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Articles

Doing Away With Scientism

Ian Kidd exposes the errors of the science fundamentalists.

Most people agree that science is a good thing, and that scientism, by contrast, is a bad thing, although it is likely that few people could easily give a robust definition of either of those two terms.

Many decades ago, philosophers of science spilt much ink on the ‘demarcation problem’, trying to identify what science is by distinguishing it from pseudoscience. It gradually emerged that this problem of defining science is rather difficult to resolve. Most of the criteria that were once popular are now seen as untenable, and the best accounts offered by historians and philosophers of science indicate that the search for the distinct essence of science is likely to be frustrating. Karl Popper for instance, argued that the hallmark of genuine scientific hypotheses was that they had the potential to be proved wrong – or that they would be, in his term, ‘falsifiable’.

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