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<p>The advance of science is often depicted as the onward march of an army onto land that was previously farmed by the humanities. If this analogy were to be taken literally, it would imply that scientism, understood as the view that there is no corner of reality that is beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, is the inevitable outcome of scientific progress. This paper argues that the analogy of territorial expansionism can be misleading insofar as it suggests that the domain of inquiry of the humanities shrinks as science progresses. It argues that the progress of science poses no threat to humanistic understanding because more scientific knowledge is simply more knowledge of the same kind. Scientific and humanistic inquiries address and seek to answer not different questions, but different kinds of questions, and therefore do not compete with one another. It is not the progress of science that poses a threat to humanistic understanding, but the mistaken philosophical assumption that scientific and humanistic inquiries seek to answer the same kinds of questions. Having established that humanistic and scientific inquiry address and answer different kinds of questions, the paper proceeds to fend off the objection that the attempt to place limits onto what science can know (by claiming that there are questions science cannot answer) must be motivated by the attempt to make room for transcendent entities or for dubious alternative forms of knowledge of the kind that Karl Popper criticized as pseudoscientific. The paper argues that claiming that humanistic inquiry is concerned with different kinds of questions, questions which call for distinctive explanations, explanations which relieve one’s curiosity by bringing to light the point of what happened, is not the same as defending folk beliefs in the face of scientific evidence. One cannot, as a result, dismiss the idea that humanistic understanding addresses questions that are different in kind from those which science seeks to answer as an attempt to rehabilitate impostor sciences of the sort Popper critiqued.</p>

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Scientism, Pseudoscience and the Territorial Distinction Between Humanistic and Scientific Knowledge

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年9月25日

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  • Giuseppina D’Oro

摘要

The advance of science is often depicted as the onward march of an army onto land that was previously farmed by the humanities. If this analogy were to be taken literally, it would imply that scientism, understood as the view that there is no corner of reality that is beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, is the inevitable outcome of scientific progress. This paper argues that the analogy of territorial expansionism can be misleading insofar as it suggests that the domain of inquiry of the humanities shrinks as science progresses. It argues that the progress of science poses no threat to humanistic understanding because more scientific knowledge is simply more knowledge of the same kind. Scientific and humanistic inquiries address and seek to answer not different questions, but different kinds of questions, and therefore do not compete with one another. It is not the progress of science that poses a threat to humanistic understanding, but the mistaken philosophical assumption that scientific and humanistic inquiries seek to answer the same kinds of questions. Having established that humanistic and scientific inquiry address and answer different kinds of questions, the paper proceeds to fend off the objection that the attempt to place limits onto what science can know (by claiming that there are questions science cannot answer) must be motivated by the attempt to make room for transcendent entities or for dubious alternative forms of knowledge of the kind that Karl Popper criticized as pseudoscientific. The paper argues that claiming that humanistic inquiry is concerned with different kinds of questions, questions which call for distinctive explanations, explanations which relieve one’s curiosity by bringing to light the point of what happened, is not the same as defending folk beliefs in the face of scientific evidence. One cannot, as a result, dismiss the idea that humanistic understanding addresses questions that are different in kind from those which science seeks to answer as an attempt to rehabilitate impostor sciences of the sort Popper critiqued.