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Sawing off the branch

'Only science gives knowledge' is not a scientific statement: it is a philosophical claim about science, one its own rule ought to disqualify.

Objects to Scientism

Husserl · The Crisis of European Sciences · 1936

1. The argument sets a criterion: only what exposes itself to the public test of facts is knowledge.
2. But the statement 'only science gives knowledge' is itself neither an observation nor a testable theory: it is a philosophical claim about science.
3. By its own criterion, then, it fails: it would have to be filed among the 'opinions' it claims to disqualify. It moreover presupposes a lifeworld, subjects, norms of proof, which science assumes without grounding.

Therefore So scientism saws off its own branch: to assert it is already to do a philosophy its own rule forbids, hence to acknowledge a knowledge that is not science.