[lit-ideas] Re: On being called a Lyre [dilemmas]


On 21-Sep-08, at 8:51 PM, wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:


Scientists seduced by the allure of brain science ...


To say nothing of philosophers seduced by same:

        ... philosophical scientism fails to see the role that
        science and technology play in the alienation of
        human beings from the world through the latter's
        objectification into a causally determined realm of
        nature or, more aggregiously, into a reified realm of
        commodities manipulated by an instrumental rationality.
         .... [S]cientism rests on the false assumption that the
        scientific or theoretical way of viewing things ... provides
        the primary and most significant access to ourselves and
        the world.  ... [T]he scientific view of the world is derivative
        and parasitic upon a prior practical view of the world as
        [in Heideggerian terms] ready-to-hand, that is, the environing
        world that is closest, most familiar, and most meaningful
        to us, the world that is always colored by our cognitive,
        ethical and aesthetic values.  That is to say, scientism ...
        overlooks the phenomenon of the *life-world* which is
        the enabling condition for scientific practice.  Although
        such an anti-scientism *can* lead to obscurantism ... it
        *need* not do so.  The critique of scientism    ... does not
        seek to refute or negate the results of scientific research in
        the name of some mystical apprehension of the unity of
        man and nature ...; it rather simply insists that science does
        not provide the primary and most significant access to a
        sense of ourselves and the world.... [T]he practices of the
        natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and ...
        the latter are not simply reducible to the former.
[from Simon Critchley, "Introduction: what is Continental philosophy?", in Simon Critchley and William R Schroeder, eds. _A Companion to Continental Philosophy_, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998; p. 13]
Of course, one does not have to side with Heidegger in order to be critical of 'scientism' - Adorno & Horkheimer (with all of their antipathies to Heidegger) immediately come to (well, at least, *my*) mind. (I think it is the 'commodities manipulated by an instrumental rationality' which triggers that.)
Indeed I think that in Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy a critique of theoretical science providing 'the primary and most significant access to ourselves and the world' can be founded. (Tentative explication of this view will be made available upon request.)
One must be fair to the scientists themselves. Not all are (or were) 'realists' when it comes to philosophising about their endeavours; indeed some regard(ed) realism as an impediment to scientific progress (the parenthetical past tenses - 'were' and 'regarded' are prompted by thoughts of the debate between the early developers of quantum theory and Einstein: the former thought that Einstein's commitment to realism a serious hindrance). 'Anti-scientism' (i.e., rejection of the view that science 'provides the primary and most significant access to ourselves and the world') is most definitely not automatically 'anti- science'. 

- Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
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