Posts Tagged ‘ “Scientism” ’

You might learn something

Jun 15th, 2010 5:20 pm | By

Gosh, that was a lively discussion. It was sometimes rather…cryptic, though. When Dan L asked Michael, “where’s the dividing line? Where does philosophy stop and science start?” Michael said it was a tough question, and rather than answer it himself, pasted in a long excerpt from a post by Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking last November. It wasn’t the most helpful excerpt from that post that he could have chosen – there’s a more relevant one later on, for instance:

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little

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Scientism on stilts

Apr 28th, 2010 3:58 pm | By

Carlin Romano goes after the annoying scientistic arrogant smug Galileo-wannabe whatsits that get on everyone’s nerves so much.

A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn’t want to feel that sense of power and rightness?

You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by

By…one of the new atheists it must be? This should be good. By?

by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York.

Yes! Massimo, the scourge … Read the rest