Splinters in my mind
Now that school's out, I'll be able to blog more! In this post I share some thoughts in kernel form that I hope to flesh out soon in full size posts. Scientism There are two interesting varieties of scientism: epistemological and ontological. The former claims that the methods of the (natural) sciences are the only reliable ones for obtaining knowledge of the world. The latter claims that the only things that exist in the world are those which are transparent to the methods of the sciences. Note that the two must be distinguished, as one could hold to epistemological scientism without ontological scientism (there may be entities other than scientific ones, but we don't know anything about them). Epistemological scientism is vulnerable to at least two objections: 1) the claim that the methods of the sciences are the only reliable ones for obtaining knowledge of the world cannot itself be assessed using those methods, as one would have to assume their reliability prior to mak