The purpose of this blog is defend a kind of naive scientism. ‘Scientism’ is a derogatory term applied to a wide variety of beliefs that hold science as central in some way. Generally those accused of scientism don’t go as far as I will attempt to. My claim for naive scientism is as follows:

(1) Only those things found in the ontology of science exist.

The ontology of science might be said to include, for example, fundamental particles, objects composed of fundamental particles and space-time. Actually nailing down the ontology is not important for our purposes; what will be important is what it strictly does not include. This includes gods and supernatural entities, of course, but I will extend it to include mental objects and properties and what we might call linguistic entities.

In contemporary philosophy naturalism is the position that philosophy should be continuous with science in some way. Call methodolical naturalism the belief that philosophy should be continuous methodologically and ontological naturalism the belief that philosophy should be continuous with the ontology of science. What I hope to defend is a species of ontological naturalism. I take science not to have any global methodology or global normative contraints and therefore do not consider methodologically naturalism viable. I will defend this claim later.

One of the difficulties of discussing philosophy with scientists or scientifically-minded people is that they tend to reinterpret philosophy as making the sorts of causal claims they are used to. In actuality contemporary philosophy (after Frege) is primarily making linguistic claims (in a special sense). This is the very strange belief that examining our language can tell us things about the world. Almost all modern philosophy stems from this belief (implicitly or explicitly). So realism is taken to be a thesis concerning the types of things that need exist in order to make propositions true, reductionism a thesis concerning the reduction of one proposition to another, and so forth. It is natural for the scientifically-minded reader to reinterpret such claims as being what makes up the world and whether some entity is composed of simpler entities. But these are not, in fact, the claims (most) philosophers are making.

It will be my contention that the entire apparatus of this linguistic philosophy is bankrupt. Theses such as supervenience, representationalism, computationalism, etc, are founded on concerns about propositions. So, while a naturalist might claim to hold beliefs continuous with science, he or she can make claims about extra-natural propositions that will allow almost any entity through the ‘backdoor’ of supervenience, reduction, realization, or some other linguistic move. This sort of thing needs to be avoided. Philosophy prior to the contemporary analytic trend primarily concerned psychology; this is not to say it was continuous with psychology but rather it posited a psychology and drew philosophical lessons from it. So the two most famous schools, Rationalism and Empiricism, were primarily concerned with (what they took to be) psychology. Analytic philosophy replaced this with linguistic concerns; again, this is not to say analytic philosophy is continuous with the scientific study of linguistics, but rather than analytic philosophy posits a series of assumptions about the uses of language, the meaning of sentences, and so forth. Rejecting these methods need not be any more difficult than recognizing that they are plucked from the air and have no basis in reality. Language is an empirical phenomenon and needs to be studied empirically; making claims about language establishes nothing, even if you do formalize your resulting system. Computationalism is a particularly modern form of this sort of linguistic mysticism that I will have more to say about later.

The method of naive scientism, once we recognize the bankruptcy of philosophy, becomes quite simple. If I think cannot be composed of those things physics tells us exist in those ways physics and chemistry tell us matter can be composed, they simply do not exist. Since we have no longer have any recourse to magical linguistic arguments we cannot appeal to supervenience, reduction, algorithms, representations or any other such entities found in our modern mysticisms, we must merely accept that those things that cannot be so composed do not exist. Science is in the business of describing reality and not of providing apologetics for our naive folk beliefs. The rules of the game are therefore quite easy to follow. We see immediately that beliefs, feelings, sensations, morals, thoughts, desires, and the rest of the mentalist apparatus clearly and indisputably fail to exist. Many of the entities posited by sociology, history, economcs, and so on, also fail to meet our criteria. This may appear to be a great tragedy and it may seem to you impossible to do without these things. You’re probably right on both accounts.