Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.
For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism”, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.
Perhaps the most worked out
form of scientism was the early 20th century movement knows as logical
positivism. The logical positivists signed up to the “verification
principle”, according to which a sentence whose truth can’t be tested
through observation and experiments was either logically trivial or
meaningless gibberish. With this weapon, they hoped to dismiss all
metaphysical questions as not merely false but nonsense...<<<Read More>>>...
