Place of science

Long before positivism, Bacon raises the methodical knowledge of nature into the royal road of human learning, alone capable of growing and bearing fruit, where the philosophy of the schools turns in circles. He does not go so far as to dismiss every other truth, for he reserves a domain of its own to religion, but he strips the metaphysics of the Ancients of its authority and makes experimental inquiry the arbiter of what we may legitimately hold to be known.

The Advancement of Learning, I-II · Novum Organum, I, §79-92

Descartes conceives a unified knowledge: all the sciences are but one single human wisdom, which he pictures as a tree whose root is metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are the applied sciences. This methodic unity of knowledge leans toward scientism, even though its root remains metaphysical.

Principles of Philosophy, Preface · Rules for the Direction of the Mind, I

The System of Logic aims to extend the inductive method of the natural sciences to moral and social facts, grounding a science of man (the moral sciences). This confidence in the unity of scientific method and its extension to the social marks a clear scientistic leaning, without thereby denying the specificity of human phenomena.

A System of Logic, book VI (on the logic of the moral sciences)

Mathematics is the model of all certain knowledge: Descartes, inventor of analytic geometry, makes the order of mathematical reasons the paradigm of method, and Leibniz, co-inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, dreams of a universal characteristic that would turn every disagreement into a calculation. Confidence in a unified deductive science inclines the school toward a strong epistemic optimism.

Descartes, Discourse on the Method, part two · Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics

Marx claims for his analysis of capital the status of a rigorous science, opposed to utopian socialism: the task is to lay bare the objective laws of motion of capitalist society. This confidence in a scientific knowledge of history and economics, the model of all serious critique, expresses a marked scientistic leaning, even if Marx does not reduce all knowledge to the natural sciences.

Capital, vol. I, preface (the laws of motion of modern society) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 3 (scientific against utopian socialism)

The school is allied with experimental natural philosophy: Bacon sets out its inductive method, and Locke calls himself the humble under-labourer clearing the ground for the Newtons of his age. The most secure knowledge is that drawn from observation and experiment, which places the school on the side favourable to the authority of science.

Bacon, Novum Organum, book II (induction) · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, epistle to the reader

The Fixation of Belief sets four methods against one another, tenacity, authority, the a priori taste, science, and keeps only the last: only the scientific method submits our opinions to something external capable of contradicting, and so of correcting, us. This trust in method brings Peirce close to a certain scientism. But his fallibilism and his refusal of all closure hold him at a distance from a Comte: science has no ready answer to everything, it is the indefinite march of a community that knows itself correctable, nearer to a critical rationalism than to a sovereign knowledge.

The Fixation of Belief (1877)

Etiology, the science of causes, explains the ordered relations between phenomena but leaves whole the riddle of their inner essence: it always says how, never what. Science is thus sovereign in its own order and, in principle, insufficient, with metaphysics, art, and mysticism taking over where it stops.

The World as Will and Representation, §17

Science has no monopoly on the true: by reducing everything to measure and calculation, it misses the living, the singular and the meaningful, which poetry, myth and intuition grasp better than it does. Romanticism contests the Enlightenment's claim to set scientific knowledge as the model of all knowing, and rehabilitates ways of reaching the real that calculating reason had disqualified.

Novalis, The Novices of Sais · Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature

A leading mathematician, physicist and logician, Leibniz holds mechanistic science to be fully valid in its order, that of efficient causes. But it cannot suffice: physics requires a metaphysical foundation (force, substances), and the order of ends escapes mechanical explanation alone. He therefore refuses reductive scientism in favor of a plurality of mutually harmonized levels of explanation.

Discourse on Metaphysics, §17-18 (force, beyond Cartesian extension) · Monadology, §79 (the two realms of efficient and final causes)

Pragmatism erects the sciences' experimental method as the model of all rational inquiry, moral and social included, yet without reducing all value to the measurable: James defends the rights of religious and moral experience, and Dewey refuses to treat science as the only form of meaning. The stance is therefore favorable to science while remaining pluralist, keeping its distance from scientism.

Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929) · James, The Will to Believe (1897)

If science increases knowledge, it is for Rousseau neither the model of good living nor the path of virtue: erudition and the arts often spring from idleness and vanity, and flatter amour-propre more than they elevate the soul. The knowledge of the heart and of conscience matters more than that of the academies, hence a clear challenge to the authority the century grants to science.

Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts