I'm happy to use the terminology currently in place when describing science and its various branches.
Haven’t all who have wished to maintain the current status quo been happy keeping things the way they were and been resistant to change? However we categorize and sub-categorize, it is done for our convenience. Categorical thinking, though, has its drawbacks and can lead to problems, including overemphasizing the importance of a category and losing sight of the big picture.
(As an oversimplification) people started applying an increasingly structured experimental method to natural philosophy.
It goes well beyond experimental methods. Objectivity in The Activity increased because there was a realization that human reason was fundamentally flawed, it just took the cognitive dissonance being generated within pursuits of Natural Philosophy to bring that lesson home. It became increasingly difficult to ignore hard evidence that contradicted human reason and intuition. The weakness of human reason is just as weak in every other philosophical discipline at the time of this burgeoning awareness, it’s just that there was no stark way to show that weakness in other categories with unfalsifiable claims. For example, cognitive dissonance cannot be generated with respect to claims made regarding phenomena said to be immune from detection and evaluation, such as souls or transcendental planes, yet where do these concepts come from other than through fallible human reasoning.
Considering religion as primitive science is pretty misleading imo, but going into this would digress to much for minimal benefit.
One thing you probably agree with is that it also overlaps with a search for meaning, community and cohesion.
I think we can both agree that meaning, community, and cohesion are biological necessities for the species Homo sapiens, and much of this is driven by our pre-programmed instinctual inheritance. These must be accommodated at whatever objective level of understanding we have attained regarding the world, the cosmos, and ourselves, be it at the level of primitive hunter/gatherers or 21st century moderns.
Why religions began and the function they came to serve in societies is all part of *what is* and *why it is*, well within the remit of The Activity. I think it is pretty misleading to think that our primitive ancestors didn’t want to have a genuine understanding of the world in which they found themselves. I would also suggest that any ancient child would be more than open to best possible explanations prior to their having been fully indoctrinated into a particular social and cosmological belief system.
We are all born amateur scientists or empiricists, if you will. We struggle from day one to understand the world around us and develop, at the very least, sufficient knowledge to survive and meet our needs.
What is includes what exists naturally and independent of human conceptualisation and classification, and that which only exists by virtue of human conceptualisation and classification.
Yes, and to understand *all* of that falls within the remit of The Activity, incorporating all of the hard lessons learned over many millennia.
Yes. As I’ve always said, criticising scientism is not an attack on science, but a call for better science and a more rational sceptical approach to scientific outputs.
Is this a concession on your part? Are we calling The Activity ‘science’ now?
The term ‘scientism’ is an attack on The Activity. The term is used to establish and maintain a boundary between what should and should not be evaluated by The Activity, regardless of how you want to backpedal from how this term is being used in academic philosophy. We cannot understand what is, why it is, and what is possible, however, if we do not try, and if we are going to try it must be through The Activity, with its millennia of lessons learned, mandates to establish and maintain objectivity and mitigate, to best ability, human fallibility throughout the process. Otherwise we futilely spin our wheels, at the mercy of fallible human reasoning.
Efforts within the activity will fail, fall short, and hit dead ends. We are trying to reverse engineer the Cosmos from a starting point of complete ignorance. Maintaining rational skepticism and calling out errors when they occur are part and parcel to The Activity itself.
They also overlap significantly with the human search for meaning, community and cohesion as it is hard for us to see things from outside our worldview. The political beliefs of the researcher should have minimal impact in physics, but are quite likely to influence much of the research in political science, sociology and social psychology (see for example:
Q&A on WEIRD )
This seems a prime example of The Activity working as intended, with those engaged in the activity highlighting these concerns, yes?
You don’t think there is a fundamental difference between studying things that exist independently of human awareness of them, and things that only exist because humans have (linguistically) invented them?
If this difference is indeed worth being aware of, labelling it for ease of reference seems to make sense to me.
I simply disagree here. Problems are problems. Some are harder to solve than others, and some are well beyond our means to answer for the foreseeable future. Regardless, all fall within the remit of The Activity if objective understanding and solutions are to be found. Creating hard category boundaries between what you want to call ‘natural sciences’ and ‘social sciences’ is an artificial boundary that will only exacerbate errors related to categorical thinking. Human beings and their associated behaviors *are natural*, they *are a part of nature*. Forgive my use of woo terminology here but understanding human beings requires a holistic and integrated approach that seeks to understand both the neuro-physiology and the complexities of abstract thinking, as they function as an integrated whole.
There are lots of historical reasons for weakness in the social sciences, chief among them is the resistance to even address these areas within The Activity in the first place, deeming them the domain of philosophy etc. These historical issues are slowly resolving. How to improve the social sciences is a completely different topic in my view, but pushing social sciences further outside of The Activity clearly would be counterproductive to that goal.
When these different areas of "The Activity" have wildly different success rates, we should particularly want people to be aware of this so they can be more careful and sceptical of the findings in the less reliable areas that contain greater subjectivities.
What I would really like is for people to not only be rationally skeptical about findings within The Activity, but also with all that lies outside of The Activity, to include, for example, philosophy and religion. I do not share your focused concern regarding the effectiveness of The Activity in generating understanding of human behavior, especially in light of other disciplines that claim any degree of authority in understanding as well as prescribing and proscribing behaviors.
This is what makes this whole notion of ‘scientism’ ridiculous. By pushing back on the incursion of The Activity into understanding human behavior, it only serves to give free reign to activities that lack robust self-evaluation or any form of measurable success rate.
What is left in the vacuum when you push science (The Activity) out of the social sciences?
