Scientism: physics fixes all the facts, science answers everything

Scientism; "the physical facts fix all the facts"

Alex Rosenberg born 1946Philosopher of science who defends "scientism": physics fixes all the facts, and science answers the big questions, often in the negative.

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What it claims

The only true answers to the persistent questions are scientific, and they are often negative: no purpose, no lasting self, no free will.

Why

Science is the only reliable path to truth, and physics knows no purpose, no design and no self.

The same idea through history

Auguste Comte1830Comte counts as real knowledge only what rests on observed facts. Rosenberg goes further: physics is the basic description of everything, and science draws from it answers to questions Comte placed in metaphysics.

Rudolf Carnap1929In "The Scientific Conception of the World", the Vienna Circle manifesto signed by Hahn, Neurath and Carnap, the authors defend a view of the world that recognises only statements of experience and logic, and sets metaphysics aside as without object. The link with Rosenberg is our own: this text is a distant intellectual ancestor, he does not cite it here.

In short

"Scientism: physics fixes all the facts, science answers everything" is an argument by Alex Rosenberg (Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality, 2011, ch. 1-2) on the question "Can science explain everything?" (answer: it can explain everything). Its claim: The only true answers to the persistent questions are scientific, and they are often negative: no purpose, no lasting self, no free will. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality, 2011, ch. 1-2

Valid with an implicit premise

What is the meaning of life? Is there a self that lasts? Do we have free will? Can morality be grounded? For Alex Rosenberg, these "persistent questions" have scientific answers, and those answers are often negative. He starts from a simple idea: physics is the basic description of everything there is, and science is the only reliable route to knowledge. From there follow, he says, a life without cosmic purpose, a self that is only an illusion of the brain, and no free will. He himself calls this view "scientism", a word others use as an insult. Is this a conclusion of science, or a philosophy passing itself off as science?

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, one can believe that physics is complete and science reliable, and still think that "the meaning of my life" or "the good" talk about something other than particles, as the rules of chess talk about something other than the wood of the pieces. Then science says nothing negative about them.

With P4, the argument is valid. P1 makes science the only source of knowledge, P2 and P3 say what it describes, and P4 says traditional answers need something else. Only scientific answers remain, negative on what P4 lists. P1 is the premise that science itself does not prove, and P4 is the most contested: a philosopher can say that meaning, morality or the self are not physical facts without being illusory.

Analogy. Imagine a painting perfectly described by the list of its pixels. Rosenberg says: there is nothing in the painting besides the pixels, so "the beauty of the painting" is not an extra element. His opponents answer: the pixel list does not contain the notion of beauty, and that does not prove it does not exist.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Susan Haack 2012 · attacks premise 1

The thesis "only science gives knowledge" is not itself a scientific thesis: no experiment confirms it. If it is true, it is not known; if it is known, science is not the only source. Haack, a philosopher of science, counts this kind of claim among the "signs of scientism": looking to science for answers beyond what it can establish, and treating everything else with disdain. The self-refutation objection is our own formulation, not a quotation from Haack.

Rosenberg replies

Alex Rosenberg 2011 · What the book says

Rosenberg does not treat the objection in this form in the passage we re-read. He justifies his trust in physics by its track record: it has explained and predicted with extreme precision across an immense range of phenomena since Newton, and this record is, he says, the best reason to believe it is complete.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Point of disagreement: trust in science can rest on its success, but this reasoning is itself a reflection on science, not a laboratory result. Supporters see ordinary empirical evidence, critics see a circle; the debate is unresolved (our summary).

Thomas Nagel 2012 · attacks premise 2

Nagel argues, in Mind and Cosmos, that consciousness, reason and values cannot be explained by physics and Darwinian biology alone. His book's subtitle says it: the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is, in his view, almost certainly false. He does not conclude that science should stop, but that another kind of explanation is needed, one that would make mind a basic fact of nature. This targets P2, and thus Rosenberg's conclusion about the self and morality.

no reply

see the argument

Rosenberg never answered this objection.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: Rosenberg and Nagel agree on what current science describes, not on what it proves. For one, consciousness is one more illusion to explain; for the other, it is a fact that forces science to change. No widely accepted answer (our summary).