A view of knowledge that acknowledges that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of ‘science’ seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. (Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, 5)

There are, of course, a great many things that humans do quite naturally, e.g., acquire a mother tongue and fall in love. Just as naturally as those, there is the human need to understand the world, not just the Great Clod under our feet, but ourselves, where we are and who we are, each other and our relationships, and our relationship to the world as a whole. While we may make a distinction between understanding and knowing, the desire to understand the aforementioned things is reasonably seen as understanding through knowing. We seek to know that such and such is the case—specifically, what constitutes the world, how those “parts” relate to one another, and how we are related to those “parts.” We seek to understand via propositional knowledge.

This need to understand, to know, has been attempted through such “things” as religion, philosophy, and poetry. But perhaps the most “successful” means we have found is that of science and the scientific method. We have to be careful, however, for we need to be clear about the kind of success we are talking about. There are two main ways that science is successful, ones that are closely related, but which while still separate are easily confused or mixed together.  There is the success at discovering the truth about particular areas of inquiry, e.g., the structure of the animal cell and the atom, and there is the success of technological innovations used to solve practical problems, e.g., ways of communicating over long distance, and to provide various luxuries, e.g., air conditioning. Again, the two are obviously related, the former providing the partial means to the latter. This distinction is important to keep in mind, I believe, because its being ignored is partially responsible for the denigration of the success of philosophy and poetry as means of knowing certain truths of our world.

We should never forget to ask whether or not science has legitimately displaced such things as philosophy and poetry as means of knowing our world. This issue is a central concern of Mary Midgley in her book Science and Poetry. That this is a real concern and not a strawman is indicated in part by such passages as the following:

Many people…are convinced that rational, intellectually respectable discussion can only be carried on in scientific language, meaning by scientific not just disciplined and methodical, like the language of history or logic or linguistics – which would be uncontroversial – but drawn from the natural sciences. They are sure that – as Richard Dawkins has recently put it – ‘Science is the only way we know to understand the real world.’ (Midgley 2006, 13)

An even more blatant expression of the denigration of the usefulness of philosophy and poetry as means of discovering truths about our world is found in the following passage by Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, quoted by Midgley:

Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasize delights in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension.  Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets … They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists … While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates. (From ‘The Limitless Power of Science’ in Nature’s Imagination, ed. John Cornwell, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 123 in Midgley 2006, 27-28.)

These are certainly strong words. But are they true? What would have to be true for science to be the only legitimate means to know the world? Well, if we take “the world” to refer to everything that exists, and if we take knowledge to consist of truths about the world, then all knowledge claims would be claims about the world. Therefore, if the position held by Dawkins and Atkins were true, that would mean that all knowledge claims would be scientific, whatever “scientific” ends up meaning. This in turn would imply that all claims to knowledge that are not overtly scientific, e.g., claims about one’s subjective experience of art or love or music, are either a) not legitimate claims to knowledge (perhaps because the “facts” they report on do not actually exist) or b) reducible to claims that are explicitly scientific, e.g., distribution of particles and fields in space-time. Let us call the view that all propositional knowledge is scientific knowledge scientism.

Therefore, in order to show that science is not the sole means to knowledge and that some knowledge is not scientific knowledge, we would need to show both that some non-scientific claims are nevertheless legitimate claims to knowledge and that some non-overtly scientific knowledge claims were not reducible to overtly scientific claims, i.e., weren’t scientific claims after all. We would need to do both in order to show that the disjunction above of a) and b) is false.

We thus need to examine two main things: 1) the connection between the methods of science and justification for knowledge, and the possibility of non-scientific knowledge; and 2) the idea of the reduction of one sentence type to another, and/or the reduction of one theory to another. Regarding 1), the main issue seems to be the question of whether and in what way subjective, potentially non-verifiable claims and non-repeatable experiences can allow for the justification required for knowledge. Regarding 2), the main point is that if philosophical or poetic knowledge claims simply reduced to scientific knowledge claims, then there would not be any issue of whether philosophy or poetry provide legitimate knowledge claims qua philosophy and poetry.

Lastly here, I want to look at one very quick, very pointed response to scientism, one that may seem at first to bypass my above proposed way of critically evaluating the truth of scientism. It is a response that closely resembles both the objection made to the verificationist theory of meaning as itself being unverifiable and the claim that any answer to the question, “Is there synthetic a priori knowledge?” will itself be a synthetic a priori claim and thus the answer is necessarily yes. The objection to scientism that I have in mind is to point out that the question, “Is all knowledge scientific knowledge?” is itself not a scientific question. It is not scientific because it would not be answered through the methods of the sciences. It would not be made true by a “scientific fact.” Therefore, its answer cannot be yes (if it were yes, you would have a contradiction), and not all knowledge is scientific.

This may be too quick and easy of a refutation of scientism. For perhaps it is correct to say that “Is all knowledge scientific knowledge?” is not a scientific question only in the sense that it is not overtly a scientific question. That is, perhaps it is not answerable by means of scientific investigation, e.g., hypothesis formation and testing. However, the purported anti-scientistic truth of the answer to the question, namely, “No,” depends on the form of the question and the “fact” that it is not answerable by scientific investigation. But what if the question itself either a) reduced to entities, e.g., brain states (themselves particles and fields), or b) it turned out to be meaningless? a) is a problematic response because even if the question reduced to brain states, whatever that might mean exactly, it would not be about brain states. b) is a problematic response, for it would either rely on a problematic, verificationist theory of meaning, or it would imply that all questions are meaningless, i.e., that language itself, if we assume it to involve an intensional as well as extensional component would be meaningless, since “intensional meanings” are not scientific entities.  But that would also imply that statements affirming scientism are meaningless or nonsense.