Maarten Boudry, Massimo Pigliucci.
Science Unlimited?: the challenges of scientism.
University of Chicago Press. 2017
In this wide-ranging collection, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci
gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science
to ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief)
captures an interesting and important intellectual stance,
and whether it is something that should alarm us.
Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry?
Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration?
What, if any, are its dangers?
Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject—that
it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence—justified?
Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing?
Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term
that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates.
Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism,
it is a conversation long overdue.