In his new book Monopolizing Knowledge (available for purchase now), physicist Ian Hutchinson engages with the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge” (
In his new book Monopolizing Knowledge (available for purchase now), physicist Ian Hutchinson engages with the world-view he calls “scientism”: “the belief that science, modeled on the natural sciences, is the only source of real knowledge” (page vii). In Hutchinson’s eyes, this erroneous world-view is at least indirectly responsible for the apparent friction between science and religion that many see today. In this series (taken from the larger book, which engages the topic in a much fuller and deeper fashion), Hutchinson will attempt to both explain and dismantle “scientism” by examining both what we mean when we say “science”, and how the scientistic worldview oversteps this definition and becomes a philosophical and metaphysical framework. In part 1, we took a brief look at the origins of scientism. In Part 2, Hutchinson described "reproducibility", the first of two key characteristics of science that underlie its immense power but limit its scope. Today, we move on to explore the second key characteristics of true science: Clarity.
The most direct way to ensure this unambiguous Clarity is for scientific observations to consist of measurements. The consequent reduction of the main parameters of the observations to numbers offers Clarity because numbers are probably the most familiar universal concept of thought. Measurement is more than numbers though. To measure the physical world we need shared scales, references, and common systems of units, which are crucial supporting parts of science.
Figure 1: The replica K48 of the official kilogram, kept by the Danish National Metrology Institute under two bell-jars.1
Clarity is a deliberately vaguer description of the crucial characteristic of science expression than mathematics. That is for a good reason. The description of experiment and of field observations involves a lot more than what most people would recognize as mathematics. And yet those aspects of science also strive for Clarity and precision. The ability to focus on the important aspects of the phenomena, and avoid over-burdening descriptions with endless details that are irrelevant, is something that is learned by scientists through apprenticeship and numerous informal experiences, not formal courses. So, paradoxically perhaps, scientific Clarity is something that can't be learnt or prescribed with Clarity.
There are many important questions that inherently lack the kind of Clarity that science requires. Consider the beauty of a sunset, the justice of a verdict, the compassion of a nurse, the drama of a play, the depth of a poem, the terror of a war, the excitement of a symphony, the significance of a history, the love of a woman. Which of these can be reduced to the Clarity of a scientific description? Yes, a sunset can be described in terms of the spectral analysis of the light, the causes of the coloration arising from light scattering by particles and molecules, and their arrangement and gradient in the sky. But when all the scientific details of such a description are done, has that explained, or even conveyed, its beauty? Hardly. In fact it has missed the point. Many-layered connections and implications are intrinsically part of the significance of these subjects. We appreciate and understand them, we know them, through sharing conceptually in the interwoven fabric of their often only evocative allusions. Removal of ambiguity destroys that significance, because ambiguity is at the very heart of their meaning. One cannot appreciate ambiguity unambiguously. Consequently, matters such as these cannot be encompassed scientifically.
This is not a problem for science. But under scientism's presumptions there's a major problem for subjects like these. They either have to be dismissed from the set of topics offering any real knowledge or they have to be reduced to something like science. The first strategy is often at work, for example, when people talk about the distinction between fact and value. If scientism places the discussion of value into a category of non-knowledge, of unsupported doctrine, of mere opinion, it fundamentally undermines its significance. The second strategy: reducing the topic to something like science by imposing on it the structures of scientific analysis, is commonplace in many social disciplines, and spills over, for example, into popular journalism through an excessive reliance on opinion polls.
Reduction or reductionism is sometimes regarded as a principle of science. A complex system is explained in terms of the interaction of a number of simpler subsystems from which it is composed. Those subsystems may themselves be further explained by a lower hierarchy of sub-subsystems, and so on. Actually, though, this general strategy has a much simpler name than reductionism. It is precisely what is meant by analysis: the separating of something into its constituent parts in order to understand it. A scientistic viewpoint very often adopts reductionism not just as a useful method, but as an inviolable principle. It is presumed that when a satisfactory scientific explanation at a reduced level exists the higher level descriptions lose their force or relevance. Donald MacKay2 coined the disparaging but descriptive phrase "nothing-buttery" to refer to this ontological reductionism. "Nothing-buttery is characterized by the notion that by reducing any phenomenon to its components you not