Scientism under Assault by "Contrarians"

" A pair of behaviourist lovers have sex. 'It was great for you. How was it for me?'"

When science is extended to include all aspects of human experience the joke above demonstrates the ease with which the insufficiency of scientific models available when confronted with human interiority can be pilloried.

This is because it gives an insufficient account of what human beings are. It sets out to study something which is assumed to exclude the defining qualities of our interiority unique to us - self-awareness and free will. These exclusions are unjustified and disastrous for the experiment. They also happen to discard the very qualities that distinguish us from other animals (as in Homo Sapiens), that make the meaningful moral drama of our lives possible and contribute most to our potential for dignity and nobility. These qualities enable us to be freely responsible in an unpredictable world and to respond to it as we choose.

They can and will always confound the expectations of scientific prediction and demonstrate that there is something over and above science. That thing, of course, is the creature and the mind that developed science and wields science. By their nature any human can be enlisted to demonstrate this.

Such ideas are nemesis to a scientizer who will be constrained to either accept this confounding of his model or to characterise those who rebel against it as purely destructive belligerents devoid of respectable motivation. The person who challenges such a model, in person, does signal destruction for the model but that is not destruction for its own sake. It is a just destruction in the service of replacing the model with something more appropriate to the nature of the creature being studied. The scientizer will, thus, dismiss his challenger as a 'contrarian.' In such a situation one might almost accept such a charge as a badge of honour if by 'contrarian' is meant to run counter or contrary to such a model and to rebel against being enclosed within such a confining and restricting cage (one is reminded of that perfect expression of the primacy of science - 'The Infinite Monkey Cage'). Thus, the weapon used to demolish scientism is me or any other human person. The fact that I exist and confound the expectations of scientising models is all it takes. This will explain why in such arguments ad hominem is inevitable. The human in question, by his or her inconvenient presence (by merely existing), proves the case against the model. The scientiser is bound to turn on that person and to attempt to discredit him or her as being disreputable or poorly motivated. That is how much is at stake.

Scientism attempts to deny us the right to be a person, to be what a person is and to do what a person does in our freedom and awareness by subjecting us to (usually mathematical) models that do not factor in such freedom. The scientising model wielded by humans, ironically caters for everything except that which is peculiar to humans.

We need to restore the old and well-tested division between the humanities and the perfectly respectable material sciences.