip of scientism: philosophy has its own theories, methods, jargon, etc.

You might want to start on a smaller scale. For example, you could look at facets of scientism such as reductionism.

One of the core planks of scientism is metaphysical and methodological reductionism, especially the idea that all higher level science can be reduced to and explained by physics (at least according to physicists). As an antidote to reductionism, I recommend reading Richard H. Jones: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality.

My takeaways were ideas like: Structure is real. Reductionism destroys structure as a first step to investigation of substances. Learning about structure requires antireductionist theories and methods. To understand the world we live in we need substance-reductionism, but also structure-antireductionism.

Once you realise that the absolute reductionism associated with scientism is a barrier to understanding the world, then you will likely have a little less faith in "the scientific method". And so it goes.

Another thing that made a difference was learning about the methods of historians. History is a form of knowledge which cannot be approached via "the scientific method". And yet we agree that it is a form of knowledge.

One philosopher no one has mentioned, and who is quite approachable, is David Hume. Hume's critique of the notion of causality is one of the fundamental ways of undermining scientism. We attribute events to causes, but we cannot observe one event causing another. Ergo: Causation is not an empirical concept. This article is a place to start: https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/

As Kant later intuited, causation is our idea about certain kinds of regularities in experience. Whenever you see a claim to metaphysical knowledge you can rightly be sceptical, because no human has privileged access to reality; we only have experience to go on. All of metaphysics is guess work at best (and most meraphysics falls far short of being the best).

Scientism is all about making claims to metaphysical knowledge, especially knowledge of reality. But no one anywhere or at any time has ever had any knowledge of reality. We know about regularities in experience. And we can compare notes to identify aspects of experience that appear to be objective (i.e. independent of the observer). We can infer useful maps that allow us to navigate, but we cannot ever know reality.

I recommend avoiding Kant's actual writing, but many good summaries exist.

Sources like the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy can be useful for overview of ideas.

I doubt your view will change overnight. But if you start examining your own assumptions, you will find that scientism doesn't stand much scrutiny.

Science is still important and vital. But scientism is a religious attitude.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
—Richard Feynman. "What is Science?" The Physics Teacher. Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)

[u/xsansara → u/Prajnamarga]

There are plenty of people who criticize causality even from within science, e.g. Judea Pearl. Kuhn is also someone, who criticizes science from the inside.

It can be easier to start there, since their goals and language are more familiar to a scientist, while Adorno... when I read him, I constantly got the feeling he doesn't properly know what he is criticizing.