Intersections (?) of Science (?) and Humanism (?)

It is uncontroversial that humanistic thought and scientific inquiry have been entangled throughout a very long arc of intellectual history. Beyond this, however, significant challenges await anyone hoping to understand let alone articulate the nature of these entanglements. Since “science” and “humanism” are labels that are commonly applied to traditions of theorizing and practice that predate the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century introduction and use of these terms in their modern senses, respectively, and since both of these traditions have evolved and speciated a great deal from antiquity to the present, any attempt to untangle the many complex relationships between them amounts to a formidable task.

Thankfully, and while endeavoring not to shy away from any of these complexities en route, my focus in this chapter is much narrower. My interest here is in what the history of these relations between science and humanism reveals about the (arguably) peculiar way in which their connection is typically viewed today, as being entirely asymmetrical. If, on a first pass common to dictionaries and encyclopedias, we take humanism to be a worldview emphasizing the interests, capacities, and welfare of humanity, as well as our potential for learning about the world as a means to confronting the challenges we face and promoting human flourishing (e.g., Lacey Reference Lacey and Honderich1995: 375–376), the importance of the sciences to humanism is abundantly clear and, indeed, this is commonly, explicitly asserted. But what of the complementary relation of the importance of humanism to science? It is striking that while, for most of the more recent history of Western societies, this latter relation was often acknowledged as something worthy of praise or criticism, in our times it may seem a strange thing to hold that humanist values and ambitions are at all relevant let alone important to what we think of as science.

Taking the past of both science and humanism as a prelude to a consideration of their connection in the present, my current aim is twofold. First, of historical interest and less controversially, I review certain developments in the intellectual history of the West since the Renaissance that were pivotal to establishing a widespread (though hardly universal) commitment to the idea that the sciences are among our most potent means for enhancing human and planetary flourishing. Also of historical interest but more controversially, I endeavor to illuminate just how strange it is, in historical perspective, that we have now drifted away from a complementary commitment to the idea that humanist ideals could or should be pivotal to our conception of the sciences. Not least given the serious, in some cases existential, crises we have brought upon ourselves and our planet in the relatively short duration of our existence as a species, I argue for a return to these ideals as a plausible basis for a normative conception of the aims of science today. This furnishes a partial answer to one of the three questions tagged obliquely in the heading of this section – the question of how we might best understand the connection between science and humanism.

The other two questions concern how, to this end, we should understand the extensions of the terms “science” and “humanism,” in light of the historical evolution and speciation of these traditions of theory and practice mentioned earlier. Regarding the sciences, I am somewhat prescriptive. In Middle English the term “science” simply meant something like knowledge, derived from the Old French term, itself derived from the Latin word “scientia.” It did not take on something resembling its modern sense until the eighteenth century; subsequently, William Whewell coined the term “scientist” in the nineteenth century. For present purposes, however, I use the term “science” in the anachronistic way it is commonly used when we speak of ancient or medieval science, or when we apply it more specifically to traditions of natural philosophy, the precursors to what we now recognize as modern science. This is to elide modes of inquiry that have been transformed in numerous ways and very significantly over time, as well as substantially different forms of investigation across the highly specialized subdisciplines of the sciences. For my purposes, it suffices to recognize as “science” all that is commonly of interest to scholars of the sciences, past and present, in this looser and less pedantic though anachronistic way.

Regarding the question of what humanism is, here I attempt to be more descriptive, which occupies the following several sections. I begin by clarifying what “humanism” has come to mean in our contemporary setting, first and foremost in the eyes of the most influential humanist societies and organizations in the public sphere, where the very idea of humanism is intimately tied to the sciences. Next, in the manner of a film that begins, tantalizingly, with an enigmatic glimpse of the last scene, before going back in time to tell the story of how we got here from there, I rewind the clock to consider the history of this contemporary affiliation of science and humanism, and their coevolution, in terms of formative developments in the Renaissance and growing connections during the Enlightenment. Finally, I turn from this synoptic history of ideas to what I take to be a weighty question for today, which should be assessed, I contend, in the full light of the past: What is science for, exactly? I conclude with some thoughts about what this assessment entails for the future of both science and humanism.

Contemporary Humanist Invocations of Science

Earlier I described a first pass at humanism in terms of “a worldview emphasizing the interests, capacities, and welfare of humanity, as well as our potential for learning about the world as a means to confronting the challenges we face and promoting human flourishing.” Sharpening up and drilling down to the core of the position, one might put a (still) highly abstract and compressed summary this way: Humanism is a worldview emphasizing reason and science as a basis for understanding the world and our place in it, and for making it a better place. In various ways, the rest of this chapter is an attempt to elaborate this summary and to make it more concrete, in order to exhibit key relationships between humanism and science.

Against a backdrop of scholarly debates about these relationships – fueled by different philosophical views which, each in its own way, claims allegiance or opposition to one of a number of different characterizations of humanism (more on which later) – in the lay public domain there is, and has been for much of this past century, an impressive convergence on the matter of what humanism is. One easily accessible window into this convergence is provided by an extensive overlap in descriptions of basic principles offered by the largest national and international humanist organizations concerning the worldview they espouse. A number of common themes appear, expressed in terms of variations on central commitments to or respect for: secularism; critical thinking; science as a source of knowledge (often associated with a vaguely specified naturalism); ethical deliberation and action; freedom and democracy – all of which, in keeping with the first-pass gloss on humanism given in the previous section, are conceived to play a crucial role in the service of human well-being, broadly conceived.

I cite some of these humanist-society pronouncements as evidence momentarily, but first, let me offer a more detailed, philosophical synthesis of what I am calling here a broadly shared worldview, which I take this evidence to support. It is helpful, I think, to collect the various aspects of the view into two families of commitments, each made up of interwoven domains of philosophical interest:

1. (1) metaphysics and epistemology; and

2. (2) value theory (most prominently, moral, social, and political philosophy).

What makes the conjunction of what may appear disparate aspects of humanism so interesting, and what explains the fact that in the history of ideas, it has seemed natural to collect these many, seemingly separable commitments under one heading as a worldview, are the ways in which these two families of commitments were (and are) linked to one another to envision an agenda for improving the human condition. Of course, any such agenda must of necessity extend to considerations beyond humanity, since humans do not exist in isolation but are embedded in the world, which brings human relationships with other life and the planet into the picture. Furthermore, the abidingly aspirational nature of the agenda inevitably renders its completion something of an ideal, toward which one can only work. But with these caveats in hand, let me turn now to what I have identified as two families of commitments.

Interlude: Science, Religion, and Epistemic Authority

In part because the humanistic worldview is associated with such wide-ranging (albeit interconnected) commitments, across metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, it is unsurprising that individual humanists are often most interested in or identify most with a proper subset of them. Some are especially exercised by legal issues concerning human rights and social justice, some by political institution-building to establish and protect democracy, and so on. One particular fixation, however, is a source of substantial confusion about humanism and requires separate clarification. It is not uncommon this past century to find humanism labeled as “secular humanism,” with the intention of giving special emphasis to distinctions between it and other worldviews associated with various religious traditions. This all by itself is unproblematic, but it is often misrepresented in ways that are problematic, by proponents and critics of humanism alike, as expressing a blanket opposition to or rejection of religion. As a characterization of humanism, however, this is incorrect both historically and in the present, as well as muddled in ways I will attempt to clarify here, briefly.

Historically, religious identification and even some religious beliefs have been viewed by many as compatible with humanism.Footnote ² The fact that this may seem less plausible now owes in part to a growth in the prominence of naturalistic orientations with respect to metaphysics in the tradition as a whole, but even recently, in the North American context (for example), the growth of humanist organizations was substantially supported by liberal religious groups (Weldon Reference Weldon2020), and there are still those who identify as religious humanists today. The Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association publishes a journal entitled Religious Humanism, and the American Humanist Association’s Center for Education offers a course with the same title. Given how broadly we now understand, in this era, what it means to be “religious,” this should not be surprising. Many who identify with a religious tradition do so primarily for reasons of social, community, or cultural affiliation, or attachment to a heritage. And many who fall under these descriptions do not hold the theological beliefs associated with these traditions or otherwise – an explicit commonplace in many religions including (for instance) Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism.

The key to understanding how humanist and religious commitments are sometimes compatible is to take note of an underlying point that is often overlooked: a matter of epistemic authority. When there are conflicts here between different traditions of investigation and belief formation regarding the world, where does authority lie – with naturalistic modes of inquiry and knowledge, or with supernaturalistic ones? If our most up-to-date cosmology estimates that the age of the universe is at least 13.7 billion years, but a religious text suggests that it is more like 6,000 years, or if our most sophisticated evolutionary biology gives an account of causal mechanisms giving rise to adaptations, but creation narratives attribute this causation to a God or gods, or if naturalistic descriptions characterize the behaviors of various systems in the world in terms of certain principles or laws, but supernaturalistic descriptions include violations of them in the form of miracles, which way does one lean? What is crucial here, from the point of view of compatibility, is simply to note that humanism recognizes the epistemic authority of a naturalistic – and ultimately scientific – orientation in cases of conflict.

This, of course, allows for some but not all religious commitments. Peter Lipton (Reference Lipton, Moore and Scott2007) articulated his own “religious atheism” in terms of a commitment to “using the [religious] text as a tool for thought,” and more specifically, as a resource to help facilitate independent moral reflection. More broadly, this amounts to belief in the claims of our best science,Footnote ³ and “acceptance” regarding contrary religious claims. Acceptance is not belief, but it nevertheless involves a form of commitment in virtue of the instrumental value that something has in relation to an aim or a goal. While not believing the content of Judaic texts that conflicts with our best science, Lipton found it helpful nonetheless to reflect on them in thinking about ethical matters. He elaborated on this with a thought-provoking analogy, citing British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s famous example of his two tables: The first, his everyday table, has clearly apparent dimensions, color, and other familiar properties, but the second, his scientific table, is mostly empty space and made up of electric charges with a combined “bulk” of less than a billionth of the everyday table. One might believe in the scientific table, and simply accept the idea of the everyday table for everyday purposes (Lipton Reference Lipton, Moore and Scott2007: 32; cf. Eddington Reference Eddington1928: xi–xii).

This is just one way of preserving an affiliation with the religious in the context of a humanistic worldview. Other alternatives are familiar. One might reinterpret religious doctrines as needed in such a way as to view their content nonliterally (e.g., as metaphorical) rather than as literal assertions, thereby sidestepping conflict with the sciences. One might, following Stephen Jay Gould (Reference Gould1999), describe science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” having entirely different domains of interest – a domain of facts, and a domain of purposes, meanings, and values, respectively – which are thus never contradictory. Given the arguably transparent purchase of both the scientific and the religious in both domains, however, and clear examples of conflict (a few given just a moment ago), the plausibility of this recipe seems dubious unless it can be reworked to integrate further strategies for conflict dissolution, such as those just noted. Both scientific and religious worldviews are interpretable as furnishing descriptions of human beings and our embeddings in the world in terms of both facts and values (see Chapter 8).

The upshot of the clarification offered in this section is that while there are strong, natural affinities between humanism and positions that are deeply skeptical of supernatural commitments (e.g., atheism, agnosticism), and strong associations of humanism with secularism, understood as incorporating a rejection of any such commitments wielding untrammeled authority in our epistemic lives or otherwise, there are surely ways of thinking about religion that render it compatible with humanism, thus doing justice to the outlook of those who, historically and in the present, have identified themselves as religious humanists.

Renaissance Rediscovery and Facilitations of Science

I promised at the outset to take a scenic route to raising a question about the aim of science today, backlit by a historical past of connections between science and humanistic thought. Having sketched a contemporary portrait of humanism, which grants significant epistemic authority to the sciences, my aim now is to follow a strand through an evolving rope of humanism over time, during which the importance of science grew steadily. This is intrinsically historically interesting, but also and more importantly for present purposes, it showcases a long-standing tradition of understanding the nature and mission of science itself through the lens of humanism. Let me begin in the Renaissance, associated with the fourteenth century (sometimes earlier) through the early seventeenth century, a period of remarkable intellectual and cultural development leading from the Middle Ages to what we now regard as the early modern period and setting the stage for modernity more generally. While traditions of humanist thought can be identified not only in Europe but in China and India going back to antiquity, and in the medieval Islamicate world, for more proximate influences on the present coinciding with parallel developments in the sciences, the Renaissance is a helpful place to start.

In the Middle Ages, Latin scholars studied (among other things) earlier Arabic and Greek science and mathematics, but Renaissance intellectual culture was largely focused on the humanities, at least initially. This may make the latter seem an unpromising marker from which to begin an exploration of connections between science and humanism. Indeed, the term “humanism” was not yet in use, and the Italian term “umanista” was applied specifically to scholars who studied the languages, texts, cultures, and thinking of classical antiquity, much of which had been lost or ignored previously, in terms of disciplines we now associate with the humanities. This broad scholarship was facilitated by a rediscovery of Latin texts, with interested parties seeking out and hunting through the libraries of Europe to find them, after which came an influx of ancient Greek texts brought by scholars to Italy after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. Together this facilitated a fusion of interest in Greek philosophy and Roman humanitas: roughly, an esteem for (the nature of) humanity, serving as an ideal in the education of a virtuous person. An education thus conceived took the form of Studia Humanitatis, comprising grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.

Conspicuously, this did not include science per se, but these developments did of course have profound influence beyond the curriculum (e.g., in art and architecture), sowing the seeds of an entanglement of science and humanism. One might think of this in two ways, first in relation to the growth of humanism in its metaphysical and epistemological dimensions, yielding fertile conditions for the development of science; and second, in relation to its value-theoretic dimension. Regarding the first, the rediscovery of and engagement with ancient texts showcased values that scholars found expressed there, perhaps most inspiringly an ardent respect for human dignity, exemplified in capacities for self-expression, and for inquiry, fueled by the application of reason. This increasingly placed humanity, not supernatural forces or God or revelation, at the center of an understanding of how we learn about and interact with the world. As Protagoras had asserted in antiquity, “man is the measure of all things,” a view which naturally erodes a conception of reality on which humans are epistemologically marginal, and opens the door to a more naturalistically oriented metaphysics.

In addition to being conducive to the growth of science generally, these epistemological and metaphysical developments were instrumental to more specific consequences. The rediscovery of ancient texts included scientific and mathematical works, which, as Pamela Long (2016: 496–498) observes, contributed to transformations in natural philosophy and “changes in the most basic assumptions of cosmology, physics, astronomy, biology, and almost every other branch of the study of nature” (Long Reference Long and Rabil2016: 486; cf. Grafton Reference Grafton, Goodman and MacKay1990: 103–105). Anthony Grafton (1990: 103) notes that “humanists discovered and printed the passages in Cicero and Plutarch that showed that distinguished ancient thinkers had been willing to contemplate a heliocentric rather than a geocentric cosmos” – proposing that the sun, not the earth, is located at the center of the universe, and that the planets revolve around the former, not the latter – which inspired Nicolaus Copernicus’ heliocentrism, bolstered by his own empirical findings (Kwa Reference Kwa2011: 53). This in turn inspired the groundbreaking astronomy of Johannes Kepler (Grafton Reference Grafton, Goodman and MacKay1990: 109). These influences were not only theoretical but also practical. The study of geometry in antiquity by Renaissance humanist mathematicians led to major advances in military engineering, including the design of canons, bastions, and fortifications (Kwa Reference Kwa2011: 54).

What is most telling for the moral of this chapter, though, is a striking feature of how science in this period was entangled with the value-theoretic dimension of humanism, in ways that go beyond inspirations and affordances for naturalistic orientations in metaphysics and epistemology. As Alan Lacey (1995: 375) suggests, it was “by introducing social, political, and moral questions” that, in the fifth century bce (and here quoting Cicero), the Sophists and Socrates “called philosophy down from heaven to earth.” It is thus hardly surprising that a Renaissance humanist attention to all-too-human concerns should pervade at least some conceptions of the sciences, which were then in the process of substantial development. This took two closely related but importantly distinct forms: an understanding that rational inquiry in the mold of science, given its epistemic authority, may serve as a means to enhancing human welfare; but in addition to this, that it should do so. This dual humanist understanding of science is expressed in the idea that “science can and must contribute to the community that nourishes it”; Renaissance humanists “had a substantial hand in the development of the notion, widely held by the seventeenth century, that science has profound social impact and responsibility” (Grafton Reference Grafton, Goodman and MacKay1990: 109, 117, emphasis added).

Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (2000/1620) is widely appreciated for its articulation of a method for inquiry in natural philosophy based on observation, experiment, and induction in exactly this period, toward the end of the Renaissance. It is less widely cited for the fuller conception of science that accompanied this, according to which the fruits of such inquiry would benefit humanity in myriad ways, from improved health and longevity, to the development of forms of transportation, to better social relations, to more effective interventions in and control of our environment (see Chapter 9). The potentially negative connotations of “control” in this context – of humans exercising power over nature – are also important to consider, and I return to this in the following section. Independently of how we may think about this today, however, let me conclude this section by noting, once again, here in Bacon’s conception of science, a further and explicitly normative contention that is irreducible to mere power or control. The “true and legitimate goal of the sciences,” said Bacon, is not knowledge for its own sake, or profit or recognition, but rather ‘to endow human life with new discoveries and resources’ so as to improve the human condition (Bacon Reference Bacon, Jardine and Silverthorne2000/1620: 66, Aphorism LXXXI).

Enlightenment Ideals and Deepening Connections

Let us move forward now to relationships between science and humanism in the Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” associated with the (later) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or the long eighteenth century (extended at both ends) – a time during which “[t]he humanist mode of thinking deepened and widened” (Kolenda Reference Kolenda and Audi1995: 341). This is an apt description of humanist conceptions of science in this period more specifically, which deepened in terms of yet more explicit advocacy for naturalistic orientations in metaphysics and epistemology, and widened in the value-theoretic domain, with more fulsome articulations of the relevant values and thus, by implication, the nature and mission of science as seen through a humanistic lens. Regarding the former, many draw tight connections, for example, between methodological prescriptions for inquiry championed by natural philosophers such as Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, and Newton during the Scientific Revolution (in which the sciences made significant advances toward what we now call modern science), and appeals to the use of reason.Footnote ⁴ But with a normative moral concerning the aim of science potentially in view, let me focus here on the question of values.

The Enlightenment is often presented in terms of an exploration of and a commitment to certain values or ideals, including: human dignity, equality, and rights; freedom and democracy; cosmopolitanism and tolerance; social and political reform in the service of these values and, concomitantly, a rejection of traditional forms of authority including religious authority and an embrace of secularism. An astonishing number of works discussing these ideals arose in this period, many of which would later become hugely influential in social and political theory, and some representing the origins of sociology and economics. Enabling, epistemic values in the background of this took the form of commitments to reason, evidence, and critical thinking, and even the goal of educating the whole of society – ideals which, combined with greater freedom to question previous doctrine, are commonly cited as the fulcrum of relationships between Enlightenment humanism and science. David Cooper (1999: 7–8) notes that humanism at this time is often identified with “rational subjectivity,” the idea that humans have the potential to be autonomous, rational “adjudicators of truth and value,” and that “on this characterization, the scientific image is the paradigmatic expression of humanism.”

What is perhaps most fascinating about the link between science and humanism during and after the Enlightenment, however, is not related to epistemic values so much as social and political ones. It is important to acknowledge here that in response to the positive, value-theoretic aspirations concerning the promise and proper function of science sketched earlier, some critics of humanism have strongly contested any such portrayal as misleading or Pollyannaish. Indeed, it is sometimes held that Enlightenment values were (and perhaps still are) responsible for attitudes, policies, actions, and science that, as it happens, brought about the degradation of human dignity and cultures, as well as barbaric relationships with other forms of life and the devastation of our planet. These contentions represent a pressing, prima facie challenge to the reasonableness of any humanist narrative according to which, over a long sweep of intellectual history, the sciences were (and are) regarded as powerful means by which to seek exactly the opposite. This is a crucial issue to which we must now turn.

I suspect some may be tempted simply to dismiss the contentions I have just mentioned as ill-formed. If the humanist conception of science is merely hopeful or aspirational, and critiques of humanism, the sciences, and their applications do not concern hopes and aspirations but rather actual, grievous, historical outcomes, is there a failure here to connect? Granted, aspirations and outcomes are different sorts of things, but this observation alone is unhelpful at best, prevaricating at worst: Articulating the senses in which humanism and these critiques are, in fact, connected is instructive about what is at stake. As a first step in this articulation, let us consider more precisely the relevant concerns.

Earlier I described humanism, conceived as a worldview, as having an explicitly ethical agenda, but various critics have argued that, informed by Enlightenment values, humanism has been responsible for a number of clearly unethical consequences. These concerns may be collected, thematically, into three (overlapping) categories of ostensible harms:

1. (1) harm to people, caused by appeals to or implementations of particular ideals of reason (or rationality) that result in human suffering by means of prejudice, discrimination, colonialism, or imperialism;

2. (2) harm to other life, caused by preoccupations with human reason (or rationality) that result in the promotion of only human welfare and flourishing and, concomitantly, a disregard for or cruelty toward other life; and

3. (3) harm to the environment, caused by preoccupations with only human welfare and flourishing and, concomitantly, a disregard for or destructive exploitation of the environment and the planet more generally.

Though the details of specific charges levied under these headings vary substantially, it is fair to say that these categories of harms comprise a fairly exhaustive summary of concerns about humanism, and in cases where the sciences are charged with complicity in these harms, they are subject to these same concerns.

The worries indicated here are serious, but some of the critiques expressing them are not. Some attack views that are not endorsed by humanists nor plausibly described as humanistic. Here, one may justifiably adopt what Cooper (1999: 3) suggests as a constraint that “must be respected for the characterisation to be one of humanism … [:] the views criticised must have been described as humanist ones by people who have actually held them.” In other words, serious criticism should target views identified as humanistic by self-described humanists, not merely by critics of something passed off as humanism for purposes of criticism. Consider, for instance, the polemics of Douglas Ehrenfeld (1981/1978: 5), whose sweeping critique is premised on the notion that humanism is committed to “an unquestioning faith in the power of reason” and an “irrational faith in our own limitless power.” It is difficult to imagine how one could even begin to square such proclamations of human infallibility and omnipotence with naturalistic orientations in metaphysics and epistemology, which plainly suggest otherwise.Footnote ⁵ Reasoned discourse and scientific inquiry are inherently critical pursuits, in which beliefs and methods must be perpetually open to scrutiny.

Some critiques of humanism are more charitable, genuinely engaging with claims advocated by humanists in various contexts historically. This is susceptible, however, to spurious conflations in which the positions cited, properly identified with very specific issues or parochial theses, are then mispresented as humanism simpliciter. This runs together the more specific and parochial with the broader conception of humanism as a worldview described earlier. Since the more specific and parochial are not equivalent to the broader worldview, and since the former are often marginal or rejected as outmoded in the latter, it is specious to cite worries about these specifics as insuperable for the worldview more generally. For example, some twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmental ethics targets views concerning the “essence” of humanity, which aim to explain features of human thought, action, and morality. This “essentialist humanism” is charged with a worrying anthropocentrism leading to harms to other life and the environment (see Snaza Reference Snaza2017: 16–17). It is a mistake, though, to conflate this with a humanist worldview. Many have argued instead that human nature is complex, that it has no particular essence, and that the value-theoretic dimensions of humanism must extend beyond humanity narrowly construed, to the teeming world of dependencies in which humans are embedded.

Other critiques are premised on dubious claims of cause and effect between humanist attitudes and dreadful states of affairs. Enlightenment humanism in particular is sometimes blamed for hordes of dysfunctions: epidemics of self-absorption and excessive individualism; brutalities of colonialism and imperialism; exploitations of other humans and nonhumans; catastrophic pollution; anthropogenic climate change; and accompanying all of this, general moral decay.Footnote ⁶ Now, there are aspects of this that must be taken seriously, not dismissed out of hand (more on which shortly); but it is also important to note just how strained some such claims can be. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1994/1947), for instance, argued that the Enlightenment was responsible for the rise of Nazism – an extraordinary assertion of causality between a misleadingly selective (and arguably confused) account of the prominence of certain values and totalitarian mass murder two centuries later. Even if one takes seriously the claim that some of these values were, and perhaps still are, vehicles for dominating people and the planet, the astonishingly reductive leap from humanist values to Nazi terror is difficult to make sense of as anything other than a desperate attempt to grapple with the magnitude of such evil (cf. Nola Reference Nola and Matthews2018: 60–64).

All of this, however, leaves at least one class of criticisms of humanism intact – criticisms that engage with actual exemplifications (not uncharitable reconstructions) of widely shared humanist principles (not parochial theses) that have played plausible, concrete (not farfetched or ineffably abstract) roles in causing harm. These criticisms share a common ground: Humanist values are themselves abstract; in order to act on them, they must be spelled out and operationalized. Translating even well-intentioned but abstract principles into precise policies and concrete actions is inevitably shaped by the particular, spatiotemporal, cultural contexts in which these translations occur. This yields value-driven attitudes and practices that from later or other perspectives may seem terribly confused or even appalling: notions of equality, rights, or freedoms that exclude Indigenous people, otherwise racialized people, women, or some sexual orientations and identities; notions of toleration that exclude people belonging to certain linguistic, social, sectarian, or cultural groups; and so on. The very notions of reason and rationality, at various times and places, have been conceived in ways that have fueled discrimination, exclusion, incarceration, conquest, and slavery.Footnote ⁷

Where does this leave a fair assessment of Enlightenment humanism? I submit that any such assessment must involve serious engagement with apparently conflicting perspectives. Failing this, humanists risk a blindness to historical and present wrongs done in the name of their own values, and critics of humanism risk seeing nothing else. Both extremes of partial perspective are undermined by a failure to do justice to a crucial aspect of the humanist worldview, noted earlier (initially) in connection with Renaissance humanism: a critical attitude toward received claims, doctrine, and dogma. Immanuel Kant (1996/1784) famously described enlightenment in terms of an emergence or a liberation from an immature state in which one is unable to think for oneself; in line with this, many apparently conflicting perspectives on humanism are reconcilable upon reflection. A charitable and defensible conception of humanism must incorporate an assiduous understanding of its value-theoretic dimension: one on which humanist values have a dual nature. At a certain level of abstraction, they are goods to be sought, but their contextual operationalizations must be subject to sustained vigilance, critique, and reformation.Footnote ⁸

Perhaps some will find this combination of resolute aspiration and amelioration intolerable. After all, in some cases, words or concepts become so infused with harmful connotations that the best way forward is simply to discard them. (Consider now discarded terms once used to describe mental illnesses, sexual orientations, or racialized groups.) Many values, however, conceived in ways that transcend particular historical manifestations, are not sensible candidates for disposal. Conceived more abstractly, their positive senses are too deeply entrenched; this makes them goods to be sought and drives criticism and reconstruction of their concrete manifestations. In this spirit, postcolonial theorist Edward Said (2004: 9–10) rejected “dismissive attitudes” toward ideals such as justice, equality, and liberty – powerful inspirations for liberation movements this past century – found in postmodernist criticism, and rebutted attributions to humanism of a strict, “totalizing and essentializing” emphasis on individual thought and reason (e.g., by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault), in contrast to embeddings of individuals in “systems” (e.g., Marx’s “capital,” Freud’s “unconscious”) that exert controlling influences on them. Surely, the capacities of both individuals and systems must be part of any compelling study of reason and rationality.

Let us take stock. Having considered how Renaissance intellectual culture facilitated the development of science, humanism, and relationships between the two, this section has given substantially more attention to the humanist side of the equation. This is not to downplay connections of humanism and science during the Enlightenment – which, as I mentioned, deepened with respect to naturalist orientations in metaphysics and epistemology, not least in light of articulations of methods of reasoning and inquiry furnished by natural philosophers during and after the Scientific Revolution. Also, as noted earlier in passing, concerns about harms done in the name of Enlightenment humanism to people, other life, and the environment are not obviously or uncontroversially separable from concerns about the sciences, which were in some ways integral to enacting many of these harms. Looking forward now, the emphasis on certain values and, in particular, on what I have called their dual nature, is essential to understanding why they persist, and in what forms, in ways relevant to science in the present.

In the third and most recent iteration of the “Humanist Manifesto” (originally published in 1933 and updated in 1973), the American Humanist Association (2003) extends a concern for human welfare “to the global ecosystem and beyond,” asserting “a planetary duty to protect nature’s integrity, diversity, and beauty in a secure, sustainable manner.” Likewise, in the third and most recent statement (earlier ones appearing in 1952 and 2002) of “fundamental principles of modern Humanism,” Humanists International (2022) asserts a “duty of care” that extends beyond humanity to “all sentient beings” and a responsibility “for the impact we have on the rest of the natural world,” and seeks – perhaps implicitly reflecting on past wrongs – not “to impose our view on all humanity,” but “to cooperate with people of different beliefs who share our values, all in the cause of building a better world.” Most telling for present purposes, after advocating for “the application of science” to these ends, there is a qualification: “remembering that while science provides the means, human values must define the ends.” Let us turn now, from Enlightenment values in historical context, to their extension in the relationship of science and humanism leading up to today.

Modern Intersections of Science and Humanism

I began this chapter by reflecting on contemporary humanism and its invocations of science before proceeding to sketch a synoptic history of the evolving entanglements of these two traditions, all with the ultimate goal of motivating a question about the aim of science in the present. What is science for, fundamentally – what is its telos, or end? Throughout the chapter I have been concerned to highlight not only the idea that the humanist worldview, in its various incarnations over time, has incorporated an appeal to science as a means by which to realize humanist aspirations, but also the idea that it is part of the very nature of science that it should play this role. Though the former idea is contestable, it seems uncontroversial that many subscribe to it, even with the addition of qualifications borne of healthy caution and an attentiveness to the maturity and rigor of any given domain of scientific inquiry and practice. My focus in this final section, however, is the latter idea, about the aim of science, which I suspect many people today may find strange or even unsettling.

As we have seen, this was not always the case. Indeed, tracing the history of science and humanism now closer to the present, in the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century, it was not at all strange among scientists and philosophers to think that the function of the sciences is to aid in making the world a better place (see Chapters 4–6). By way of illustration, let me mention two major philosophical traditions in this period, both of which counted philosophers as well as scientists among their proponents and discussants. The first is logical empiricism, which crystallized with the birth of the Vienna Circle, a highly interdisciplinary, scholarly collective that took shape in Austria in the 1920s and 30s, whose thought (together with that of allied colleagues in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere) came to represent the founding movement of the philosophy of science as a self-aware discipline.Footnote ⁹ Many influential members of the Circle and colleagues abroad were staunchly dedicated to social, political, and economic reforms, in line with what they later described as “scientific humanism” (Carnap Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963a: 83).

In their manifesto, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” Otto Neurath and other founding members of the Circle noted that while “questions of life” were not in the forefront of their scholarly discussions, there was nonetheless substantial agreement on such questions borne of their shared worldview (Neurath et al. Reference Neurath, Hahn, Carnap, Neurath and Cohen1973/1929: 304–305): “endeavours toward a new organization of economic and social relations, toward the unification of mankind, toward a reform of school and education, all show an inner link with the scientific world-conception; it appears that these endeavours are welcomed and regarded with sympathy by the members of the Circle, some of whom indeed actively further them.” The paramount objective was “unified science” (Neurath et al. Reference Neurath, Hahn, Carnap, Neurath and Cohen1973/1929: 306): “to link and harmonise the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science. From this aim follows the emphasis on collective efforts.” The idea, in essence, was that in order to leverage the sciences to address “questions of life,” there must be effective collaboration between different areas of inquiry and expertise, and by developing the means to this end, “The scientific world-conception serves life” (Neurath et al. Reference Neurath, Hahn, Carnap, Neurath and Cohen1973/1929: 318).

Herbert Feigl (1949: 136) identified this overarching preoccupation with value-laden aims of science with a confluence of philosophical approaches during this period, including not only empiricism but also pragmatism and others, converging in “a broad movement that one may well be tempted to regard as the twentieth-century sequel to the enlightenment of the eighteenth century.” It involved “a synthesis of the scientific attitude with an active interest in the whole scale of human values” (Feigl Reference Feigl1949: 137) – a goal championed by the foremost figure of American pragmatism at this time, John Dewey. (For connections between logical empiricism, pragmatism, and discussions of values, see also Frank Reference Frank, Reisch and Tuboly2021.) Given the growth of the sciences into tools of previously unimaginable power, Dewey (Reference Dewey and Boydston1985/1931: 201) posed a question: “Here is the instrumentality, the most powerful, for good and evil, the world has ever known. What are we going to do with it?” His answer, not least given that science itself “has created a new social environment,” is that science must “face the issue of its social responsibilities” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1985/1931: 202; cf. Morgan Reference Morgan2016): systems of insurance to spread risks; preventative medicine; public hygiene; reduction of superstition (e.g., supernatural causes of plagues, famine, disease), and so on.

It is natural to wonder here whether this view of science, as crucially working toward humanistic ends, is relevant only to applied science as opposed to “pure” or “basic” science. Certainly, more applied science was and is a principal focus for some, but it would be a mistake to think that basic science is thereby excluded. Leaving aside the tenuous status of the distinction to begin with (scientific practice classified as “basic” or “applied” typically incorporates a great deal of both), on a common rendering of it – basic science targets “knowledge for its own sake” and applied science targets knowledge intended to facilitate previously envisioned applications – basic science is entirely consonant with humanism. For creatures like us, with an impressive capacity for and (often if not always) an ardent desire for knowledge of the natural and social worlds in which we live, knowledge for its own sake is already, all by itself, something that can be profoundly fulfilling and constitutive of well-being. It helps us to understand and to appreciate the world, ourselves, and relations between the two. “Knowledge for its own sake” is not, after all, an expression that can be taken too literally. Knowledge does not have sakes, but people (and other agents) do.

Another possible concern about prospects for a humanist understanding of science stems from the charge that an important form of humanism is actually antithetical to science. Cooper (Reference Cooper1999) argues that there is an opposition between the “scientific worldview” and the dominant, contemporary form of “philosophical humanism,” which he calls existential humanism. On this view, not only our descriptions of the world but, indeed, the world itself are products of human thinking and agency (Cooper Reference Cooper1999: 10). Many versions of what I earlier (Footnote note 3) called scientific antirealism do in fact suggest this, rejecting the common realist idea that the sciences describe a world that is independent of our conceptions of it. As an exemplar, Cooper cites William James, who identified humanism with pragmatism, contending that truth and reality are, for us, inextricably interwoven with experience; truths reflect how we “make” the world by carving it up so as to facilitate our purposes (see “Pragmatism and Humanism” in James Reference James1995/1907). But while the nature of truth is disputed among philosophers, this is independent of the question of whether science generates truths – antirealism is not anti-science. Typically, realists and antirealists agree on scientific descriptions of the world that serve as a basis for action, even if they disagree about how best to analyze the concept of truth.Footnote ¹⁰ The alleged opposition of existential humanism and science is thus a non sequitur.

Given that normative accounts of the aim of science generally and humanist accounts more specifically were widespread for hundreds of years leading up to the recent past, our present situation seems highly irregular. In the present, and despite recent interest in the roles values may play in several aspects of scientific inquiry, the notion that we should take seriously the thought that the aim of science is ultimately normative has effectively disappeared from view. Where did it go? Partial answers to this question have been given, especially relevant to academia in the United States (home to American pragmatists and many leading logical empiricists, who had earlier fled fascism in Europe): shifting political winds and McCarthyism in the 1950s, which were hostile to any advocacy of social or political reforms branded as progressive, left wing, or socialist (Reisch Reference Reisch2005); changing priorities for research funding after the successful launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957 (Howard Reference Howard, Hardcastle and Richardson2003); the strict separation of discussions of values from discussions of the cognitive content of science, on the part of some logical empiricists (Vaesen and Katzav Reference Vaesen and Katzav2019; cf. Dewulf Reference Dewulf2021).

All of this said, and acknowledging the often heavy weight of historical inertia, answers to the question of why humanist conceptions of the aim of science effectively disappeared do not themselves appear to answer the further question of why, after all this time, they have not regenerated. Today, in the philosophy of science, discussions of the aim of science give the impression of being premised on an implicit assumption to the effect that questions about aims are appropriately – and exclusively, it seems – to be answered descriptively, by reflecting narrowly on the immediate, proximal functions of scientific theories and models. This is to suggest that if we study these things carefully enough, we will see, or at least be well equipped to theorize about and contest, the proper end or ends of science. Hence a contemporary focus on what seem purely epistemic features of successful theories and models: prediction, explanation, understanding, empirical adequacy, truth, knowledge, etc.Footnote ¹¹ Advocates of these views argue about which are correct, or which is primary, or whether contextualism or pluralism regarding these views is tenable in application to different parts of science. None of this, however, is well suited to giving an account of the ultimate aim of science, or so I will now suggest.

Prediction, explanation, understanding, and so on are instrumental features of science. Prediction, for instance, is always the prediction of something to some end, an end we care about; lacking this motivation, we would have no use for it. It is what we do with predictions, guided by our reasons for making them, that illuminates our more distal aims. When we bring theorizing and modeling to bear in making predictions about global mean surface temperatures, or the effects of synthetic compounds on human physiology, we do so with intentions – for example, to facilitate planetary health or human health. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, these intentions pertain not only to existential threats and everyday challenges but also to explanations and understandings we may hope to possess for the sake of nothing more nor less than a profound sense of longing. There are uncountable numbers of truths we might seek, but only some we do seek, and in some cases this is simply a matter of aspiring to forms of awe and contentment that can only be experienced in terms of a better understanding of ourselves and the world, as revealed by science. All of this, from the more practical to the more transcendent, may be part of a humanist conception of the ultimate aim of science.

The distinction between more immediate, proximal aims of science and more distal, ultimate aims makes room for a humanist account of the latter, but it also invites us to consider the urgency of reviving such an account. Scientific inquiry, like any human endeavor, is driven by hopes and desires for certain outcomes. The question here is not whether there are such ends, but rather what they should be. The humanist worldview furnishes an answer to this question, but others are clearly possible. For instance, setting humanism to one side, we might instead establish an increasingly free market of science in which, to a large extent, the most powerful (often private) interests and corporations set the agendas of inquiry. As it turns out, this has already happened, significantly improving the welfare of certain members or strata of society and certain peoples or parts of the world, but with often alarming consequences for others.Footnote ¹² The choice to make the sciences de facto servants of unfettered commercialization (and supporting ideologies) as opposed to humanist values has, it seems, been made, or largely made, in the present. But this choice could be unmade. Rather than forgetting a rich heritage of humanistic aspirations for science, unfolding over hundreds of years up to the recent past, we might consider resurrecting these ideals instead.

Going this route, however, will require significant courage of conviction. As argued in the previous section, humanist ideals are by their nature abstract, admitting of more concrete conceptions and operationalizations that inevitably reflect the historical and cultural contexts in which they arise. If the actions they guide are to yield something better than what has come before, they must be subject to stalwart questioning and rethinking. In this spirit, briefly and in conclusion, let me describe three of what I take to be the most pressing desiderata for remaking a humanist conception of science for the twenty-first century. The first concerns how we think about the bounds or scope of science itself; the second, relatedly, concerns relationships between Western science narrowly construed and other forms of systematic inquiry; the third concerns a constellation of practical issues raised by the ambition to implement a humanist agenda for the sciences.

One major obstacle to renewing a humanist conception of science is a growing suspicion of science in the public sphere (Kennedy and Tyson Reference Kennedy and Tyson2023). Some of this may stem from a perception that the fruits of scientific labor benefit only some and not others (more on which momentarily), but some is surely attributable to a growing view that the sciences have no special epistemic authority. In some quarters, science is even described as something akin to a religion, equally well characterized in terms of dogma and faith. Of course, this is facile; it fails to reckon with the epistemic potency of empirical evidence and reflexively critical investigation. That said, such views are often concomitant with and conflated with a rejection, not of science per se, but of scientism: an especially strong endorsement of the epistemic authority and jurisdiction of the sciences. Scientism is quite reasonably taken to be a bad thing when the strength of its endorsement is excessive, amounting to a kind of hubris regarding the certainty and scope of scientific knowledge. Scientism is thus a much more plausible target of suspicion than science, and it is correspondingly crucial that humanists understand this distinction and take it seriously.

Certainly, lacking an awareness of the stage of an inquiry, the strength of the evidence, and the confidence of scientists in their own results, mindless deference or unthinking assertions of the truth or finality of scientific claims fails to grasp the nature of most scientific work as work-in-progress – even if it is, generally, our best bet epistemically and for acting in the world. Moreover, the notion that all questions are in principle answerable by the sciences alone is justifiably controversial (see Chapters 3 and 4). For example, though the human sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) investigate and contribute to our understanding of the nature of value, morality, and meaning, it is at best a promissory note that they will, one day, be capable of doing so comprehensively or exclusively, and it is unclear why taking a stand on this should be important to the epistemological dimension of humanism, which prizes both reason and science. Both are key and, presumably, not all reasoning is scientific reasoning. Or more neutrally still: There is nothing about humanism that entails that it is or should be.

This openness to uses of reason that transcend the sciences is critical to the possibility of renewing a humanist conception of science. Consider, for instance, domains in which scientific expertise overlaps with traditional or Indigenous expertise (see Chapter 10 for the case of global agriculture), where a failure to bring reason to bear in connecting different sources of expertise productively threatens epistemic injustice, and even the oppression of those with genuinely systematic knowledge falling outside the narrower remits of Western science. To complicate matters further, the broader remit of reason includes more expansive contexts in which science and technology, as well as social, economic, and political relations, are inextricably mixed. In these inevitably complex settings, competing goods and values are the norm, and we must think about how to prioritize (cf. Holman and Wilholt Reference Holman and Wilholt2022). Vannevar Bush (1945: 10–12), the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, argued that if science were supported and scientists given complete freedom to do as they pleased going forward, huge benefits to society would result. This view, however, enormously influential in its day, has few if any adherents today. A laissez-faire attitude is compatible with societal benefits, but it is also compatible with massive inequities.

What, then, is the alternative? Is it what Dewey (Reference Dewey and Boydston1985/1931: 203) described as a “Baconian ideal”: “the systematic organization of all knowledge, the planned control of discovery and invention, for the relief and advancement of the human estate”? From a humanist perspective, there is no alternative but to face up to the task of marshaling our collective reason to grapple with the practical challenges of implementing a fairer and more just administration of the sciences, not to mention their complex embeddings in technology, industry, commerce, and culture. This includes not only a transparent, conscious, resolute focus on placing science in the service of the good but also on directing it away from the service of harm (cf. Kitcher Reference Kitcher2001: chapter 8; Kourany Reference Kourany2016; see also Chapter 12). It requires that we engage our highest capacities for reason, critique, discovery, and invention to make good on a humanist conception of science.

In his defense of humanism, in response to critics who questioned his advocacy of it given his scholarship on the cruelties of colonialism and postcolonialism, Said (Reference Said2004: 28) observed that

These same observations apply in equal measure to the sciences, for there can be no true science whose scope is limited to extolling dogmatically the virtues of our current methods for gaining knowledge and the outcomes of inquiry. Science too is about questioning, upsetting, and reformulating, and it would be a mistake to think that unlike all other human practices, the sciences are somehow insulated from being shaped by and having consequences for the social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of the societies in which they are practiced. The modi operandi of an evolving humanism and an evolving science are complementary, in ways that do justice to their long association, and which hold out hope for a conception of science on which, not merely by accident but by design, it is an engine for positive change in the world.

Renaissance Humanism

Though contemporary humanists sometimes trace their ancestry back to the ancient period, philosophical humanism in the West first took substantive form in the Renaissance. True, the thought of the umanisti was not “the sum total of Renaissance thought and learning, but only a well-defined sector of it” (Kristeller Reference Kristeller, Schmitt, Kraye, Kessler and Skinner1990: 114). However, it was sufficiently influential that it radiated outwards, geographically and historically, through to contemporary varieties of humanism. I therefore agree with Cooper’s judgment that contemporary humanisms must be “intelligibly descended from a tradition of humanist thought in the West” which began with the Renaissance, the later varieties being “plausibly construable as developments, perhaps culminations, of earlier humanist tendencies of thought” (Cooper Reference Cooper1999: 3). Renaissance humanists were intellectually vigorous and had diverse convictions, interests, and concerns, as one should expect for a period whose name means “rebirth.”

Before looking closer at Renaissance humanist philosophy, it is worth considering the fact of its neglect relative to, for instance, the ancient and early modern periods. Doubtlessly, there are several reasons, but consider three that seem especially relevant to understanding the relationship of humanism to science. First, a sense of the Renaissance being populated by a motley crew of “sententious moralisers and littérateurs, by philologists and compilers [and] wild-eyed magicians” (Hankins Reference Hankins and Hankins2007: 339). Certainly, most humanists were interested in the study and translation of ancient texts and engaged enthusiastically in moral enquiry, and many also pursued interests in magic and astrology (Copenhaver Reference Copenhaver and Hankins2007; Kraye Reference Kraye and Kraye1996). But the superior response to what seems exotic or absurd is not derogation but understanding informed by an appreciation of the contexts and concerns of specific figures.

A second reason for neglect of the Renaissance is the understanding of it as essentially an artistic movement devoted to literature and the visual and plastic arts, but without serious philosophical interests or aspirations. This is uncompelling. Enthusiasm for aesthetic pursuits often reflects and shapes philosophical developments, such as the new Renaissance moral ideals of creative self-expression (Mann 1996: 1ff.). Such creativity could be exercised through an imaginative appropriation of ancient art and architecture or the production of artworks or an enrichment of cultures of aesthetic appreciation (Hope and McGrath Reference Hope, McGrath and Kraye1996: 161ff.). A final and related reason are remarks that Renaissance humanism was “neither a philosophy nor an ideology,” but “a cultural movement centered on rhetoric, literature, and history” (Monfasani Reference Monfasani and Craig1998: 533). This, too, is uncompelling. In addition to the fact of significant philosophizing during the period, most obviously concerning reflections on the conduct and aims of a moral life, cultural movements can inspire and in turn be shaped by philosophical developments.

I highlight these reasons since they are relevant to science. A contemporary humanist who sees the Renaissance as populated by “moralisers and littérateurs” concerned with art or magic and who lack philosophical interests is unlikely to see them as precursors of their own outlook. Indeed, some humanists ignore the Renaissance, instead tracing their roots to the more scientifically toned Enlightenment. It is notable that some high-profile contemporary humanists, such as Steven Pinker, often voice crassly philistine attitudes toward aesthetic endeavors: Consider his characterization of pleasure in music as “auditory cheesecake” (Pinker Reference Pinker1999: 534). I will not dwell on this. Instead, there are some deeper features of Renaissance humanist philosophy worthy of our consideration.

In what follows I describe three main themes prominent in and characteristic of at least the majority of Renaissance humanist philosophy. The themes are rich and can each be articulated and interrelated in different ways, but for convenience they can be understood as emphasizing human dignity, our independence from the divine, and our frailty. I survey some of them and argue in later sections that each recurs, albeit in modulated forms, in the contemporary, twentieth-century varieties of humanism described earlier. I also suggest that the frailty theme has a special role in shaping the character of humanist conceptions of science.

The dignity theme was a response to various challenges to the medieval tendency of articulating our status and worth in relation to God. We are made in God’s image, our minds illuminated by His, uniquely capable, among all beings, of achieving salvation and beatitude: These are some versions of theological accounts of human dignity. By contrast, the humanists offered alternatives: We are dignified – indeed, interesting – in our own right creatively self-expressive creatures, whether in the new social roles of artists, inventors, or men of virtù. We participate in civic and political life animated by increasingly impenitent desires for “the ancient prizes of fame and glory” (Hankins Reference Hankins and Hankins2007: 125).

Perhaps the most famous statement of this theme is Pico della Mirandolla’s Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486, an amazingly syncretic text combining material from all sorts of ancient philosophies and religions, which has an angel declaiming to Adam

Granted, Pico defines our distinctness and dignity in a divinely bestowed capacity to “fashion” ourselves, while others, such as the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, defined them in terms of the uniqueness of our status as “the mediator between the material and spiritual worlds” (Blum Reference Blum and Hankins2007: 221). We are not yet at full-blooded assertions of our independence from the divine. Still, such proclamations were to open the way for metaphysical and moral doctrines of human independence that enabled later forms of secular and naturalistic humanism. Four hundred years later, Nietzsche judged human beings – true, authentic ones, anyway – as “new, unique, incomparable” because they “create themselves,” forging their own “table of values” (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche and Williams2001: §335).

Assertions of human independence from the divine developed slowly and depended, naturally, on cultural and philosophical developments during the later early modern period, albeit accelerating during the Enlightenment. The Renaissance humanists opened the way by making possible new emphasis on distinctively human goals: New kinds of moral and cultural significance could now be attached to lives devoted to artistic self-expression, political accomplishment, rhetorical eloquence, technical endeavors, and civic vocationalism. All this was inherited by modern humanists who explain their goals in terms of, for instance, enhancement of human “life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love [and] richness of experience” (Pinker Reference Pinker2018: 410). Contemporary humanist organizations offer similar statements with the proviso, often left implicit, that the range of those goods is constrained by the stipulations of a scientific naturalist worldview.

The dignity and independence themes converged in a culture of “self-assertion,” which was Hans Blumenberg’s useful term for an “existential program” animated by a self-conscious sense of human beings as emplaced within a historical situation affording new possibilities of life whose realization depends on human agency (Blumenberg Reference Blumenberg1983: 205). Self-assertion was encouraged by the intellectual and imaginative revitalization sparked by the retrieval of Hellenistic moral philosophies and the relaxation of the moral and metaphysical strictures of medieval Christendom. Critics protest that Blumenberg downplays other important historical, political, and social conditions that also contributed to these changes (Pippin Reference Pippin1998: 275). Still, modern humanists should find in this much with which they sympathize: a new historical sense that our future is uncertain, with undetermined outcomes human beings can influence through judicious exercises of reason, imagination, and will; a new outlook that sees the natural world narrowly in terms of human interests and needs – for energy, fuel, food, and so on – coupled to imperatives to control or modify the world for the sake of human convenience and preference; and novel interest in exploring and exercising the creatively expressive capacities of the human mind and body (cf. Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 36ff. and 43ff.).

It is crude to present these Renaissance humanist developments as the opening stages of a long crusade against the dogmatism of religious institutions. After all, many humanists of the period were devoted to improvement of the study and practice of Christianity, the most obvious being Desiderius Erasmus. We should also be skeptical about historical narratives that draw straight lines connecting science, humanism, and secularism, since they are all too often guilty of historiographical sins such as triumphalism – a way of writing history from the position of the “victors” which leads one to distort the actual complexities of the historical process (Numbers Reference Numbers2009). Still, contemporary humanists, seeking to ally humanism and science, could welcome Renaissance humanist emphases on our dignity and independence from the divine. After that, however, they need to reckon with the third theme – human frailty.

From Dignity to Frailty

The frailty of human beings can have physical, epistemic, moral, or existential dimensions and my focus is our epistemic frailty – a conviction that our epistemic capacities are weak or infirm, incapable of attaining certain truths or sustaining ambitious epistemic goals. The medieval period had offered many sources of epistemic strength and confidence, such as the conviction that God vouchsafes both the integrity of our rational capacities and their fit with the rational intelligibility of the world, “an ordered structure … oriented to man” (Blumenberg Reference Blumenberg1983: 139). Theologians debated the epistemological and metaphysical details and disputed the obstacles to our epistemic confidence, such as the implications of the Fall of Man. Conversely, for early modern natural philosophers, the deep worry was that human beings are, epistemically as well as spiritually, “damaged goods,” corrupted by original sin, and the urgent question was whether or not we have “retained a capacity to discern intelligibility in the natural and moral orders” (Harrison Reference Harrison2007: 44).

Such inherited structures of epistemic confidence had been called into question in the fifteenth century thanks to various theological, social, and cultural developments. The sudden availability of ancient Greek skepticism thanks to the rediscovery of texts, the realization that serious rivals to Aristotelian Christianity existed that had been lost and never reimagined, and a new, disturbing sense of the contingency of our opinions and beliefs thanks to acquaintance with earlier and distant cultures were just some of them. As a great historian of skepticism puts it, little wonder that “early modern philosophy developed out of a skeptical crisis” (Popkin Reference Popkin2003: viii). I think that a humanist sense of our epistemic frailty emerged from this turbulent context of uncertainty and crisis and – more importantly – would shape later humanist conceptions of science up to the twentieth century.

For those sensitive to concerns about epistemic frailty, two related tasks were urgent: undertaking an appraisal of the nature, scope, and strength of our epistemic capacities and, more practically, working out how to act on the results of that appraisal. “To the humanist,” explains one scholar of the Renaissance, “truth seemed particular, conditioned, and subject to many limitations” (Nauert Reference Nauert1995: 20). For them, there were many ways to respond. Some catalogued our personal limitations and foibles. Some emphasized the various contingencies shaping our practices and outlooks. Some scrutinized translations and revised historical and philological practice. Others questioned or rejected aspirations to universal, objective, or final knowledge and truth and, instead, saw judgments as reflections of the unique circumstances of culturally and historically situated enquirers. At its most radical, a sense of epistemic frailty took the dramatic form of denying that human beings are able to “elaborate a comprehensive picture of reality,” which led to dramatic epistemological conclusions: “Most of the clearest-headed and most influential humanists regarded human intellectual activity as instrumental and showed little interest in metaphysics. The human intellect, they believed, is suited only to making response to specific problems – generally, problems of moral choice – that arise in the ongoing process of living” (Nauert Reference Nauert1995: 204).

If articulation of the nature of reality is beyond our reach, a next best option is working for a perspicuous understanding of the human condition. This requires knowledge of social practices and cultural history and of the artistic and literary works in which people explore and express their sense of themselves and their world. Granted, some humanists, such as Pico, still worked to develop ambitious metaphysical pictures, but this still involved “an eclectic survey of past philosophies and religions, a picture which no one rational mind could ever have generated” (Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 48).

I think the epistemic frailty theme helped to shape the relationship between the later varieties of philosophical humanism. Crudely put, the difference was between those who took either quietist or activist stances on our epistemic frailty: The quietists acquiesced in our frailty and rejected epistemically ambitious goals; the activists sought to ameliorate our frailties and accentuate our epistemic powers. Equally crudely put, the quietists rejected the epistemically ambitious conceptions of science which were endorsed by the activists (a tension we will see most vividly in the later discussion of existential humanism).

A quietist accepts our epistemic frailty and accommodates to it by cultivating attitudes and styles of conduct of a more modest and diffident sort. The French skeptic and humanist Michel de Montaigne advises us to abandon disputatiousness and febrile pursuit of certainty and instead cultivate diffidence, “a fear of making judgments,” and always strive to be “teachable, zealous” (Montaigne Reference Montaigne1991: 570, 564). Confronted with a variety of convictions, the wise person is exploratory, enquiring: They delight in the diversity of customs and opinions, restrain the impulses to utter surety, and submit “undogmatically to the customs and intuitions of society” (Hartle Reference Hartle and Langer2005: 195). For the French Christian humanist Blaise Pascal, too, human beings are “wretched,” epistemically and spiritually, “equally incapable of knowing and of not desiring to know,” albeit able to grasp their wretchedness and thereby attain a form of “greatness” (Pascal Reference Pascal1980/1670: §§ 75, 114). Here are two statements of a form of quietism rooted in a humanist sense of epistemic frailty.

The activist response to epistemic frailty involves attempts to mitigate or overcome it through a combination of self-transformative disciplines and the creation of supporting social systems of enquiry. Consider early modern English natural philosophy, the systematic project of understanding the operations of the natural world by identifying their principles by careful methodical enquiry. Its practitioners shared an acute sense of the “epistemic infirmities of the intellect” and sought purgative or curative “disciplines” and “regimens.” Drawing on classical philosophies, the natural philosophers used their therapeutic conception of philosophy to help epistemically corrupted and enfeebled human beings “to conduct the mind in the right way toward the double acquisition of truth and of virtuous dispositions” (Corneanu Reference Corneanu2011: 9). The idola mente (“idols of the mind”) described by the English philosopher and early champion of science Francis Bacon, consist of inherent and acquired epistemic frailties – “weaknesses,” “deformities” – which all “do violence to the understanding and confuse everything” (Bacon Reference Bacon, Jardine and Silverthorne2000/1620: §44). Natural philosophy helps us overcome them through the methodological disciplining of individual minds and the centralization of enquiry – a conception of science whose rich classical, Christian, and humanist influences should prompt us to rethink the tenacious myth of Bacon’s anti-humanism (Vickers Reference Vickers, Kraye and Stone2000).

I distinguished the quietist and activist responses to epistemic frailty for convenience, though obviously they exist in a dialectical relationship that changes with cultural, intellectual, and historical context. It is tempting to see the subsequent history of science as evidence that the activist responses won out, but that is too quick (Grafton Reference Grafton and Kraye1996: 204ff.). Granted, maybe no modern philosophers of science would articulate epistemic frailty in terms of our corrupt, postlapsarian state. Other options are available, though, from transcendental or perspectival constraints on human knowledge or a sense of the historical contingency of what came to be our scientific inheritance (Kidd Reference Kidd, Alfano, Lynch and Tanesini2020).

I return to epistemic frailty, humanism, and conceptions of science later. What matters for now is appreciating that Renaissance humanism introduced new concerns about the scope and strength of our epistemic capacities. At the most extreme, there is the denial that we do or could ever produce a “comprehensive picture” of reality. This precludes the strong epistemic ambitions central to scientific realism – roughly, a conviction that our best theories and models describe, or are well on the way to describing, the world (Chakravartty Reference Chakravartty2017). Less extreme options include aspirations to provide more provisional, particular, pragmatic kinds of knowledge and understanding of the world, sufficient for certain modest cognitive and practical purposes. Between these lie a whole range of epistemological and metaphysical positions which is reflected in the varieties of humanism, including the three surveyed in what follows.

Essentialist Humanism

Martin Heidegger proposed that every form of humanism “presupposed [a] universal essence of man” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger and Krell1993: 226). This sloganizes a variety of humanism which aims to identify “the essentially, universally human” (Davies Reference Davies2006: 22). Some essentialist humanists articulate conceptions of our essence or nature, while others occupy themselves with the search for it, even if all agree that an account of our essence must be ennobling. The “anti-humanism” that Bernard Williams perceived in Lutheranism was explained by reference to its vision of human nature as “twisted,” fundamentally corrupted by original sin (Williams Reference Williams and Moore2008: 147).

When it comes to accounts of our distinctive essence, possibilities abound. A short list includes our capacity for autonomous agency, moral self-consciousness, spiritual relationship with God, or accounts of our being existentially concerned creatures who are “condemned to meaning” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962: xix). We necessarily experience our lives and the world under the categories of meaning, significance, purpose, and value. For the Renaissance humanists, humans are essentially creative, self-assertive beings, able, as Juan de Luis Vives put it, to “bring forth extraordinary things” (Vives Reference Vives, Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall1948: 392). Pico denied we had an essence in the sense of something that fixes our position in the cosmic hierarchy but still accepted our unique creative ability to “fashion ourselves.” Such examples show that essentialist humanism can take many forms – scientific, theological, philosophical. Moreover, claims about essence are not constitutive of humanism, and some self-described humanists reject any talk of a human essence. For Jean-Paul Sartre, the “fundamental meaning” of humanism should be that “existence precedes essence” (Sartre Reference Sartre1966: 28). Our “essence” does not fix in advance the kind of person we will become or the kind of life we will lead: Our distinctive capacities of reflection and choice enable us to choose our own kind of “existence.”

An interesting critic of essentialist humanism is the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who declares the belief in “a definite pre-existing essence” as a “philosophical myth of man” which should be “reduced to ashes” (Althusser Reference Althusser, McNeill and Feldman1998: 275). By emphasizing an alleged common essence, those “myths” downplay the importance of social and historical structures and obscure the differences between people under different material conditions – neither of these being acceptable to a good Marxist. Ameliorative projects demand diligent attention to the structural and material conditions of human life, not distracting attempts to discern some underlying essence allegedly common to bourgeois capitalists in Los Angeles and oppressed workers in Laos. In other writings, Althusser clarifies his target as “liberal-rational” humanism, a doctrine which exaggerates the power of individuals to use their rational powers to change the conditions and direction of their life: “the human subject … is not the ‘centre’ of history” (Althusser Reference Althusser1977: 201).

Althusser criticizes essentialist humanism because it obstructs or undermines a perspicuous social and structural understanding of human life and also propagates a stifling conviction that there is an “essential or best form” that life should take (Lewis Reference Lewis and Zalta2018: §3.5). An essentialist doctrine can be criticized on the grounds of content, coherence, and consistency with our everyday understanding of human beings. Certainly, some philosophers who talk of our essence advance inconsistent claims (see Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 86ff.). During the twentieth century, most debates about essentialist humanism involved the biological sciences. The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson begins and closes his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 book, On Human Nature, by declaring that “human nature can be laid open as an object of fully empirical research,” meaning that at last our “self-conception” can be “enormously and truthfully enriched,” as we finally progress toward a “scientific humanism” (E. O. Wilson Reference Wilson2004: 2, 206).

A heated debate ensued among naturalists enamored by the idea of some definitive statement of human nature and their constructionist, postmodernist, and other rivals who all denied any nature or essence at all. What followed was a truculent clash of extreme doctrines, alleviated by the soberer account of human nature offered by Mary Midgley in her 1978 book, Beast and Man. She rejected both overconfident claims about the fixity of our nature and radical claims about our being utterly plastic creatures, emphasizing that both scientific study and everyday experience and practice show that we have “highly particular, sharply limited needs and possibilities,” which delimit the “schemes of life” into which we can fit and flourish (Midgley Reference Midgley1994: 22–24ff.). We should reject polarizing caricatures, crass dualisms of “nature vs. nurture,” and an empirically, conceptually, and methodologically myopic fixation on biology – at which point we can get on with the multidisciplinary project of developing an appropriately complicated account of our dappled natures (McElwain Reference McElwain2019: chapter 2).

A clear theme of these critiques is that accounts of the human essence or nature must be properly pluralistic if they are to capture our complexities. If science is to play a role, then it should not dominate the stage, and if it does we risk narrowing our understanding of those vital or essential features of human beings. John Dupré – a philosopher who criticizes misuses of and misconceptions about the biological sciences – calls our attention to the seemingly inexorable cycle of new research programs that promise to reveal all about human nature. Some recent culprits include sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and genetics (Dupré Reference Dupré2001; Dupré and Barnes Reference Dupré and Barnes2008).

Dupré argues that human nature consists of “the developmental cycles that currently constitute human life,” which have biological and cultural dimensions requiring both scientific and humanistic illumination (Dupré Reference Dupré2001: 95). Since social practices and cultural history count among the essential determinants of our nature, seeing evolution as “the route to deep insight into human nature” is “profoundly mistaken” (Dupré 2003: 4–7ff.). “Imperialist scientism” would narrow our understanding of our complexity and distinctness and assign to the sciences work that ought to be shared across a range of disciplines (cf. Midgley Reference Midgley2002: 215). Similar criticisms are offered by Raymond Tallis – himself a self-described naturalist and humanist – who rejects the specific forms of scientism he dubs “Darwinitis” and “neuromania.” A true humanist should demand from the sciences and the humanities “an image of humanity that is richer and truer to our distinctive nature than that of an exceptionally gifted chimp” (Tallis Reference Tallis2011: 10).

I hear clear echoes of the Renaissance dignity and independence themes in these twentieth-century varieties of essentialist humanism. Dupré, Midgley, and Tallis share a conviction that any satisfying account of what is essential to us requires a “radical epistemological pluralism,” encompassing the natural and social sciences and the humanities, tempered by a principled reticence about the prospects for “any grand unifying theory of human nature” (Dupré Reference Dupré2002: S292–S293). Our essence is a complicated and evolving product shaped by biological, historical, and cultural factors – an attitude the Renaissance humanists would applaud.

Notice, though, that the biological debates are essentially epistemological – what can science contribute to our knowledge and understanding of human nature? This is interesting, no doubt, but there are two essentialist humanist accounts of science worth considering in this connection.

The first account can be called a vital conception of science. It sees the sciences as the primary engines for the realization or expression of our essence or nature, a means of drawing out our essential capacities. Science realizes our nature, rather than just describes it. A good example is Karl Marx’s early writings in the economic and philosophical manuscripts which describe our Gattungswesen (“species-essence”) in very humanist terms: We are essentially creative, embodied creatures for whom using our practical epistemic capacities to transform the world brings material satisfaction and, more important, overcomes our painful sense of estrangement (Cohen Reference Cohen2000: 379). Creative activities shape the world in our image, transforming it from something “independent and alien” into a realm increasingly intelligible by virtue of bearing the marks of human purposes and activity (Marx Reference Marx2009: 139ff.). Science must be liberated from its “subordinated” condition of “serving material production” for the sake of the bourgeoisie (Marx Reference Marx and Elster1986: 318). Once that is achieved, it can be recognized as our preeminent vehicle for exercising our epistemically and practically creative powers and realizing “man’s real nature,” our “true anthropological nature” (Marx Reference Marx and O’Malley1994: 110).

I see the early Marx as offering an account of our “species-essence” as creative beings which is clearly related to Renaissance humanist themes and also includes a rich conception of science as an existentially transformative enterprise. Science should be valued, not simply as a source of biological knowledge, but as a vital enterprise that “receives its purpose” from its ability to further “the evolution of all human powers as such” (quoted in Adams Reference Adams and Carver1991: 267). Few contemporary philosophers of science would endorse this existentially charged account of science even if some appreciate Marx’s other contributions to more mainstream issues in philosophy of science (Farr Reference Farr and Carver1991; Kidd Reference Kidd2021). Still, it offers a further essentialist humanist conception of science.

A second account of essentialism, humanism, and science has a different character: It denies any substantive, central role for science in the effort to understand or cultivate our nature or essence. Some contemporary moral philosophers argue that what is essentially definitive of us is our ergon – a term that is too narrow if translated as “function” – coupled to some conception of eudaimonia, an account of what it means for us to flourish as the distinctive kind of beings we are (Roughley Reference Roughley2021: §5). Humans beings have certain set needs and dispositions, reflecting the sorts of creatures we are: Insofar as our needs are satisfactorily met and those dispositions are given meaningful expression, we flourish. Martha Nussbaum, for one, has argued there are some “functions” of humans “so important, so central, that their absence will mean the absence of human being” (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum, Altham and Harrison1995: 94). Such functions are primarily identified through diligently conducted moral reflection illuminated by empathetic humanistic understanding, rather than the natural sciences. Indeed, in later writings, Nussbaum argued that the already modest role of science is even further reduced by educational developments which downplay the humane aspects of science – imaginative, creative, critical aspects (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2016: 2).

It should be clear, hopefully, that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included several varieties of essentialist humanist doctrines which provoked lively debates about their epistemological, political, and existential dimensions. I have only sketched out some examples; more could be offered. The point here is simply that there is a variety of essentialist humanisms, each telling a distinct story about the nature and significance of science.

Rational Subjectivity

Humanism can also be understood as a doctrine that identifies our most important and ennobling characteristic as rational subjectivity. To be a human being is to be a subject, which means recognizing oneself as a rational creature, one able to self-reflectively understand its own existence. For rational subjectivists, our central, defining, and most ennobling feature is our capacity for reason, and “the sovereignty of rational consciousness” is a “pillar” of humanism (Davies Reference Davies2006: 60). An appreciation of our rationality, for Pinker, marks out an “Enlightenment humanism,” one that promotes “fairness, autonomy, and rationality” because the enhancement of our powers of reasoning enhances our moral capacities: The rationally sophisticated person is better able to “detach [themselves] from a parochial vantage point” (Pinker Reference Pinker2011: 639, 656). Other scholars agree that rational subjectivity characterizes humanism. Charles Taylor maintains that rational subjectivity is central to a “modern humanism” which encourages images of human beings as uniquely “capable of … courageous disengagement” from social context and emotional needs, whose self-conscious understanding of their status as rational agents elicits “admiration and awe” (Taylor Reference Taylor1989: 94). Many champions of humanist doctrines of rational subjectivity adopt, as a motto, Immanuel Kant’s injunction to aspiring enlightened people to “use your own understanding” (Kant Reference Kant and Reiss1991: 54).

A celebration of rationality as the defining feature of human subjectivity is familiar thanks to its prominence within mainstream contemporary humanisms and its enduring place in the recent history of European philosophy. Cooper notes “Cartesian and Kantian images of the lone spectator surveying and adjudicating, from a withdrawn and superior vantage point, the totality of beliefs, practices and norms that constitute the milieu of everyday life” (Cooper Reference Cooper1999: 8). Many today reject these images, but they could only do that because they were once widely entertained.

Many humanists present doctrines of rational subjectivity as a positive thing, not least for its obvious connections to the sciences, at least if they are understood in certain ways. Since this position is familiar, I consider here an alternative – more critical – account of humanism as rational subjectivity from the writings of Michel Foucault.

Actually, humanism is understood in two senses in his writings, the first – which is not my concern – takes humanism to refer to “modern thought about man, our concern for him,” specifically the idea that human beings are unique: We are both located within the empirical order of the world, like an object, but ones capable of knowledge and subjectivity – what Foucault describes as a “strange empirico-transcendental doublet” (Foucault Reference Foucault1970: 318ff.). This is something whose full implications were drawn out by Kant, whose doctrines of transcendental idealism are an effort to understand and reconcile the “apparent duality of our nature” (Kant Reference Kant and Reiss1991: 207). In what follows, though, I focus on Foucault’s second sense of humanism – as the name of a doctrine characterizing human beings in terms of rational, autonomous subjectivity.

“The theory of the subject is at the heart of humanism” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Bouchard1977: 222) and those who reject humanism thereby reject “the theory of the knowing subject” (Foucault Reference Foucault1970: xiv). To be a subject means, among other things, being self-consciously capable of understanding and representing ourselves, one another, and the world. Exercising our epistemic abilities, on this account, enables us to make sense of the world, which, in turn, better places us to guide our lives in rational ways. Illuminated by truth, a rational subjectivity can be autonomous – “self-regulating” – and thereby aspire to freedom. Foucault, of course, urges us to oppose this “metaphysical illusion of a self-empowering ego,” which he thinks has become entrenched across “modern, occidental culture” (Ingram Reference Ingram and Gutting1994: 217). A human being who falls for those enticing and self-aggrandizing illusions condemns themselves to try and live within a narrow pattern of development and conduct. Ideals of rationality, after all, get codified in standards of rationality or reasonableness and Foucault sees two problematic consequences. First, the ideal of conformity to the standards of rationality comes at the awful cost of surveillance, anxious self-monitoring, and subjection to increasingly intrusive disciplinary regimes. Reason imposes itself in codified standards which get expressed through institutionalized social practices, the classic examples being the prisons and hospitals described by Foucault.

The establishment of specific images of what a rational subjectivity should be creates a second unfortunate consequence: Those who resist conformity are classified as deviants – as wild, irrational, untamable – and thereby oppressed or destroyed. Anyone who does not fit the strictures of rational subjectivity, as defined, becomes a dangerous deviant. Following many critics, Foucault presents the Enlightenment as the aggressive imposition of an ideal of “a single rational trajectory along which humanity fulfills its essential nature,” one with grim implications for women, “the mad,” and other “deviants” who fall outside its strictures (Ingram Reference Ingram and Gutting1994: 218). Worse still, their oppression was disguised by a rational subjectivist “grounding of reason, history, and truth in the figure of the transcendentally free and creative subject” (Owen Reference Owen1994: 221). Epistemologically, politically, and culturally, humanist doctrines of rational subjectivity are oppressive: hence Foucault’s often-quoted anticipation of the happy day when “Man” – the rationally autonomous image of him – will be “erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault Reference Foucault1970: 387).

Foucault is obviously critical of humanist doctrines of rational subjectivity and there is much to say about them. I confine myself to exploring their relationships to science to show, hopefully, that there are lots of ways of thinking about the connections of science, humanism, and rationality, including ones that emphasize potential tensions between them. For some self-described humanists, after all, science, humanism, and rationality are mutually reinforcing. A good example is Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now, which insists on natural harmony between the four themes in its subtitle, Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I question this by considering what I call the ratiocentrism and dehumanization criticisms.

The ratiocentrism criticism challenges the tenability of characterizations of the nature and conduct of human beings and their existence in terms of rational subjectivity. The very general concern is that our rational capacities are too complex and interconnected with our social, affective, imaginative, and practical capacities for it to be plausible to try and privilege rationality as the locus of our subjectivity. I suspect few philosophers today think of us as essentially isolated rationalities floating about in an asocial void, sometimes stirred by affects or imagination. Such conceptions of rationality are truncated and too abstract, deriding constitutive aspects of human beings such as our affective capacities as superficial contingencies.

Rational subjectivity is also, for critics, a poor fit with the everyday experience and conduct of life. As a distinguished philosopher of emotion puts it, “the rational ideal of careful deliberation” really “seems utterly remote” from how we actually conduct our lives, especially during times of “mental turmoil” (Goldie Reference Goldie2012: 146). A vision of humans as autonomous rational beings also incorporates an epistemic individualism rendered increasingly untenable once we appreciate just how hugely dependent our knowledge-practices are on other people: We depend on other people for criticism, ideas, information, and other epistemic goods; many epistemic projects are too large or complex to be performed by a single person; moreover, a lot of our everyday epistemic activities rely on social practices and institutions. Such criticisms are common to many philosophical communities – feminists, pragmatists, existential phenomenologists, Wittgensteinians, and others, all skeptical, in their own ways, of attempts to define subjectivity in terms of cool rational capacities hived off from our embodied, social, affective engagement with the world. For John Cottingham, only those who are in the grip of a “ratiocentric bias” could find such truncated conceptions of rationality and their thin visions of human subjectivity attractive or compelling (Cottingham Reference Cottingham2009: 250).

That is a general statement of the ratiocentric criticism, the specific variations of which get articulated in many ways, depending on the sensibilities, concerns, and commitments of different critics. It is worth noting, though, that very few philosophers of science would really endorse rational subjectivity. Granted, some still interpret science as a sleek engine of reason, as “the one realm of accomplishment of which we can unashamedly boast before any tribunal of minds” (Pinker Reference Pinker2018: 385). For these ratiocentric humanists, the scientific enterprise is “the achievement par excellence of detached rational investigation” (Cooper Reference Cooper1999: 8). The problem with this is that images of science as the institutional systematization of detached rational enquiry are no longer tenable thanks the investigations of sociologists and historians of science, feminist epistemologists of science, and postpositivist philosophies of science (see Chapters 9–11). If science is a search for truth, we should be truthful about science, including what were once called embarrassingly “extra-rational” dimensions.

Granted, some do reject science and reason, either sincerely or provocatively, and the “Science Wars” of the 1990s saw heated attacks on, and defense of, science (one episode saw a physicist write a spoof exposé of the “intellectual impostures” of certain criticisms of the sciences – Sokal and Bricmont Reference Sokal and Bricmont1998). Care is needed, though, to clarify what is actually being rejected and why. Paul Feyerabend’s book Farewell to Reason, despite its provocative title, was specifically criticizing “faulty” accounts of scientific rationality made untenable by studies of scientific practice which showed that “scientists do not proceed ‘rationally’ in the sense stipulated by abstract models” (Feyerabend Reference Feyerabend1987: 1). Rejecting faulty conceptions of science and rationality is not the same as rejecting science and rationality tout court. Unfortunately, this obvious point was occluded by the noisy and ideologically charged “Science Wars” of the 1990s, though hopefully we are now past the bad old days when “what philosophy of science was offering as an account of scientific rationality was of surprisingly little relevance to actual science” (Kourany Reference Kourany2010: 107). It is a nice irony that careful studies of science helped challenge the varieties of rational subjectivity to which some humanists cling.

I turn now to the second, “dehumanization” criticism of humanist doctrines of rational subjectivity, which presents them as offering diminished and dehumanizing conceptions of humanity. Foucault’s influential critiques of épistémès, “discursive regimes,” and the “modern era of ‘bio-power’” exemplify the dehumanization criticism. Doctrines of rational subjectivity, first, construct human beings in narrowly rational terms, rendering us conveniently susceptible to monitoring and control. For Foucault, “proper” behavior is modeled and predicted by medical and psychiatric sciences that are themselves part of a “political technology of the body,” directed at “the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault Reference Foucault1978: 140). Second, sciences are presented as rational enterprises immune to the prejudices and sentiments that sully the rest of the social world. Conveniently, they appear as the only means of achieving the objective truths that ought to be the basis of rational social practice and political policy. Moreover, this image of science conveniently conceals those “all-too-human” factors animating science, most obviously the “drives” for power, emphasized by Nietzsche, that inspired Foucault’s methods of “archaeology” and “genealogy” (cf. Flynn Reference Flynn and Gutting2005: 30–38ff.). What matters is appreciating that “knowing subjects and truths known are the product of relations of power and knowledge,” a crucial insight that exposes “an aspiration to power” that, unchecked, ends in “the suppression of all conflicting voices and lives” (Rouse Reference Rouse and Gutting2005: 107). Hence the “sense of listening” to the many silenced voices who offer exposés of the conceits of doctrines of rational subjectivity and also challenge official narratives of socially progressive rational enquiry (Foucault Reference Foucault1981: 8). Think, for instance, of calls for greater inclusion of persons with disabilities who point to more complex conceptions of subjectivity, or historical studies showing the role of sexist biases in scientific enquiry, past and present.

This dehumanization critique of rational subjectivist humanism is complex and only an example of wider discourses premised on insidious connections between certain conceptions of science, rationality, and humanism. We should, though, see rational subjectivist humanism as a continuation of the Renaissance project of articulating our distinctive, ennobling aspects. The nomination of rationality was intelligible and, up to a point, sensible, even if it later took truncated ratiocentric forms that obscured other aspects of humanity – affects, imagination, sentiment, intuition, spiritual impulses, moral sensibility. Celebration of rationality might also sometimes play valuable strategic roles: the sociologist of science Steven Shapin criticizes a past hagiographical tradition fixated on images of the “genius” scientist, a rational superhero stripped of sentiment and subjective partiality. An appeal to rationality played a role, though, during earlier hostile times when science needed the “protection and celebration” that could come by stressing its “essential rationality and … unique status among other forms of human endeavor” (Shapin Reference Shapin2010: 11–12ff.). The trick here is doing this while avoiding entrenching distorting conceptions of science and rationality. According to one account, the value-free ideal, which explained the superlative rationality of science partly in its alleged immunity to social and political values, helped protect American philosophy of science from the ideological strife of the 1950s, then unfortunately became entrenched in ways that delayed appreciation of the essential role of values in scientific practice (Reisch Reference Reisch2005; for studies of values in science, see Part III).

It is ironic that, if these commentators are right, humanism as rational subjectivity can promote both distorting conceptions of science and dehumanizing visions of humanity. I take no stand on whether one could amend those doctrines to avoid these risks. What matters for my purposes is simply to note that this is a further variety of humanism with its own accounts of science.

Existential Humanism

I want to consider one final variety of humanism – existential humanism – which David E. Cooper has constructed from figures in existential phenomenology, pragmatism, neo-Kantianism, and several other nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions, as well as Nietzsche and several others (Cooper Reference Cooper2002: chapter 5). The core claim is that an ineradicable role is played by human perspectives, life, and practice in shaping not only our understanding of the world but also – more radically – the world itself. For Sartre, our distinctiveness lies in the fact that we are beings “by whom it happens that there is a world” (Sartre Reference Sartre1957: 552). Existential humanism understands the world in terms of the articulated and intelligible world of our experience and engagement: The human world is therefore “inseparable from subjectivity and inter-subjectivity” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962: xx).

Here I only sketch some general features of existential humanism, directing those who want further details to Cooper’s own elaborations and defenses (Cooper Reference Cooper2002: chapters 8–10). Some of the main ones are that the concepts we apply to the world necessarily reflect human values and interests. Consequently, those concepts cannot be extricated from human traditions and forms of life and are only intelligible in relation to our purposive practices and ambitions – no sense can be made of what it is for something to exist, therefore, except in relation to those purposes, practices, and perspectives. As Nietzsche put it, “we have only drawn the concept ‘real, truly existing’ from the ‘concerning us’” (quoted in Poellner Reference Poellner1995: 89). A creature that lacked interests and concerns could not have a world at all; nothing would be “lit up” for them as distinct or salient – a possible object of experience, evaluation, and interaction. Hence the existential phenomenological characterization of our ways of “being-in-the-world” in terms of embodied “operative intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962: xviii). We inhabit a world of practical possibilities, revealed through embodied engagement – climbing, carrying, exploring, walking – which gain significance through their contributions to our life-projects. For the existential phenomenologists, “being-in-the-world” is immersed, engaged, active, and only becomes detached and spectatorial for special purposes. For this reason, existential humanists reject the primacy assigned to rationality by rational subjectivists and their conceptions of rationality.

A lightning sketch omits many details, but two clarificatory points are worth marking, which concern an obvious criticism and a connection to science. First, the existential humanist is not claiming that the world is somehow a product or construction of human beings. One does find such promethean rhetoric out there. Some pragmatists and, at times, Nietzsche indulge in it, as does Umberto Eco when speaking of our “gradually constructing ourselves a World” (Eco Reference Eco1999: 20; cf. Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 103ff.). Our relationship to the world is much more intimate: The world is “always, already” there, as Heidegger puts it; our engagement with it is usually unreflective, smooth, and supple – not at all one of our going about “imposing” order on some formless mass. Indeed, our being-in-the-world is experienced as comportment within a world already, as it were, up and running – something existential phenomenologists convey by characterizing the human world as a theater of possibilities, “referential totality,” or “cradle of meanings” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962: §17; Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1962: 499).

Second, existential humanism is clearly a late descendant of Renaissance humanism. What it aspires to is an account of our distinctiveness and dignity – our unique manner of being-in-the-world enables us to inhabit and share a world which is experienced as a dynamic space of significant possibilities for personal and collective agency. This world is given its color and animation through its being “lit up” in virtue of our purposive practices which are, themselves, components of the existential life-projects embedded within a rich intersubjective world – an unquestionably human world. Its inhabitants are, indeed, embodied human beings and not a transcendental I, some abstract “constitutor” in whom “nothing human is to be found” (Husserl Reference Husserl1970: 183). Existential humanist attitudes to the divine vary considerably, though pronounced theological commitments are only visible among the “religious existentialists,” such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. Finally, the frailty theme remains in the epistemic and existential forms of, for instance, the phenomenological claim that the structures of meaning that “light up” the world for us are not anything that we created, and which can, at times, collapse in the horrible experiences of emptiness – of the sudden collapse of the sense of things mattering – that Heidegger called Unheimlichkeit (cf. Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 249ff.).

I finish here with existential humanist conceptions of science. Central to scientific enquiry is a disengaged spectatorial stance on the world, one dependent on, and therefore derivative of, our everyday ways of experiencing and engaging in the world: “cognition in the … spectator sense … presupposes existence” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1982: 276). Scientific enquiry therefore takes for granted the prior richness of our experiential world, whose structure and intelligibility owe to our concerns and interests. As Husserl puts it, science is rooted in the “meaning-fundament” of the “life-world,” the Lebenswelt, the shared structure of enthusiasms, interests, needs, and presuppositions constitutive of a certain form of life (Husserl Reference Husserl1970: 121).

Existential humanists draw two conclusions about science. First, scientific descriptions and explanations of the world, while valuable for certain purposes, presuppose a background way of experiencing the world, one they cannot account for in their own terms. We can “stop and stare … in the scientist’s manner,” but this entails abstracting things from that “relational totality” of interconnected structures of possibility even to the point that it is “dimmed it down to [a] uniformity” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962: 114, 178). The objects and processes studied by sciences, such as animals and the weather, initially appear for us through more basic ways of being-in-the-world. Science is therefore derivative, albeit useful for certain cognitive and practical purposes; problems only arise when this dependence gets forgotten (Ratcliffe Reference Ratcliffe2013). This has two implications: Phenomenology plays the vital role of describing the tacit, background structures of meaning and experience that the sciences presuppose, hence Heidegger’s remark that the sciences are “utterly incapable of gaining access … to their [own] essence” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 177). The “essence” of science, then, is revealed by phenomenology, making it the most fundamental method of enquiry (Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 193–200ff.).

A second conclusion existential humanists draw about science is the need for what we might call an existential critique of science. Many existential humanists celebrate the richness of our being-in-the-world: We experience a world suffused with meaning and significance that resonates with our moral and emotional experiences. By contrast, the world described by the sciences seems to them flat, thin, cold, and devoid of those features, such as meaningfulness, that are vital to living. The rhetoric used by existential humanists will seem overwrought to those who do not experience the scientific worldview as alienating and empty – Heidegger speaks of the “distress” of our age of science and Husserl declares a “crisis of European sciences” that precipitates a “barbarian hatred of spirit,” the erosion of the deep values which stir in us nobler sentiments and feelings.

Such critiques have two aspects: The distinctive character of human existence is itself threatened by internalization and privileging of scientific descriptions of the world, including we human beings. Heidegger, indeed, judges that what is “messing up” modern thought and culture is “the dominance and primacy of the theoretical” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1987: 87). By ignoring or forgetting the richness of our “primordial” being-in-the-world, we thereby fail to appreciate a fundamental truth about our existential situation, about the unique sorts of creatures we are. Such concerns are, again, expressed in different ways by different existential humanists, as in Husserl’s warning that falling victim to a dualistic picture of “nature … alien to spirit” destroys our sense of intimacy with the world, replacing it with a sense of estrangement, one so radical it can precipitate a slide into cultural “barbarism” (Husserl Reference Husserl1970: 390, 121ff.). Our dualistic and disenchanted existence, for these critics, encourages a calculating, exploitative stance on the world and feeds painful feelings of alienation, hence Heidegger’s characterization of the contemporary human condition being one of “distress.”

A second aspect of the existential critique of science concerns the tendencies of these scientistic attitudes to gradually occlude other ways of experiencing and making sense of the world. The world, recall, is a rich theater of possibilities lit up by virtue of the myriad practices and projects of human life – the pursuit of religious conviction, say, or appreciation of beauty. When scientific ways of thinking prevail, warn existential humanists, this experiential richness gets dimmed down and treated as superficial, “primitive,” or “confused” (Cooper Reference Cooper2002: 337–345). As the later Heidegger famously put it, “ways of revealing” the world central to scientific enquiry start to “drive out” other ways, even to the point that the fact that it is a way of revealing a particular stance – one among others, suited only for certain purposes – gets forgotten, hence its “monstrous” character (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1987: 26ff.). Nature, for instance, gets narrowly “revealed” in relation to human concerns: “the earth … reveals itself as a coal-mining district,” the Rhine as “water-power supplier” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 14ff.). The possibility of alternative ways of experiencing places, creatures, and things is therefore gradually driven out, dimmed down, until one sees cattle as meat-on-legs, chickens as “egg units,” and human beings are talked about and treated as “human resources” (cf. Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman1990). Crucially, this expresses a corrupted variety of humanism which “explains … whatever is, in its entirety … in relation to man” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 133). In Paul Feyerabend’s evocative term, it is a “conquest of abundance,” a process of experiential impoverishment made possible by the entrenchment of inflated conceptions of the nature and significance of science (Feyerabend Reference Feyerabend and Terpstra1999).

I hope that even this sketch confirms that existential humanism is a complex doctrine with distinctive conceptions of the epistemological, cultural, and existential status of science. It is also a genuine form of humanism: Our distinctiveness lies in our unique ways of being-in-the-world as existentially concerned creatures, “condemned to meaning,” who experience the world as a theater of possibilities. In most of its forms, there is no theological dimension, even though some responses to its intrinsic sense of epistemic and existential frailty are expressed in religious terms. The French Catholic and existentialist Gabriel Marcel, for one, urges us to cultivate an “ontological humility” (Marcel Reference Marcel1949: 132).

Whatever one makes of existential humanism, we must recognize it as a contemporary variety of philosophical humanism which offers distinctive critical accounts of science. Indeed, it is one of the latest in an ongoing history of diverse forms of humanism, which offer different ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. Ironically, what we find in the history of philosophical humanisms is what we ought to expect of creative, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.

On one side, humanism opposes religion, or, more specifically, the idea that religion is the ultimate and universal source of cognitive and practical significance. This opposition to religion makes an alliance between humanism and science quite natural.Footnote ¹ So does the use of a suite of tools, concepts, and ideals in science that are very much congenial for the humanist: observation, reason, evidence, argument, experimentation, progress, objectivity, universality. Indeed, this convergence between humanistic values and science might encourage not only their alliance but even an identification of sorts, at least for cognitive significance: Science is the ultimate source of cognitive significance, or as I term it later, objective thinking. Call this view of the role of science, scientism, and the interpretation of humanism, humanism as scientism.

On the other side, though, humanism is concerned with the subjects (and outlook) of the humanities: with language, and languages; literature, poetry, theater, music, dance, and art; ideas, ideologies, history, and society. And these subjects, taken at face value, are very much unlike those of science. The suite of tools, concepts, and ideals at use in the humanities are diverse and varied, including different forms of analysis and critique, creativity and new forms of expression, the articulation of new frameworks for thinking and acting, and much more. But at least one thick strand in the methods of the humanities has the humanities focused on interpretation and criticism – of words and texts, of ideas, practices and movements, of societies and their history.

This tension in humanism is the background to this chapter, the topic of which is a critique of scientism. One result of my critique is that the idea of humanism as scientism is a bad one. A more positive result is to make room for an understanding of humanism as fundamentally involving interpretation and criticism, while at the same time locating this dimension of humanism in science itself.Footnote ²

* * * * *

Scientism is philosophically interesting not only because it is an “ism,”Footnote ³ and so purporting to be a general framework for thinking in some domain, but also because of the particular domain for which it purports to be a general framework, namely for the domain of objective thinking itself. On this view, science determines the limits of objective thinking by constituting what it is to think objectively at all. Thinking is validated as objective by the fact, if it is one, that the thinking is scientific. Otherwise, the thinking is invalidated, at least with respect to its status as objective.Footnote ⁴ In a slogan, objective thinking starts and ends, constitutively, with scientific thinking.

“Objectivity” is understood in many ways. My own use emphasizes connections to impartiality, rationality, universality, and knowledge, to draw from Janack’s (2002) analysis. I say more about objective thinking later but, roughly, objective thinking is thinking that uses concepts and methods appropriate for acquiring knowledge. This understanding of objective thinking is not meant to rule out, for example, knowledge that there is beer in the fridge, on the grounds that such mundane thinking is not scientific thinking; nor, however, it is much concerned to vindicate such thinking. The interesting contrast is not between scientific and mundane thinking (see de Ridder Reference De Ridder, de Ridder, Peels and van Woudenberg2018 on “high-grade” and “low-grade” knowledge in connection with scientism), but rather, between the objective thinking and knowledge in science and the thinking that goes on in other areas of our intellectual lives: in thinking about how to live and live together in ethics and politics, about beauty and what is beautiful in aesthetics, about the ultimate nature of reality in metaphysics.

This chapter argues that although there is a connection between science and the limits of object thinking, the connection is not that science determines those limits. There are limits to objective thinking, but as I suggest near the close of this chapter, the account of these limits is considerably different from the kind of account scientism gives, according to which the limits of objective thinking are determined by conformity to some particular kind of thinking, namely, scientific thinking. I argue instead that the connection between science and the limits of objective thinking is that some scientific thinking makes use of thinking at the limits of objective thinking, and this makes it the case that science participates in thinking at the limits of objective thinking. But it does so without setting those limits. The key to my argument is to identify a mismatch between, on the one hand, the conception of science that underpins scientism and, on the other hand, a conception of science that is informed by an analysis of the full extent of thinking at work in scientific thinking.

Using Thomas Kuhn’s classic terminology, I argue that the conception of science that underpins scientism is a conception of science as normal science. Riffing on Kuhn (I discuss Kuhn in detail later), normal science is the kind of science we all know and love, with exemplary achievements and a community of practitioners employing widely accepted methods and engaged in mutually comprehensible practices resulting in a steady stream of results and progress. I argue that an analysis of the kind of thinking, both individually and collectively, that goes on in normal science shows normal science to be a plausible basis for putting forth science as an “ism” – scientism.Footnote ⁵ Roughly, we are impressed by science when it functions like this and tie progress in science to it possessing a distinctive claim on the truth (cf. Putnam Reference Putnam1975).

But science in times of crisis or revolution becomes extraordinary science. Extraordinary science is science interpreting and critically reflecting on its own methods and practices. In Kuhn’s presentation, this is typically in response to the accumulation of anomalous results, confusion about the ameliorative possibilities for dealing with these anomalous results in the existing disciplinary matrix or paradigm, and defection by practitioners to competing paradigms. I argue that an analysis of the kind of thinking, both individually and collectively, that goes on in extraordinary science shows extraordinary science not to be the plausible basis for a plausible “ism.”

Notably, though, crises abate and are sometimes overcome through conceptual and methodological innovations produced by the interpretative and critical reflective perspective extraordinary science takes on the disciplinary matrix or paradigm. The advances extraordinary science makes through its use of the interpretive and critical reflective perspective show that perspective to be of cognitive value. This means that any account of science that leaves out the kind of thinking that goes on in extraordinary science does so on pain of invalidating the intellectual achievements of extraordinary science.

So here is where we are: If science is the basis of an “ism,” then the thinking in extraordinary science is invalidated, and if the thinking in extraordinary science is validated, then science is not the basis of an “ism.” Since the thinking in extraordinary science is valid, any account of the limits of objective thinking should validate it, making it the case that science is not the basis of an “ism.” This is my main critical argument against scientism.

Extraordinary science does, though, I argue, participate in thinking at the limits of objective thinking. The thinking in extraordinary science encounters the limits of objective thinking. So what determines the limits of objective thinking? I close by explaining how the argument of the chapter can be generalized to show that limits of objective thinking cannot be determined by a requirement that a thinker accept or adhere to any positively specified methods. I outline briefly what another approach to the limits of objective thinking might look like.

What Is Scientism?

My understanding of scientism analyzes things in a different way from most current literature on scientism. My idea is that scientism is a view about the determination of the limits of objective thinking, with science and its concepts and methods constituting what it is to think objectively at all. My understanding of scientism has its ancestry in logical empiricism, which used empiricism as a critical tool to distinguish cognitive significance from different kinds of meaning or content, including practical and expressive significance (see later in the chapter).

My general idea about scientism comes apart from some recent ideas, but I believe in a way that increases its interest and plausibility. At the same time, though, I believe that my idea is roughly consonant with mainstream ideas already in the literature, even if it emphasizes different connections. De Ridder et al. (Reference De Ridder, de Ridder, Peels and van Woudenberg2018), for example, open their volume on scientism with the rough formulation of scientism as “the view that only science can provide us with knowledge or rational belief” and, after recounting some common conceptions of scientism, write that “[s]cientism can thus stand for a number of exclusivity claims about science.” My idea comports with their rough formulation, and falls under their general description about exclusivity, assigning science an exclusive claim to the domain of objective thinking.

My understanding of scientism derives from the role of science in discussions about the limits of cognitive significance and intelligibility in the first half of the twentieth century, in the philosophy of logical empiricism. Logical empiricism was elaborated in different ways by different practitioners; I follow a strand that is particularly influential, due to Rudolf Carnap. Logical empiricism was a critical philosophy, and it found much philosophy, notably ethics and metaphysics, to be outside the realm of cognitive intelligibility.Footnote ⁶ These domains were contrasted with science, but the contrast was not that science is empirical and the others not.

What distinguishes the cognitively significant discourse of science from ethics and metaphysics is not so much the use of an empirical method but the use of an intersubjectively authoritative method, whatever its character, whether a priori or empirical.Footnote ⁷ An intersubjectively authoritative method is a method that has widespread implicit and even explicit endorsement in that community, and which governs the cognitive use of language (for expressing knowledge). Methods of empirically testing and verifying hypotheses, for example using redshift and luminosity information about galaxies to determine their relative velocity and distance, are intersubjectively authoritative methods, but so are, for example, the numerical methods used to solve the Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible flows in fluid dynamics.

The existence of intersubjectively authoritative methods figure in the account of why the statements of science have an intersubjectively constant meaning (in terms of a “criterion of cognitive significance”) and of what those meanings are (“meaning is method of verification”).Footnote ⁸ Experience and empirical method play a role here, but experience and empirical method are secondary to the general idea of intersubjective authority, whether that authority concerns empirical or a priori methods. Intersubjectively authoritative methods can also explain the meaningfulness of statements of mathematics, since there are a priori methods that can be set out that explain the meanings of mathematical languages.Footnote ⁹ This is reflected in logical empiricism in the fact that the criterion of cognitive significance includes criteria for mathematical claims. It is true that on their view, the criteria are wholly analytic or definitional, making no tie between the cognitive use of language and experience and empirical methods; and it is also true that logical empiricists often accepted the pragmatic or conventional nature of the analytic.Footnote ¹⁰ But the latter idea is an additional, noncompulsory step to take in a view about the analytic; moreover, what matters here is not that these criteria are not empirical and instead analytic but that there are indeed such criteria, whether empirical or analytic, underpinning mathematical meaning and content. What matters is the presence of intersubjectively authoritative method.

The distinction between science, on one hand, and ethics and metaphysics, on the other, does not imply that the latter have no content; the conclusion rather is that they fail to have cognitive or, as I call it, objective content. Objective contents are adequate to be the contents of belief and knowledge, and appropriate for use in acquiring knowledge of the world. Sentences (or many sentences) using language such as “witches,” “curses,” “horoscopes,” and “phlogiston” are inappropriate for acquiring knowledge. The logical empiricist idea is that ethical (“One ought not to lie”) and metaphysical (“Ordinary objects are physical objects and not ideas”) sentences are also inappropriate for acquiring knowledge. In all such cases, no objective contents are expressed. These sentences may have a kind of content, but, the logical empiricists maintained, because these discourses lack any significant intersubjectively authoritative method, they cannot have the kind of content appropriate to inquiry, belief, and knowledge – they cannot have objective content.Footnote ¹¹

I hope I have said enough to indicate the intellectual background to the idea of scientism that I am working with. However, the conception of scientism according to which science constitutes and thereby sets the limits of objective thinking does conflict with some ideas in the recent literature. One conflict is with philosophers who take mathematics to be a problem for scientism. For example, Alex Rosenberg (2018: 84) writes: “Scientism as a philosophy faces two great challenges: First, how to accommodate mathematics. If numbers are abstract objects with which we can have no causal relations, it is difficult to see how we acquired any mathematical knowledge.”Footnote ¹² The view seems to put, what should be from scientism’s point of view, the metaphysical and epistemological cart (qualms about abstract objects, commitment to a causal theory of knowledge) before the methodological horse (in the form of the highly mathematized practice of science).Footnote ¹³ The conception of scientism that I have described which prioritizes intersubjectively authoritative method includes mathematics because, though not empirical, it is subject to intersubjectively authoritative method.

Other philosophers take an expansionist ambition to be central to scientism, according to which the concepts and methods of traditionally nonscientific areas of discourse or inquiry are replaced by scientific terms and apply scientific methods. Note, for example, the expansionism in Rik Peels’ definition of scientism (which itself aims to unify three other definitions from Peacocke Reference Peacocke1993, Radnitzky Reference Radnitzky1978/Churchland Reference Churchland2011, and Stenmark Reference Stenmark2001 – hence “Scientism₄”): “Scientism₄: The view that the boundaries of the natural sciences should be expanded to include academic disciplines or realms of life that are widely considered not to be the domain of science” (Peels Reference Peels, de Ridder, Peels and van Woudenberg2018: 47). The conception of scientism according to which science sets the limits of objective thinking is consistent with this idea, and even coheres with it in some sense, but it doesn’t entail it. It is consistent and coheres with the idea because we might think that the explanation for why expansionism is in order is that such expansionism will extend the domain of objective thinking and knowledge, and that this is a good thing. It doesn’t entail this kind of expansionism because certain domains of discourse may possess some other value for our lives different from cognitive value (e.g., for a van Fraassen-style [Reference Van Fraassen2002: 171] “spiritual journey of discovery”), and so may appropriately possess a different kind of content from objective content (e.g., Carnap’s expressive meaning).

Why Scientism?

Why might science be the basis of an “ism”? Why scientism?

First let’s say some things about “isms” and the way that scientism is an “ism.” As I am thinking about it here, “isms” are not propositions but instead constitute conceptual and methodological frameworks or stances for thinking about some domain (cf. Carnap Reference Carnap1950a; van Fraassen 2002). What is special about scientism is that it is an “ism” not for this or that area of thought but for the domain of objective thinking itself. This way of being special is not the same as being the most general kind of “ism,” governing everything, like materialism, idealism, and solipsism. However, if all of reality is thinkable, as an “ism” scientism may nevertheless, as it were, reach through to all of reality via the idea that objective thought represents reality. Scientism is more general than “isms” such as anarchism and capitalism, which govern approaches to particular domains (government and economic organization), and is at the same level of generality with an “ism” such as skepticism in concerning the qualities and quality of representation and cognition.

So, scientism understands science as the framework for objective thinking and this connection itself is explained through an account of objective content that ties objective content to intersubjectively authoritative methods. Once we see this, we can trace at least in outline the attraction of scientism to the presence of intersubjectively authoritative methods in science. The general idea, which I elaborate later, is that science is the basis for an “ism” because the use of intersubjectively authoritative methods gives science desirable epistemological and sociological features. We are so impressed with science that we think that its status should not be that of just another discipline but that of a framework, and not just any framework but for objective thinking itself.

I try to get a handle on just what the intersubjectively authoritative methods in science consist of epistemologically, and how they contribute to an attractive sociology, by critically reviewing Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of normal science, as well as the distinction between it and revolutionary or extraordinary science, in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Before beginning, though, I would like to say a little bit about my use of Kuhn. It is a surprising feature of recent work on scientism that it contains almost no discussion of Kuhn.Footnote ¹⁴ This is a surprising hole in the literature given Kuhn’s influence on the philosophy of science, but also because one might think that scientism should welcome a broadly scientific – the biological, psychological, sociological, historic, and economic factors that influence the institution of science and as a result condition scientific practice – view of science itself. I review Kuhn rather extensively. The argument of this chapter in effect charges scientism, despite being post-Kuhnian, with being, philosophically, pre-Kuhnian. The hole in the literature is filled with a spade with a critical edge.

At the same time, the main argument of the chapter, though colorfully filled out by Kuhn, relies only on some basic Kuhnian ideas about different phases of scientific practice and an idea about the kinds of thinking they involve. Kuhn, at least initially, connects these with phases of normal and extraordinary science. Philosophers have argued that the structure of science may not conform exactly to Kuhn’s structure for scientific revolutions, and that normal science makes its own form of revolutionary advance (see Toulmin Reference Toulmin, Lakatos and Musgrave1970). Kuhn later acknowledges this, emphasizing that the key to his view “is a certain sort of reconstruction of group commitments,” and not necessarily revolution (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2012: §1). This is consistent with the argument of this chapter, and its key idea that there is a substantial distinction between working within a set of basic commitments and working in a way that evaluates and challenges those basic commitments, and that these differences make a sociological difference, even if that difference is not to start a revolution.

Again, many philosophers reject Kuhn’s ideas about “incommensurability” and the attending specter of relativism, but one does not need to accept those ideas to accept the idea that comes into play later, namely that communication becomes more difficult in periods of transition, and that this makes it appropriate to think that different languages are in play. However, these languages may permit intertranslation, albeit with difficulty, pace incommensurability. In any event, a commitment to incommensurability or relativism plays no role in my argument (and indeed is antithetical to my use of Kuhn).

With those initial clarifications and disclaimers in mind, let’s return to Kuhn. Following Kuhn, I highlight two epistemological elements of intersubjectively authoritative method. The first is the presence and role of exemplars of scientific achievement. The second, which for Kuhn is epistemologically posterior to exemplars but crucial for understanding their significance, is a commitment to systems of rules – at conceptual, theoretical, experimental, and instrumentational levels – for conducting exemplar-grounded scientific inquiry.

The attractive sociological elements include a conception of science involving a community of inquirers, whose members are capable of mutual understanding, and further, consensus and agreement, and whose work cumulatively builds and progresses. These ideas about the sociology of science are commonplace in everyday parlance – “the scientific community,” “scientists have discovered,” “according to scientists.”

I now work out these epistemological and sociological ideas in more detail, with explicit reference to Kuhn’s discussion.

“Normal science,” Kuhn writes, “means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (II: “The Route to Normal Science”).Footnote ¹⁵ The past scientific achievements, or some distinguished subset of them, constitute the exemplars for the scientific community – “a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational, and instrumental applications” (II: “The Route to Normal Science”). Exemplars are the gateway to new scientific forms of life with novel, unanticipated results pregnant with new problems to solve. Kuhn gives the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and the transition from classical to relativistic and quantum physics (see also Kuhn Reference Kuhn1978) as exemplar-driven transitions to new disciplinary matrices (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2012) or paradigms for the practice of science.

Exemplar achievements “are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity,” but also “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve” (II: “The Route to Normal Science”). Here we see epistemological and sociological elements of exemplars and exemplar-driven science.

Epistemologically, the role of exemplars is to generate scientific problems as puzzles. According to Kuhn, science as normal science should be construed as a kind of “puzzle-solving.” Puzzles are “that special category of problems that can serve to test ingenuity or skill in solution” (IV: “Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving”). Although arriving at a solution may require skill and ingenuity, less up for grabs is whether there are solutions. Kuhn argues that “one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions” (IV: “Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving”). Puzzles are thus distinguished from some other problems in promising well-defined solutions.

Further, “to classify as a puzzle, a problem must be characterized by more than an assured solution. There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained” (IV, “Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving”). According to Kuhn, rules are “abstracted” (V: “The Priority of Paradigms”) from the exemplars.Footnote ¹⁶ Achievement for the scientific community is modeled on the exemplars and involves following conceptual, theoretical, experimental, and instrumentational rules implicit in those exemplars. These rules, together with the exemplars, constitute the new forms of scientific life – the disciplinary matrix (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2012) or paradigm. For a current example, in research in artificial intelligence, deep learning, large language models, and big data constitute primary elements of the disciplinary matrix, building on exemplar results about restricted Boltzmann machines, backpropagation, and deep belief networks (Hinton, Osindero, and Teh Reference Hinton, Osindero and Teh2006).

The net result is that normal science is an exemplar-driven activity in which problems that are relatively assured of solutions are chosen for investigations that require high levels of skill and ingenuity while at the same time using shared rules that are implicit in the exemplars of the normal science. The exemplars and shared rules set up a disciplinary matrix within which the activity of normal science proceeds.Footnote ¹⁷ This summarizes Kuhn’s influential account of what intersubjectively authoritative method in science looks like in at least some detail.

I want now to indicate how these epistemological features of normal science intertwine with an attractive sociology.

Sociologically, disciplinary matrices or paradigms are instantiated materially in textbooks and lab and instrumentational manuals that recount exemplars and contain courses of study, problems, and instructions that form the basis for inculcation into the scientific community. As Kuhn puts it, “by studying [the exemplars] and by practicing with them, the members of the corresponding community learn their trade” (“Introduction”), and later, “[t]he study of [exemplars] … is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community with which he will later practice” (II: “The Route to Normal Science”).

Exemplars and their role in gaining membership into the scientific community also help explain the mutual understanding and, further, the high levels of agreement and consensus in science. As Kuhn puts it, scientists “who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models … seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals … [and] are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice” (II: “The Route to Normal Science”). Mutual understanding, in the form of agreement over fundamentals, as well as a more general agreement and consensus, are the result of the exemplar-based inculcation into the community and propel the research tradition forward.

Finally, commitment to the exemplars and rules that make up the disciplinary matrices or paradigms of normal science explain the progress that is seen in normal science. Kuhn suggests that it is almost definitional of normal science that it progresses – “we tend to see as science any field in which progress is marked.” Why though? Why should the properties of normal science give rise to progress? The answer, Kuhn tells us, “depend[s] in part upon an inversion … Does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?” (XIII: “Progress through Revolutions”). The inversion is that scientific activity, including progress in science, is a result of the kind of community that forms around exemplars in normal science, and the role of those exemplars in providing a model for future achievement and success according to rules shared by the community. The community sets itself up for success not in the abstract, by having the correct methodology for success, but concretely, by having exemplars that it can follow to solve problems that the disciplinary matrix or paradigm has licensed as problems to solve, in part by limiting the problems to solve to those that can be solved by the rules implicit in paradigms. The epistemology and sociology of normal science underwrite this progress.Footnote ¹⁸

We have been considering the prospects for scientism understood as a framework or stance for objective thinking itself. We took the inspiration for this idea to come from logical empiricism, which tied objective content (or cognitive significance or meaning) to the presence of intersubjectively authoritative method. The idea was that science is the appropriate basis for an “ism” because the use of intersubjectively authoritative method possesses attractive epistemological and sociological features. We then used Kuhn’s conception of normal science to understand what intersubjectively authoritative method in science consists in, and then, again following Kuhn, made explicit the intertwined sociology. The discussion of Kuhn confirmed the idea that normal science has attractive epistemological and sociological features in so far as concretely specified exemplars, rule-based inquiry, mutual understanding, agreement, community, and progress are epistemologically and sociologically attractive. The net result is that if the science in scientism is normal science, it is understandable why science is thought to be the basis of an “ism.”

Why not Scientism?

However, Kuhn did not think that normal science exhausts science. Kuhn thought that scientific activity also includes what he called extraordinary science. I discuss extraordinary science in more detail in this section, but for orientation, it is useful to note that Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and extraordinary science is the fulcrum around which the argument of this chapter turns. I make this explicit in the next section.

Let us consider Kuhn’s account of extraordinary science in relation to the epistemological and sociological features of normal science.

Extraordinary science happens

On Kuhn’s picture, as normal science proceeds, anomalies accrue and the inability of the disciplinary matrix or paradigm to explain or otherwise accommodate them becomes manifest. This “blurring of the paradigm” precipitates a crisis, from which the new paradigm emerges as a “reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes … many of its paradigm methods and applications” (VIII, “The Response to Crisis”). The epistemology of extraordinary science does not include acceptance of and adherence to paradigms and their methods with an eye to trace out their applications, but instead reconstruction of fields from new paradigms with new methods and applications.

This difference in epistemology is one aspect of a more general difference between normal science and extraordinary science, namely a difference in the kind of thinking that goes on in each. Normal science of course includes proposing hypotheses gathering of evidence, performing experiments, etc., but will also include forms of reflective and metarepresentational thinking in the honing and revising of hypotheses and theories that is ubiquitous in the course of everyday scientific work. But in normal science, this is done against the background of a disciplinary matrix or paradigm. Extraordinary science, by contrast, involves significant reordering and reprioritization of commitments, opacity instead of transparency about proper methods, an absence of substantial common ground in disagreement over paradigms, and factionalizing instead of the fostering of scientific community. Choosing between paradigms is not “determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science,” since “these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue” (IX, “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions”). It is these kinds of more foundational and controversial but also more nebulous concerns that are addressed with interpretation and critical reflection in extraordinary science.

Further, Kuhn thinks that the thinking directed at evaluating the paradigms themselves approximates much more the kind of thinking that goes on in philosophy than the kind of thinking that goes on in normal science. In the transition to extraordinary science, “scientists [turn] to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field” and make “recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” (VIII, “The Response to Crisis”). Extraordinary science employs a form of thinking appropriate for when foundations are shifting and thinking must make progress without solid ground under its feet. It is thinking that does not proceed from first principles but examines first principles themselves.Footnote ¹⁹

With extraordinary science comes a deterioration of intersubjective understanding and communication breakdown. In the transition to extraordinary science, scientists “whose discourse had previously proceeded with apparently full understanding may suddenly find themselves responding to the same stimulus with incompatible descriptions and generalizations.” These differences in response lead to problems that are “first … evident in communication” but which are “not merely linguistic, and [which] cannot be resolved simply by stipulating the definitions of troublesome terms” (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2012: Postscript, 5, “Exemplars, Incommensurability, and Revolutions”). This kind of phenomenon can be seen in common examples, for example concerning the question of the connection between the availability of guns and crime, on which American conservative and liberal paradigms not only disagree (see Pew Research Center 2021) but, more deeply, on which those adopting them encounter significant problems of intersubjective comprehension.

However, when extraordinary science tries to move past the barriers to intersubjective comprehension, extraordinary science looks very different from normal science. Again, what is called for is something more like philosophy, in its interpretive, analytic, critically reflective, and even dialectical aspects. Kuhn tell us that members of different disciplinary matrices “recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators.” Though translation will be difficult, Kuhn does not close off the possibility, and allows that translation “is a potent tool both for persuasion and for conversion” (2012: Postscript, 5, “Exemplars, Incommensurability, and Revolutions”).

Unsurprisingly, the epistemology of extraordinary science is intertwined with its distinctive sociology, one conditioned by the loss of mutual understanding. The breakdown of a paradigm is accompanied by significant attention to and disagreement about foundational issues and replaces community not only with a “proliferation of competing articulations” and “different language communities” (VIII: The Response to Crisis) but with a loss of identity and alienation. Kuhn recounts Wolfgang Pauli’s words of resignation in the face of the difficulties of accounting for atomic spectra that led to the development of Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics: “At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics” (quoted by Kuhn, VIII: “The Response to Crisis”).

So, the erosion of a paradigm and rules implicit in it occasions a crisis that includes the splintering of the scientific community into different schools, among which communication is difficult enough to suspect that different languages and systems of meanings are at play, and this in turn has the potential to produce a kind of existential crisis and a loss of a sense of identity among scientists.

Making It Explicit

So: exemplars, disciplinary matrices or paradigms, and the rules they implicitly contain are not only the basis for programs of research but also of mutual understanding, significant agreement, and the progress of science. Extraordinary science, because it interprets and critically evaluates, rather than takes for granted, the paradigms and the rules themselves, foregoes these features of normal science. If Kuhn is right about this, extraordinary science lacks the epistemologically and sociologically attractive features of normal science. But possessing these features is what made it plausible that normal science is the basis for an “ism.” So, if Kuhn is right, there is no reason to think that extraordinary science is the basis of an “ism,” and no reason to think that science conceived in total, as including both normal and extraordinary phases, is the basis of an “ism.”

We can write this up as an explicit argument for which the main lines of support for the premises can be indicated. After that, I outline some larger lessons for the limits of objectivity and how, should they exist, they can and, especially, cannot be determined. I conclude by discussing the significance for humanism.

Here is the argument.

P1 sets up the argument, which takes the form of a dilemma for scientism, one that resolves in a way that undermines scientism. The dilemma turns on the question of how to interpret the science in scientism and, in particular, on how to interpret the distinction between normal and extraordinary science. The distinction is justified by Kuhn’s analysis of science. As I’ve indicated, my overall argument does not require that Kuhn’s analysis of science is correct in all its details. But it does require a distinction about different phases in scientific practice, and that these phases highlight the use of different kinds of thinking in science.

P2 recognizes that there is something attractive about normal science, and it is justified by the argument, based in Kuhn’s account of normal science, that normal science possesses attractive epistemological (exemplar-driven, rule-following) and sociological (community, mutual understanding, agreement, progress) features. But this comes at a cost. As a reminder, to say that some form of thinking is invalid is to say that it fails to trade in objective contents, the kinds of contents appropriate for belief and knowledge. According to scientism, whether a kind of thinking counts as objective thinking is determined by whether the relevant thinking is scientific. Further, we are supposing that the science in scientism is normal science, and the thinking that goes on in normal science is fundamentally different in kind from the thinking that goes on in extraordinary science, which is more like philosophical thinking in involving interpretive, analytical, and dialectical aspects. P2 records the consequence of this understanding of a scientism that is based exclusively on normal science for the status any kind of thinking that does not conform to the kind of thinking that goes on in normal science.

P3 recognizes that what is attractive about normal science, and what made plausible the idea that normal science could be the basis of an “ism,” is missing in extraordinary science. This was justified by the argument, based in Kuhn’s description of extraordinary science, that extraordinary science lacks the attractive epistemological and sociological features of normal science: It is not paradigm-driven and rule-following but challenges paradigms and rules, and involves the fragmentation of scientific communities, significant disagreement, the breakdown of communication, stalled progress, and even loss of identity and alienation.

C1 makes the dilemma for scientism explicit. To put the dilemma in different terms from those in C1, science can either be an “ism” but exclude a part, maybe the intellectually most profound part, of science itself, or science can include all of science, but then not be the basis of an “ism.”

A dilemma is an exhaustive disjunction (throughout I have assumed that science should not be identified with extraordinary science alone for purposes of scientism) with unattractive disjuncts. Spelling out the disjunction a little, it says that either science is the basis of an “ism” and extraordinary science is invalid or extraordinary science is valid and science is not the basis of an “ism.” For all that has been said so far it is open to the proponent of scientism to accept the first disjunct. But the next premise closes that option off.

P4 needs more discussion. I briefly discuss two considerations here. My point is not to provide a comprehensive defense of P4 but to make it plausible and to indicate the costs of rejecting it.

The first is that unless extraordinary science were valid, the current practice of science would seem to have a significant objectivity deficit, since the current practice of science is the result of extraordinary science replacing former paradigms and rules by new (the current) ones: If extraordinary science is not valid, this acceptance of new paradigms and rules is based on invalid thinking (again, thinking that does not trade in objective contents and that is not appropriate for belief and knowledge of how things are). The idea that the thinking that led to a new paradigm is invalid, but the paradigm and its rules are nonetheless valid, seems difficult to accept.

Second, though extraordinary science is not the basis for an “ism,” extraordinary science is, for Kuhn, cognitively valuable.Footnote ²⁰ So Kuhn is on board with the idea expressed in the previous paragraph. However, the kind of thinking that extraordinary science involves is not proprietary to science. As Kuhn put it, in times of crisis and revolution, scientists “turn to philosophical analysis” and make “recourse to philosophy.”

More specifically, we can say that the kind of thinking that occurs during periods of crisis involves a significant dose of a kind of topic-neutral, completely general, reflection of thought on itself, where thought takes its commitments, normative standards, and standing as subject. What this amounts to in science is reflection on accepted paradigms and rules that form the foundation for the practice of normal science. But, again, this is not a kind of thinking or cognition that is special to science. It is instead a kind of thinking or cognition that evaluates the commitments, standards, and standing of thought in any domain. We can summarize this by saying that extraordinary science makes use of the resources of interpretation and critical reflection as it transitions from the paradigms and rules of one tradition of normal science to another. This identification, or partial identification, of the thinking in extraordinary science with interpretation and critical reflection suggests that unless there is reason to think that interpretation and critical reflection are in general without cognitive value,Footnote ²¹ or that they are widely applicable but just not in science, the kind of thinking in extraordinary science should be validated.

Finally:

From these premises, our conclusion about the prospects for scientism follows.

Science and the Limits of Objectivity

On the view according to which science is the basis of an “ism,” there is a tight connection between science and the limits of objectivity according to which science, by constituting what it is to think objectively, sets or determines the limits of objectivity. But if science is not the basis of an “ism” and so does not set the limits of objectivity, is there any connection at all between science and those limits? And if science does not set or determine the limits of objectivity, what does so instead?

At this point we can make the following conditional claim: If interpretation and critical reflection have some substantial connection to the limits of objectivity, then science will have such a connection to the limits of objectivity. This is because science includes extraordinary science, and extraordinary science makes uses of interpretation and critical reflection. However, this connection will be looser than that envisioned by scientism. The connection would not be that science sets or determines the limits of objectivity, but that science, through extraordinary science and its use of interpretation and critical reflection, sometimes operates at and thereby participates in and encounters those limits.Footnote ²² To repeat, though, this depends on the idea that interpretation and critical reflection themselves have a tight connection to the limits of objectivity. Do they?

There is an objection to the view that critical reflection has or could have the kind of tight connection to the limits of objectivity that we have argued science lacks. The objection is that the argument against scientism arguably generalizes and licenses the conclusion that the limits of objectivity are not set or determined by any positively specified methodology. The reason is that whatever positively specified methodology one may accept or adhere to in hopes of setting or determining the limits of objectivity (the way that adherence to scientific methodology is supposed to set or determine the limits of objectivity), it will always be possible to take that positively specified methodology as itself an object of evaluation and critically reason about it.Footnote ²³ When we are in engaged in interpretation and critical reflection, our thinking takes positively specified methodology as a subject of critical evaluation. This means, though, that the positive methodology in question does not occur in thinking in a mode of full acceptance (because it is under critical evaluation), and so by the lights of the “ism” for objective thinking that the positively specified methodology ostensibly defines, interpretation and critical reflection about it are invalidated. So, again, if interpretation and critical reflection are valid and possible for any positively specified methodology, then no positively specified methodology can be the basis of an “ism.”

This might be thought to be an objection to discerning some limit to objective thinking in interpretation and critical reflection, but really there is no objection. The way that the limits of objective thinking come up in interpretation and critical reflection is not by interpretation and critical reflection serving, with some positively specified methodology, to police the limits of objectivity. Another general conclusion of the chapter is that the limits of objectivity are not what they are because of any kind of methodological policing presence ruling this kind of thinking in and that kind out. Scientism falls really to this more general idea.

I want to suggest though, in closing, that when it comes to interpretation and critical reflection, there is reason to think that they could bear a tight connection to the limits of objectivity without some positively specified methodology for interpretation and critical reflection playing some kind of policing role. Instead, the tight connection to the limits of objectivity comes from the epistemology of interpretation and critical reflection itself. The epistemology of interpretation and critical reflection is a topic for another time, but for now we can briefly think of that structure as having a subjective aspect according to which the subject critically reasons about her own beliefs for the purpose of achieving comprehension and reflective justification for them; an intersubjective aspect according to which a subject critically reasons about another’s beliefs for the purpose of being able to understand and learn from or instruct another, even under conditions of disagreement about paradigms; and an objective aspect according to which evaluation of a disagreement with another does not build in preference for one’s own belief (or paradigm) merely because it is one’s own. And now we might imagine that the limits of objectivity arise not from any methodological policing but are instead based on principled difficulties in reconciling the subjective, intersubjective, and objective aspects of interpretation and critical reflection. Again, science will participate in such limits, but it does not set or determine those limits, which are, to repeat, set or determined by principled difficulties in reconciling the subjective, intersubjective, and objective aspects of interpretation and critical reflection. This is an approach to the limits of objectivity that does not arise through methodological policing, and so is consistent with the considerations adduced here against scientism.

* * * * *

Let me conclude by returning to the issue of humanism. I said that a direct consequence of my argument is that the view of humanism as scientism is a bad idea. But what else? Does anything else follow for humanism? Well, one thing is that if science does not constitute the limits of objective thinking, then there is room to think that the humanities, too, can participate in objective thinking. Against logical empiricism, the possibility is now open for ethics and metaphysics, too, to participate in objective thinking, even though their methods are not those of science. And against scientism, no discipline in general need follow science in its proprietary methods to count as being engaged in objective thinking. We might insist that a necessary condition for engaging in objective thinking is to engage in interpretation and critical reflection, but interpretation and critical reflection do not provide any specific positive methodology conformity to which sets the limits of objectivity. Disciplines that do engage in interpretation and critical reflection about their most basic commitments will still encounter the limits of objectivity as a result of trying simultaneously to meet subjective, intersubjective, and objective norms in interpretation and critical reflection.

This, I think, is a cheerful conclusion for any humanism that wants to recognize the validity of the humanities and their methods, since it emphasizes the role of interpretation and critical reflection in understanding what it is to think objectively and what the limits are that objective thinking can expect to encounter. Since science too makes use of the resources of interpretation and critical reflection, the result does not reflect negatively on the status of science with respect to objective thinking. Science is thus included within humanism without, as scientism would have it, science setting the limits of objective thinking.

I

That there is a distinction we make between “scientific” and “scientistic” is reflected in the fact that many who have no phobia of science, indeed admire it greatly, have declared that they find scientism distasteful. Since a chapter, even a book, gives one insufficient space to say what “science” is, let me take for granted that we have some instinctive grasp of what we intend by that term, and ask: What is “scientism”? Even a glance at the writings that recoil from scientism would suggest that it is perceived to be a kind of overreach in the name of science, taking it to a place beyond its proper dominion.

One form of overreaching has tended to take the form of making large claims on science’s behalf, claims that are philosophical rather than scientific, yet, in doing so, relying – by a sleight of hand, a fallacious conflation – on the authority of science. In this chapter, I explore one such claim, the claim that there is nothing (no property of or in nature, no fact of or in nature) that cannot be brought under the purview of natural science’s inquiries. Such a full coverage of nature on science’s behalf is a claim that is philosophical, not scientific, since no science contains that claim. Yet many consider the assertion that nature contains properties that natural science does not countenance to be unscientific. That is the just the sort of sleight of hand that is said to be typical of scientism. But even suppose that no one declares it to be unscientific. The question I explore in this chapter is whether it is overzealous on behalf of science – in the way that scientism is – to say that any denial of the claim which I have italicized above is bad philosophy.

It is worth noting (one would not understand the real nature of the claim if one did not) that this claim, despite the sort of overreach I’ve just mentioned, is often accompanied by quite genuine expressions of humility which admit to having brought very little of what is in nature effectively within the purview of natural science’s explanatory scope. The point of the claim is not to say that what can be done has been done. The point of the claim is not even perhaps best presented by saying that it can be done. Rather it is to say that it is the business of natural science to cover in its inquiry all that is there in nature. It is this last point that the opponents of scientism are resisting.

I want to explore a familiar (and contentious) ground of such a resistance, which repudiates scientism by asserting that nature (and the world we inhabit, more generally) contains value properties and facts, for instance moral facts, and these are not the proper subject of science.

What are these facts and properties? This very question should perhaps be seen as expressing a prejudice. For now, let us just say in response that such facts are what are specified by sentences such as, “The Malabar forest is valuable,” “Gandhi’s civil disobedience was courageous,” “The genocide of Jews was cruel,” “The treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government is inhuman,” when these sentences are true; and when they are true, the predicates “is valuable,” “is courageous,” “is cruel,” “is inhuman” are satisfied by the relevant value properties. I have said “for now” let us characterize these value properties in this relatively uninformative sense because, as the chapter unfolds, more substantive characterizations will emerge that elaborate the nature of values by linking them intrinsically to practical agency. The more tentative and uninformative characterization just given is intended merely to show that there is no reason to think (that it would, in fact, be a prejudice to think) that there is anything more mysterious about value properties than there is about any other properties which we unselfconsciously speak of in the sentences we utter, and so there is no particular need to withhold notions of fact and of truth, when speaking of values in sentences that deploy the vocabulary of value than there is in speaking of anything else in any other vocabulary we unselfconsciously deploy.

Of course, none of this will satisfy those (many) who simply deny that the notion of truth (and the objectivity it is supposed to reflect) so much as applies to sentences or propositions that contain an (irreducible) vocabulary of value. What I aim to provide in this chapter are grounds for withdrawing this denial. But before I proceed to do that, I should expend a few words to register skepticism about a widely held view that only certain considerations (not present in the grounds I aim to provide) can ground the proper applicability of the notion of truth. Thus Bernard Williams, echoing many others,Footnote ¹ has proposed that only the natural sciences are characterized by a certain accumulation and convergence in judgment that is necessary to ground a proper application of notions of truth, objectivity, and realism to their propositions and the objects and properties and facts they posit and describe. The argument goes roughly as follows. Science is the only cognitive enterprise in which the results of inquiry have built upon each other over the centuries and cumulatively arrived upon a convergence. And there can be no other explanation of this convergence but to say that the judgments of science are tracking the truth and that their theoretical posits are real objects or properties in the world. Where there is no such convergence in judgment, we lack a proper ground for the attribution of objectivity and realism that is carried by the concept of truth.

Let me express my skepticism about this argument by asking: When did we start converging in this cumulative way upon the truth? Did we start doing so from the very beginnings of human thought? Surely not. For centuries there were all sorts of false starts and false leads that were abandoned. In fact, Williams himself is quite explicit that it is only sometime in the seventeenth century that we began upon such a convergence. Why is that? Because it is only with science in the modern period that we were set on the right path, says Williams, and, once on that path, the results of scientific inquiry began to accumulate, building upon each other, toward a convergence. So now, let us further ask: What makes this path that opened up sometime only in the seventeenth century the right path? What is that word “right” doing there? If we become clear about what makes that path the right path, we would have established the objectivity and realism that William hankers for in science, and we do not need the rest of the accumulation and convergence as an argument for scientific objectivity and truth. For Williams’ argument to be the argument it is, it must presuppose what he wants to argue for. He is presupposing truth in his assumption of a right path in the elaboration of the argument for truth via convergence. That notion of truth is not compulsorily tied to any considerations of convergence. Thus, the domain of value, even if it cannot be characterized by such a convergence, can nevertheless be host to the full prestige of truth.

Returning then to my anti-scientistic claim, which appeals to the presence of value properties, it is important for me to give a careful answer to the question why it is that value properties, if they exist in the world we inhabit, are not the proper subject of natural science. We can, of course, study values by methods of study that are disinterested and systematic in the way that science, at least when it is exemplary, aspires to be, but there is something fundamental about values that will necessarily be left out in such study. It is this fundamental fact about values that constitutes the real source of the resistance to scientism. Much of this chapter, therefore, seeks to elaborate this source of resistance more or less exactly in an argument.

The fundamental fact about value properties in the world (including nature) that makes the natural sciences beside the point is that when we perceive such properties in nature (in the world around us, generally), they prompt our practical agency, not our theoretical agency, not our agency that seeks to explain and predict in a detached and disengaged form of inquiry, but the agency that seeks to address the normative (in the sense of practical) demands those perceptible values make on us. Invoking Kant, we might say that value properties in nature and the perceptible world, generally, fall outside the scope of science because their scope really falls within practical reason or agency, the subject of Kant’s second “Critique,” quite outside the reach of physics and mathematics that are the explicit examples of the theoretical domain mentioned in the theme-setting “Preface” of his first “Critique.” Kant himself did not put things as I have (“value properties in nature and the perceptible world prompt our practical, not theoretical, reason”) because he thought nature and the properties of the perceptible world (what he called “phenomena”) were entirely the domain of theoretical reason and, in particular, Newtonian science. That is why practical reason was relegated by him to what he called “noumena,” for him a nonnatural realm. So, my appeal to Kant here is, in some strict sense, partial. But if we put aside the gratuitous metaphysics of the distinction between phenomena and noumena (a distinction forced on him only because of the sheer artifice of his equation of “nature” or “phenomena” with “that which is exhaustively the domain of Newtonian science”), the insight that there is a disjointness between practical and theoretical agency (needing two quite different critical philosophical inquiries or “critiques”) is a natural starting point to explore the real source of the resistance to scientism.

Now, these considerations of agency that I am bringing to center stage may, with some right, be thought to offer a more radical and perhaps deeper path of resistance to scientism than I pursue in this chapter. As I said, what I am pursuing is a resistance to the scientistic claim that nature contains only what the natural sciences countenance by providing an argument for the counterclaim that nature contains value properties that natural sciences do not countenance, because unlike the properties that the natural sciences do permit they are intrinsically tied to our practical agency. The more radical path against scientism appeals to considerations of agency in a more pre-emptive manner than the resistance I pursue by denying the very articulability of the scientistic claim we are discussing. It might go like this.

Natural scientific explanation, its laws and predictions and the ontology of objects, properties, and facts that these laws and explanations deliver, are an outcome of theoretical agency. Once these deliverances of this sort of agency is in place, we have a metaphysical picture of what the world contains, and then scientism appeals to just this metaphysical picture to say: “We do not find values in that picture, nor can we fit values in that picture.” The radical path of resistance to such scientism says in response: You have things the wrong way round. You proceed as if the metaphysical picture is primary and comes fully formed, as if from nowhere. You, thus, present the ontology as what is given first, ignoring the fact that it is the deliverance of an exercise of (theoretical) agency. Science is first and foremost a practice. The practice, of course, has its outcome (it’s deliverances, as I put it), but philosophy must make the practice the primary focus, not the outcome, since it is the practice that makes possible the outcome. And if, for that reason, it is made primary, we will find that in the practice, the practitioners are constantly and ineliminably speaking of how evidence justifies certain hypotheses, to generate its laws and predictions. That talk of justification is normative talk; it speaks to values of rationality. So, it is neither here nor there that we cannot find a place for values in the metaphysical outcome of this practice. The values are present in the very thing that makes the outcome possible, the exercise of theoretical agency in the practice of science. Philosophy must not make the metaphysics primary. It is the agency and practice that is primary.Footnote ² If so, scientism cannot so much as get off the ground. I have considerable sympathy with this path of resistance to scientism because I have sympathy with its conception of philosophy, but since it will only carry conviction for those already possessed of such meta-philosophical commitments, I proceed more patiently without assuming those commitments at the outset.

Two more preliminaries – first an historically contextualizing point and then a ground-clearing one – before I lay out in detail the chapter’s argument for the anti-scientistic conclusion that the perceptible world, including nature, contains value properties.

John McDowell (1979) has, in recent years, attributed just such a conclusion to Aristotle.Footnote ³ But Aristotle is a very high philosophical location for it and high philosophy is only a narrow strand of intellectual history. It was a pervasive part of the worldview of a wide variety of folk and spiritual traditions (including popular Christianity) for centuries before and after Aristotle. These traditions, unlike Aristotle, mostly viewed the source of perceptible value properties in the world to be sacred and conceived nature as being shot through with value because it was shot through with the presence of the divine. It was only after the desacralization of nature in the modern period that such a view of nature began to be treated with a special hostility, not initially by those who proclaimed the “death of God” (that came somewhat later) but even before that by those who arranged for the “exile of God” (“Deus absconditus”) to a distant place outside the universe of matter and nature in a strictly “providential” role.

This was not a purely intellectual hostility.Footnote ⁴ It was often motivated by political and material considerations. Those who continued to see nature as sacralized by God’s presence were dismissed as “enthusiasts” both for seeking to make God democratically available to all who inhabited his earth rather than exclusively accessible only to the learned scriptural judgment of university-trained divines, as well as for placing metaphysical and theological obstacles in the way of prospects for taking from nature with impunity. I say “with impunity” for a reason. Human beings have, of course, been taking from nature ever since they came to inhabit it, but in every social world until this period, there were rituals enacted before and after cycles of planting (and even hunting) to show respect and reciprocation to nature for the gifts it presented. By contrast, with desacralization, taking “with impunity” seems a quite apt description of the human – at any rate, European – outlook on nature. It was such an ushering out of God to this remote station, external to nature and matter, that made possible the scientistic claim that nature contained no properties that natural science (then known as “natural philosophy”) did not study. It emerged in the seventeenth century, and grew into an entire outlook, a zeitgeist, as a result of worldly alliances formed first in England (spreading next to the Netherlands, and then to the rest of Europe) between the (high church) Anglican establishment, the institutions around science (such as the Royal Society founded in 1660 and somewhat later the Royal Institution), and commercial interests, determined to transform the very concept of nature into the concept of natural resources.Footnote ⁵

This deracination of God from nature resulted over time in an illicit extension of the notion of desacralization to the more general notion of “disenchantment.”Footnote ⁶ The exile of God, thus, led to evacuating nature of value properties as well, which was perhaps an unsurprising consequence in a time when values were pervasively assumed to have religious foundations. Thus, by the time of the eighteenth century, in high philosophy, Hume was presenting values as wholly derivable from our states of mind (our desires and moral sentiments, our capacities for sympathy, etc.), whereas the world we inhabit was a fully Newtonian world, bereft of all properties that fall outside the scope of explanation by Newton’s laws. For all the vehement disagreements on the nature of values that contemporary Humeans and Kantians have registered in recent years, Hume and Kant were one on this particular issue – their radically different ethical and meta-ethical views both ruled out the possibility of even a secular enchantment of nature, that is to say, a conception of nature that contained value properties without any sacred source underlying them.

The second and ground-clearing point is this. It may seem that such a resistance to this form of scientism by appeal to values is pushing at open doors. Isn’t the heyday of a no-holds-barred “naturalism,” in which natural science claims this kind of exhaustive coverage, a philosophical outlook that has now passed? Has there not been a frequent acknowledgment that human subjects, because of their unique possession of “reason,” language, self-consciousness, etc., are set apart in not being subsumable under the laws with which we aspire to explain the natural phenomena in the world they inhabit? This acknowledgment, which though it may have come late to philosophers in the English-speaking tradition (it was explicitly made much earlier in the “verstehen” and hermeneutical traditions in European philosophy), is now increasingly voiced by “analytic” philosophers.

But it is not these doors against which the anti-scientism in question is pushing. As I said, Kant’s very claim, in his second work of “critical” philosophy, to a pure practical reason that was radically disjoint from theoretical (what Kant sometimes called “speculative”) reason, the subject of his first such work, was already an acknowledgment of the limited coverage of Newtonian science. Rather, it is the very fact that Kant had to seek a distinct domain from the perceptible world of “phenomena” for practical reason that reflects the scientism being resisted. Hence, the acknowledgment by the hermeneutical tradition and more recently by analytic philosophers that human subjects are set apart from the rest of natural phenomena as objects of inquiry misses the point that what is being resisted is just the idea that values are a construction of human subjectivity, that is to say, of human states of mind (moral sentiments, to use the vocabulary of Hume and Adam Smith). The resistance is precisely claiming that human states of mind such as moral sentiments are themselves formed by the perception of values in the world, that is to say, the “phenomenal” and natural world that human subjects inhabit; in other words, it is claiming – to put it in Weberian terms – that it is shallow to think that it is merely we who are “enchanted” while we inhabit a world, including a natural habitat, that is disenchanted. So, the argument I try to lay out is for the conclusion that it is only because the world that human subjects inhabit is (to continue with this Weberian vocabulary) “enchanted” that human subjects are.

II

I have said that the fundamental path of resistance to scientism that I follow is the one that denies the claim that “there is nothing, no facts, no properties, in nature that fall outside the purview of the natural sciences” by asserting that nature (the perceptible world, generally) contains facts and properties described in irreducibly value terms, and these cannot be brought under the sort of detached inquiry that natural science undertakes in its explanations and predictions because our perception of value properties (or, more simply, values) in the world prompts our practical agency, not our disengaged and detached theoretical inquiry. So, it is really by exploiting the conceptual tie between values and (practical) agency that one takes this path of resistance.

One can first get a glimpse of the relevant considerations of agency if we consider an utterly familiar ambiguity we find in the following thought or proposition, which is so often on our minds and lips:

It could be interpreted in one of two ways:

1. (1) I intend that I will …

2. (2) I predict that I will …

These are radically different thoughts that can be expressed by the same words; different because (1) and (2) harbor entirely distinct points of view or perspectives on oneself. When one predicts that one will do something, one is taking a disengaged or detached point of view on oneself. One is viewing oneself to be an object rather than a subject. When one intends something, one has an engaged perspective on oneself, one takes oneself to be an agent. In (1), both occurrences of “I” are the I of agency. But in (2), only the first occurrence of “I” is the I of agency. In the second occurrence of “I” in (2), the personal pronoun denotes an object. This is because in (2) the subject in the first occurrence of “I,” speaking or thinking these words or this thought, views himself or herself in a purely disengaged and detached way.

One can have both these perspectives (engaged and detached) on oneself, but not at the same time. In other words, one cannot at the same time both intend and predict that one will do something. The one perspective necessarily displaces the other. Moreover, and more important for the purposes of this chapter’s argument, unless one had an engaged perspective on oneself, one would not be a practical agent. Or, to put it from the other side: (3) If one only had or if all one had was a detached or disengaged perspective on oneself (as exemplified in [2]), one would cease to be a practical agent. This is a point of real significance, which I exploit later.

Why do I use the term “practical” agent in making this significant point? Because, as I said, in (2) the first occurrence of “I” is the I of agency. But in (2) that agency is exercised in a purely theoretical way on oneself, explaining and predicting one’s behavior. Predicting and explaining are, of course, agentive acts, so there is no denying that one is an agent when one is viewing oneself with detachment and predicting what one will do. But one’s angle on oneself, being detached in this way, restricts one’s agency in (2) to theoretical agency. It is only when one’s angle on oneself is engaged, as in (1), that one is a practical agent. That is why, were we only to possess the perspective present in (2), we would not be practical agents, even if we were agents.

I have put this last qualification “even if we were agents” in this conditional and hesitant form because it is highly implausible that we could possess agency at all, agency of any kind, if we possessed no practical agency. The idea that we are agents who are only capable of detached observation and prediction and explanation but no practical agency whatever is, in the end, an incoherent idea, though I won’t argue for that here.Footnote ⁷ The point I keep in focus till a little later, however, is the italicized point (3) – that we cannot really be agents in the practical sense at all if we only have a detached perspective on ourselves as in (2). Point (3) is a conditional and I am pretending, for the sake of argument, that the antecedent in that conditional is coherent, just so as to set up the conditional for the later use I want to put it to.

Now, so far, I have said that an elementary ambiguity in a certain very common thought or expression hides a deep philosophical distinction between two perspectives each one of us can have on one’s self. But this perspectival distinction (detached and engaged) is a perfectly general one and need not be restricted to the idea of a perspective on oneself. Being general, it should extend and apply quite naturally to the perspective we have on the world. That is, we can have a detached perspective on the world or an engaged perspective on it.

In many of our ordinary observations we think of the world in a detached way quite informally (“There is a table in Akeel Bilgrami’s study”), but when we do natural science that detached perspective takes its most regimented form and we predict and explain the objects, properties, and events in the world, bringing them under laws and generalizations, moving to a different vocabulary (“molecules”).Footnote ⁸ This detached perspective, whether informal or systematic as in science, is simply an extension of (2) from a perspective on ourselves to a perspective on the world. We then have to ask, if that is what a detached perspective on the world is, what is it to have an engaged perspective on the world? Here one’s agency cannot be purely theoretical as it is when one is viewing the world in a detached way as containing elements to be predicted and explained by being brought under laws and generalizations. It would have to be practical agency. If so, two questions arise. What is practical agency and what would the world have to contain (over and above the properties that are explained by theoretical agency exercised in the detached perspective on it) if we are to have that form of engaged rather than detached perspective on it?

It is here that the link between (practical) agency and value comes to view. If we are to be agents, practically engaged with the world, the world must contain elements over and above the elements that natural science (with its detached perspective on the world) studies. It is those elements that we paradigmatically describe in the vocabulary of values (though see just a little later for what is – and what is not – the real significance underlying this). Examples can be multiplied. Someone living by the sea perceives a storm on the horizon. What he has perceived can be described in meteorological terms (condensation, H₂O, etc.), but it can also be described in value terms (as a threat, say). Or take an example from Gilbert Harman (1977: chapter 1). Someone is driving past an alley and sees some kids burning a cat. One can describe what she sees in detached terms (Felis catus, carnivorous mammal, combustion, etc.) or in value terms (as cruelty, say). Unless we see the world as described with value terms – that is, as containing such properties as threats and cruelty – we could not be engaged with it in the practical sense. Over and above the condensation (the approaching storm on the coastline) and the combustion (the burning cat) which are captured by the perspective in the extension of (2) onto the world, the world must contain value properties (perceptible threats and cruelties) to trigger the extension of the perspective of (1) onto the world. Thus, a fisherman who sees the horizon of the Bangladeshi coast in detached, meteorological terms will have only the extension of the perspective of (2) on the world, but if he sees it as a threat, he will have a quite different perspective on the world, an engaged or agentive one, perhaps prompting him to go to the local municipality to arrange for some form of protection. So also, someone may go to Calcutta and view another person’s condition in detached terms of average daily caloric counts, but then may also perceive that that person is malnourished, or as in need. When he perceives the world from a perspective that describes it in value terms of this latter sort, he will be prompted to practical agency – perhaps to give money to Oxfam, say.

These are mere examples of how we may take the same distinction as is found in (1) and (2) and extend it onto the world. And I have used the vocabulary of science (caloric counts, condensation, combustion, etc.) and evaluative vocabulary (needs, threats, cruelty, etc.) in formulating the examples to make it clear that the latter describes properties in the world that natural science does not study. I should, however, say by way of caution that, though I have used such a contrasting vocabulary to make the distinction vivid, the distinction between the two perspectives is not a linguistic one but a philosophical one. Someone who has thoroughly internalized the link between a certain scientific description of the world (some average caloric measure that is counted by public health officials as a nutritional minimum, say) and a person’s need, will, without any turn to the thought or vocabulary of needs in how he conceives the person’s condition, be prompted to practical agency. The point is not that one keeps changing one’s vocabulary or concepts as one moves from detachment to engagement or vice versa. The point is only that detachment and engagement are two distinct perspectives on the world (as well as on oneself) and the world must contain properties over and above what the natural sciences study in order for us to have the latter perspective on it. That we are paradigmatically using or thinking in the evaluative conceptual vocabulary when we perceive the value properties in the world is not what is essential. The distinction is not intended as a linguistic distinction but a philosophical one. Contrasting vocabularies are just an easy way to convey the philosophical distinction but should not be seen as essential to the distinction.

What this eventually points to is that the so-called fact–value distinction is really, at bottom, a distinction in perspectives: the detached and engaged perspectives. If values are properties in the world, the perception of those properties is an apprehension of facts. So, values are facts, and can’t, therefore, stand in a distinction with them. The distinction, therefore, can be reformulated as a distinction between what makes the kinds of facts that values are distinct from the kinds of facts that natural science studies. And it is in elaborating this latter distinction that we have been invoking the perspectival contrast between detachment and practical agency. The reformulation has radical consequences. It puts into doubt the very intelligibility of what philosophers claim is the “supervenience” of values on the facts that natural science studies, broadly speaking the claim that where there is no difference in the facts or properties that natural science studies, there cannot exist a difference of values or value properties. This claim posits a dependency relation of values on facts. But if values are facts or properties intrinsically tied to a perspective of practical engagement, precisely the perspective that is missing in the detachment of our angle on the facts that natural science studies, the very idea of such dependency becomes incoherent. I say “incoherent” and mean it. The point about a perspectival disjointness is not to deny supervenience; it is rather to say that supervenience cannot be asserted or denied, no more than it can be coherently asserted or denied that duck facts are supervenient on rabbit facts. In fact, I would be inclined to say that if supervenience of this kind were a coherent notion, it would indeed be foolish and implausible to deny it. So, it is of real importance to register that supervenience is not being denied; rather, the deep and intrinsic link between value and the considerations of agency we have been stressing render the very idea of supervenience unintelligible. (For more on this issue, see the references in Footnote note 4.)

The crucial point, for the purposes of this chapter’s argument, is that this deep and intrinsic link between agency and value should now have come fully into view. We have a perspective on the world that is an engaged or agentive rather than a detached one only to the extent that the world contains value properties over and above the properties that natural science studies and which trigger the engaged rather than a detached perspective on it.

To recapitulate the argument so far: Starting with a familiar ambiguity in a ubiquitous thought or proposition (“I will … ”), I’ve teased out of it, in small steps which introduced the notion of agency, how natural it is to think that values are visible properties in the world. But to show that something is a natural thing to think is not yet to give an argument for it. It is only to show that one may think it without strain. Can we do better and present an argument for the conclusion that the world is populated by values over and above the properties that natural science studies?

III

One way to come to an argument toward such a conclusion might be to raise a challenge for it and answer the challenge. I have relied on the link between practical agency and value to make my claims thus far. It is only as or qua practical agents, that is, as subjects capable of engagement rather than mere detachment in our perspective on the world, that we view the world as containing value properties. The challenge might, then, seek to disrupt this link, denying that in order to be agents of this sort we must see the world as suffused with values. Practical agency, it might be said, is a simpler phenomenon than I am presenting it to be. It is a matter merely of acting on our desires and other such states and mental dispositions (including the loftier form they take, our “moral sentiments”). I have the desire to help the poor, I give money to Oxfam. I feel fear and vulnerability, I appeal to the municipality. I feel a combination of sympathy and indignation, I get out of my car and stop the kids from burning the cat. And so on. Values, on this view, are derivable from these desires and other states of mind and our agency is merely acting on these desires and states of mind. There is no need to add the further complication I am adding, which is that the desires and other such states of mind such as moral sentiments must be responses to value properties in the world, in order for us to be agents.

So, what I am insisting on is that desires are not self-standing in the way that this challenge proposes. They are responses to something that prompts them; they are responses to value properties in the world. Desires in us are nothing if there are no desirabilities (and undesirabilities) or values (and disvalues) in the world as well. And our agency consists in the fact that these desirabilities or values in the world, when we perceive them, make normative demands on us which trigger the appropriate desires in us upon which we act, as practical agents. (It should go without saying, but in case it does not let me say it: It triggers them only if we are virtuous or rational. If, as I said, they are properly normative demands that the world and its properties make on us, then the prompting to agency by those demands is not a causal, at any rate not a merely causal, prompting.Footnote ⁹) And the challenge to us, which views desires as self-standing, simply denies this, claiming instead that agency consists merely in acting on our desires and those desires do not answer to any external calling of desirabilities or values in the world.

Can our agency be adequately characterized in terms of desires viewed as self-standing in this way? This is a good challenge because the view of agency it offers as an alternative is simpler and, therefore, may seem to be more intuitive than the more complicated one I am insisting on. To respond to the challenge, let me introduce some more conceptual apparatus.

There is a curiosity that was first pointed out by Gareth Evans (Reference Evans1982) in an insightful passage in his book, The Varieties of Reference. When we are asked, “Is it raining?” we tend to look out of the window and respond. And (this is the curiosity) when we are asked, “Do you believe that it is raining?” we tend to do the same. We don’t scan our interiors to see if it contains the belief that it is raining. We simply look outside and respond. In short, we tend to do the same thing whether we are being asked about the world or about a state of mind, such as a belief. Evans went on to draw very interesting conclusions from this curiosity about the nature of self-knowledge, but I want to exploit the curiosity for a different purpose on the specific theme of this chapter.

I think it is perfectly plausible to extend Evans’ insight about beliefs to desires as well. If we are asked, “Do you desire x?” we don’t, in the normal and routine case (allowing, as exceptions, other unusual contexts, such as for instance on a psychoanalyst’s couch), scan our mental interiors to see if it contains the desire for x, we simply consider the desirability of x.

Two quick points of clarification, before I proceed further with the argument. First, for the sake of simplicity and convenience, I work with just the term “desires” here, as philosophers so often do, to function as a sort of omnibus term that is capacious enough to take in a range of (“conative”) states of mind, including “moral” desires or what have been called “moral sentiments.” So also, I take “desirabilities” in the world to be the more general term that is capacious enough to include “values.” Second, by “consider x” I mean either observe x if it is available in our vicinity and consider whether it is desirable or, if it is not available in perception, we may imagine its desirability – and I am assuming that imagination in these cases, as in all cases, depends on some background of previous perceptions of x or of other things and properties like or approximating x.

If I am right that Evans’ point can be extended to desires in this way, the dependence of desires on desirabilities (or values) in the world that McDowell and a large number of other moral realistsFootnote ¹⁰ have laid claim for, is, prima facie, established. But someone, determined to press the challenge further, may deny that what seems prima facie so, is so. This denial would stubbornly maintain that when we are asked about whether we desire something, unlike what Evans said about beliefs, we simply do not and cannot look to desirabilities since there are no such things or properties. On this view, facts (such as that it is raining) may rightly be viewed as “believabilities” (to coin a term that is the counterpart to what I have called “desirabilities”), and so Evans’ point is right about beliefs, but since there is no equivalent to facts in the case of desires, my extension of Evans’ point, which claims that there are desirabilities we look to, is unwarranted. Therefore, in responding to the Evansian question about whether we desire something, we must and do look inwards into our minds to see if it contains the desires being asked about.

I won’t indulge the temptation I have here to say that this just begs the question and denies without argument what I have concluded from my extension of Evans’ point, viz., that there is indeed a counterpart to facts in the case of desires, that is, desirabilities. This would only result in each side to the dispute claiming that the other is begging the question. I was supposed to give an argument that there are value properties or desirabilities, it will be said, and I have only given an analogy with beliefs in extending Evans’ point; I have not given an argument. But something more specific can be said by way of argument to break this impasse.

Let’s proceed, then, as if this challenge does not beg the question and ask, instead, what follows from its denial of my extension of Evans’ point to desires. It would follow from the challenge’s conclusion that we do always look into our minds in order to answer questions of the form, “Do you desire … ?” That would mean that we always step outside of ourselves and look at ourselves from the outside in, as it were, before we respond. We look at ourselves as objects to be scanned for whether or not we possess the relevant desire. In other words, we take the detached perspective on ourselves. And if there were no desirabilities, only desires in the self-standing sense, then our desires would only and always be available to us as such objects of detached self-scrutiny. Our entire relation to our desires could only be one in which they are given to us or available to us as desired by us. They would not be given to us or available to us via the desirabilities we perceive since there are no desirabilities to be perceived. We have no other way of being with our desires and experiencing them except by way of detached self-scrutiny of them. It is here that (3) strikes us with its relevance. That claim was: if one only had or if all one had was a detached or disengaged perspective on oneself (as exemplified in [2]), one would cease to be a practical agent.

The challenge, therefore, can only be successful by depriving us of our practical agency. But we manifestly do possess practical agency. So, the self-standing view of desires that the challenge assumes can only be true by denying something else that is manifestly true of us – that we are practical agents. That is why I had said that we could not so much as be agents, in the practical sense of agency, if desires were self-standing rather than responses to external callings, responses to the normative demands on us that come from desirabilities, or value properties in the world.

Though the argument, as I have presented it, is complicated, with the complications in place, the conclusion should be presentable in rather obvious terms.

Consider what is the philosophically significant difference between my thinking or saying as an observation of myself, “x is desired by me” and my thinking or saying “x is desirable.”

In the former thought (“x is desired by me”) the desire itself lacks motivational power for me qua agent. Even if the desire were to dispose me to act, that act will be something that happens to me. I will not enact it. It will be an “act” only by courtesy, as it were. It will not be an agentive intervention in the world. I will merely be the carrier of the intervention in the world. These are the effects on desire of the desire being only available to me as desired, as something that is the object of my detached gaze (rather than via my perceiving some desirability). It is deadened or leadened in its agentive motivational power by being an object of a detached perspective on myself.

But now consider the latter thought (“x is desirable”). When I think that x is desirable, my desire, which is a response to that desirability of x, is not an object of my observation. Its being given to me, its availability to me, is indirect, it is not given to me as desired, but via my apprehension of a desirability. This is what makes it possible that I have an agentive relationship with my desire, because this indirect way of being given to me allows the desire to have agentive motivational power. The crucial point, then, is that it is only when our desires are not directly given to us in our detached perspective on ourselves, but rather are indirectly given to us via our direct observation of desirabilities in the world, that our desires have agentive motivational power. And without that motivational power, desires cannot be the basis of our agency, as the challenge claims. So the simpler view, that desires are self-standing and not responses to desirabilities or values, simply cannot make its way to accounting for the agency we manifestly possess.

I admit that the argument I have elaborated in this section for the claim that there are value properties in the world ties value properties to the possession of practical agency, and it will not move a philosopher who is prepared to deny that we do possess such agency. In that sense the chapter’s conclusion is modest. The argument has no efficacy against such a philosopher, and I have no argument against someone (an Alamo-style philosopher, prepared to bite all bullets) who denies that we are agents, except, I suppose, just to say, “Come off it.” These just are the limitations of philosophy. No argument is efficacious against all comers: what analytic philosophers like to call “knock-down” arguments. At best, one can say: If you don’t believe what my argument establishes (in this case, the meta-ethical position that the world, including nature, contains visible value properties that fall outside the purview of natural science), see how much else that seems true you have to give up believing (in this case, that we are subjects who possess practical agency).

IV

This chapter, despite the gestural note it strikes in its concluding paragraph, is not the occasion to explore the wider implications of the meta-ethical claim I have tried to establish – implications for politics, political economy, and the vexed subject of the environment, which I hinted at in my introductory remarks when briefly giving the early historical context of this chapter’s themes.Footnote ¹¹ Those implications are of the utmost significance and need patient working out, and yet the tradition of philosophy within whose idiom I have made the argument for the claim has shown little interest in relating meta-ethics to these wider subjects and issues. So I particularly regret not having the space to do so here. What I try to do instead, as I bring the chapter to a close, is to address some more immediate and much narrower philosophical implications of the claim, and respond to some sources of doubt about the claim.

Perhaps one immediate implication to be drawn is that ethics is, in one sense, primarily a perceptual discipline. I use the word “primarily” and mean it. When I say it is perceptual, I don’t mean to suggest that deliberative and reflective elements are not important in ethics. They certainly are. But their role nests within a more basic perceptual understanding in which our moral agency responds to the normative demands of the value properties we perceive (or fail to perceive or misperceive) as we navigate the world we inhabit. It is when someone has different or conflicting perceptions of value that the role of deliberation (of ranking and weighing and assessing rational support or lack of support among values, etc.) comes into play. So also agents from different cultures or backgrounds may apprehend quite different normative demands in the very same perceptible situation, and when this happens, the relevance of deliberation via cultural exchange similarly comes into play to resolve the conflicts.

What follows from putting perception in primary place on the subject of value, in this way, is that the relevant states of mind (which as we saw are not self-standing) are at once our conduits for apprehending the world and states that motivate our agentive responses to what is apprehended. That is to say, it is not as if one sort of state apprehends the value properties in the world via perception of it and another quite self-standing state motivates our actions on the world. Apprehension and motivation are not two radically separated directions from which we relate to the world, apprehension going from the world to us and motivation going from us to the world.Footnote ¹² Rather, the very fact that it is something like values that we are perceiving in the world makes it clear that the perceptions themselves are motivating. It is not as if the perception of the threat in an impending storm and the feelings of vulnerability in the Bangladeshi fisherman, which prompts him – as a practical agent – to seek protection, are two states of mind with two different directions in their relation to the world. To have perceived the threat is to have felt vulnerable and vice versa.

This has implications for an entire family of states of mind. Desires, reconfigured in this way as relating in such a bi-directional form to desirabilities and undesirabilities in the world (i.e., relating to a world described and understood in evaluative terms – threats, cruelties, needs), are just one central case of mental states of this kind. Emotions too, very often, are to be conceived in just these terms. And once they are, a common and long-standing misconception about their place in practical human agency stands corrected. These points can do with some elaboration.

Too often emotions are thought of as gumming up the works of deliberation in practical life, and in politics and morals in particular. Practical reason or rationality is frequently described almost entirely in deliberative terms of rational inference, and emotions are seen by contrast as conflicting with and spoiling the deliverances of reason, so conceived (see Elster Reference Elster1996). Though that no doubt happens sometimes, it is occasional and cannot plausibly be built into characterizing the nature of emotions. If we see emotions along the lines I present later – as of a piece with the conception of desires presented earlier – we can see why.

On this reconceptualization, emotions, like desires, are also a mode of perception. How so? Perhaps a good way to begin to convey this is to look at what such a reconceptualization looks like in the case of physical pain. A plausible conception of pain might go this way. Take a toothache. We can perceive our teeth in the standard ways. I can put my forefinger to my tooth and perceive it tactually. I can go to a mirror, unfurl my lip, and perceive my tooth visually. But I can also, more internally, more involuntarily, perceive my tooth by – and here we run out of the right “logical grammar,” to use Wittgenstein’s term – by paining it. A toothache, thus, is a way of perceiving my tooth, and physical pains generally are internal modes of perception of parts of one’s body. Emotions too are modes of perception of this kind, though not of one’s body.Footnote ¹³ What, then, are they modes of perception of?

In more than one place, Aristotle writes of anger (“rage” is actually the right translation of his particular example),Footnote ¹⁴ saying that it relates to belief as follows. If I am angry with a person, that presupposes a certain sort of belief, for instance the belief that that person has done me harm. But this does not quite capture the right relation between belief and anger. To show why, I have deliberately emphasized “presupposes.” In many cases, that seems the wrong way to think of the relationship between emotions and a belief about the world. The relationship of presupposition here would suggest that the belief is all in place first and then the anger wells up. But that does not always capture the phenomenology of anger and indeed perhaps it only seldom captures it. Often, my anger is a way of perceiving that someone has done me harm. It’s not as if the belief is all calmly acquired and gives rise to the anger on reflection (not that this does not sometimes happen). My anger is very often my conduit to, a perception of, the fact that he has done me harm. The perception of something (value-laden) in the world and the emotion are not separable, just as I was suggesting about desire and the perception of the value-laden world.

If this is right, if emotions are ways of perceiving and forming perceptual beliefs about the (value aspects of the) world, then it cannot possibly be right to say that emotions gum up the works of rationality. In fact, far from gumming up the works, they are the works. The beliefs that go into rational deliberation are often the deliverances of emotions, conceived in this way as modes of perception. This point is not to be confused with the oft-made point that emotions have a propositional content – what is sometimes called the “cognitive” account of emotions. The point is not that emotions have the same form as beliefs, a propositional form; the point is that they are a path, a perceptual path to belief formation. And, as the previous paragraph makes clear, this conception of emotions cannot even be formulated if one does not view the world as containing value properties. But once one views the world that way, such a conception of emotions is entirely and naturally of a piece with doing so, as is the conception of desires presented earlier.

Desires (and emotions), I have said, are modes of perception of the value properties of the world, and in being so, they are intrinsically capable of motivating our practical agency. They do the double duty of taking in the world in its aspect of value even as they, thereby, motivate our agency to action. Now, if they are perceptual in this way, they can, of course, sometimes get the world (in its value aspect) wrong. But that is true of all perception. There can be value illusions just like there can be illusions, in general, about the nonvalue aspects of the world. This should not cause either surprise or concern. What does seem to cause some concern is the fact that just as we can have value illusions, we can have, as I admitted earlier, differential perception of value properties. The very fact of there being differential or conflicting perception of value properties in the world prompts the doubt that there really are such properties in the world. But that doubt is based on a non sequitur. For one thing, there is frequently differential perception of other properties in the world, the physical properties that natural sciences study – for instance, when we have internalized different physical theories about one or another physical phenomenon in the world. This is just a familiar consequence of what is often described as “the theory-ladenness of observation.” But no one, no one sensible anyway, is tempted to conclude from this that there are no physical properties in the world. In general, it does not follow from the fact that there is some property in the world that there cannot be differential perception of it; equally it does not follow that if there is differential perception of the property that these are not really perceptions of a real property but rather, as has been suggested by some Humeans in the case of values, a subjective derivation of them from our states of minds such as desires and moral sentiments that is then illicitly “projected” onto the world.

A related tendency that is also based on a confusion is to think that because value properties in the world, by their very nature, are intrinsically related to the fact that those who are capable of perceiving them as what they are are responsive to their normative demands with practical agency, then it must be that these are (unlike other perceptible properties in the world) not real properties after all. There is no plausible inference from the fact that we understand something (value) in the world as being related intrinsically to our capacity for agentive responsiveness to it, to the conclusion that we must somehow be making up values all on our own and projecting them illicitly onto the world. For one thing, it is a familiar thought since Locke and Boyle at least, if not since Galileo, that color properties in the world are partly characterized in terms of our visual sensibilities (frogs, for instance, do not perceive color properties). But it is quite wrong to conclude from this (not that it has not been done) that the table on which my keyboard presently sits is not brown, nor any other color. I repeat that it is a non sequitur to go from the idea that some property that is perceptible may require a certain sort of subject (one with our sort of practical agency in the case of value, or one with our sort of visual sensibility in the case of colorFootnote ¹⁵) to the idea that that property does not exist in the world at all, that the subject somehow generates it from his own mentality and projects it onto the world.

I conclude with one final caveat about the nature of these visible value properties that the world (including nature) contains. In elaborating the link between them and our practical agency, I have said that our perception of these properties takes the form of perception of the normative demands they make on us and to which our practical agency responds. Now, the expression “normative demand” is, of course, a metaphor. It is not literally a normative demand made by the perceptible features of the world. In insisting on this point, I am declaring that, in subscribing to the view that there are value properties in the world (including nature), I am not subscribing to any sort of intentional vitalism that attributes intentionality to nature and the world. And by saying this, I am disavowing any commitment to the sort of position taken by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett and others who think there is some quite literal form of “actants” (I assume that by this term they have made current, they mean agents of a kind broader than human agents) that populate nature and the world we inhabit, agents who literally address us with normative demands. My claim that there are value properties in the world is a much more innocuous claim than this. I am only saying that there are value properties in the world (including nature), and I am happily admitting that the idea that they make normative demands on us is a metaphor. No doubt this will seem like a copout to those who think we need a bolder commitment to vitalism (see Latour Reference Latour2004a; Bennett Reference Bennett2010; Reference Bennett2018).

But it is nothing of the sort. In fact, a proper, by which I mean sober, understanding of the nature of value shows such a vitalism to be quite unnecessary for the important issues at stake. Why do I rest with the thought that the expression “normative demands” is a metaphor? Why am I not moved by the doubt that the force of a normative demand is lost if the expression “normative demand” in these uses of it (unlike when we use it to say that I, a human subject, make a normative demand of you) is not literal but metaphorical? Surprising as this may sound, the answer is that I am not moved by this doubt because of the nature of metaphor.

It is widely (and surely rightly) said of metaphors that they, at least the good and apt ones, are not paraphraseable away into literal statements. This, as just stated, is, and is intended to be, a claim about the nature of (metaphorical) language. But it cannot just be a thesis about language. Though true as a thesis about language, its significance would be limited if it were just a claim in linguistics (pragmatics) or the philosophy of language. As a thesis, its full significance only comes into view if we notice that its truth has a counterpart in a metaphysical thesis, an extra-linguistic claim. What is that counterpart metaphysical claim to match the claim of unparaphraseability as a claim in the philosophy of language? It is this: If a metaphor is not paraphraseable away into literal statements or propositions, what that very thesis shows is that there is a fragment or aspect of reality that cannot be captured by any expression but that metaphor. It is striking that philosophers who have made the linguistic claim don’t make this metaphysical counterpart claim explicit.Footnote ¹⁶ But once made explicit, it becomes clear that there is no loss of force in saying that value properties make normative demands on us, just because the expression “normative demands” is said metaphorically. Without any commitment to intentional vitalism (a commitment that would only be generated if we insisted on some sort of literal deployment of the expression “normative demands”), one has said what needs to be said; one has (with a metaphor) captured something real, a fragment of reality and its unique and intrinsic relation to our practical engagement. A scientism that has long denied this presence of value in the perceptible world we inhabit is thereby laid to rest without any overreaching into an implausible and unnecessary vitalism.

Latour, however, has insisted on an important point: There had better be a politics of things if we are to emerge with some sanity, indeed with some humanity (paradoxical as that may sound), from our destructively human-centered conception of politics (and political economy). Though I have said nothing here about what such a politics would look like, I have tried to do the philosophical ground clearing for it by providing a meta-ethical foundation for a politics of things; and have done so without any implausible commitment to the idea that things, like human subjects, possess intentionality.

This chapter has been about how a scientistic claim, via an illicit extrapolation, swept away value properties from the world (including nature) with the same brush that it swept away sacral properties from it. The claim literally renders these properties invisible. I end by noting that if the chapter’s argument carries conviction, we are at least poised to pursue a point (on some other occasion) that has implications for politics. Usually, when one speaks of invisibility, the interest is to alert us to the fact that things are below the surface of visibility and need to be unearthed. Sometimes however – as in the theme of this chapter – things that are on the surface and plainly visible to us are denied that visibility due to one or other distortion of our ways of “being-in-the-world,” which philosophers first perpetrate by overextending the authority of science, but which then, through the exercise of more worldly forces (the worldly forces I cited earlier were the alliances formed between the Royal Society, high Anglicanism, and commercial interests) gets dispersed into the zeitgeist as a pervasive assumption of our time. That assumption might properly be called a superstition of modernity (which is exactly what scientism is), and this chapter has tried to present the philosophy needed (an argument) to exorcise it. But a philosophical exorcism of the particular superstition that I have focused on in this chapter, even if successful, would be an arcane achievement if one did not also see through to the details of a democratic conception of politics that included “a politics of nature,” a politics on which we do not have even a preliminary grip, leave alone a sense of its details. But this should not surprise us, considering the long centuries it took for human beings to develop (and to this day it has not been fully developed) the details of a democratic politics that included every human being.