'Scientism' proposes the methods of the hard sciences - mathematical modelling - as the preferred, or sole approach to studying any topic, no matter how inappropriately (particularly social science).
In psychology this leads to operationalism, in economics to the neoclassical synthesis, in sociology to structuralist accounts of society.
The methodology is ubiquitous in contemporary thinking: listen to any 'expert' on the radio, TV or in the press.
Friedrich A. Hayek in "The Counter-Revolution of Science" characterised Scientism thus (my emphasis):
"The persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to "objective facts," to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. ...In summary, Scientism removes intentionality from the world. It theorises as if people were Newtonian billiard balls, as if populations were classical manifolds - described by (usually linear) differential equations.
"The social sciences in the narrower sense, i.e., those which used to be described as the moral sciences, are concerned with man's conscious or reflected action, actions where a person can be said to choose between various courses open to him, and here the situation is essentially different. The external stimulus which may be said to cause or occasion such actions can of course also be defined in purely physical terms. But if we tried to do so for the purposes of explaining human action, we would confine ourselves to less than we know about the situation."
It requires severe contortions of mind to wrench-away all the common-sense complexities of the real (agent-populated social) world and to rely exclusively upon some oversimplified, reified model which then predicts counter-intuitive (and false) results.
Truly one has to be extra-smart and very-well-educated to jump through these hoops for Newsnight and Radio 4! It helps to be confident, well-spoken and well-connected too, for some reason.
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A cynic writes: "If the existing organisation of the world suits these people just fine, why not fix it for ever in some structural straitjacket from which it could never escape except by chaos?"
This is a good post, and there is the question of what one can do about it all. The opening definition involving "hard science" applications to other subjects, leaves the question open as to what alternatives to "hard science" there might be.
ReplyDeleteI am still taking a "subterranean axioms" approach to such topics. This means trying to determine whether the "hard science mathematics" is too "hard" (and inappropriate) in part because it is using the wrong axioms. Indeed related issues might be linked to the stasis in Theoretical Physics as well. Here this means digging down into axioms assumed across 20th Century mathematics, and therefore in applied mathematics.
I still need to write up another manifestation of this phenomenon I find in AI with Neural Nets. Here theorems are being freely applied which relate to standard Continuum Mathematics, but (a) there is no justification as to why Continuum Mathematics is used in a Discrete context; (b) some theorems are not correct in a Discrete context, and the properties stated are not correct for Discreteness. Naively this means such Neural Nets will not (always) work as expected and/or ANN possibilities are missed.
In other subjects we have the question of whether the Logic is correct (or really justified). I have recently been studying another axiom "Markov's Principle" which is not accepted by Constructivists except by those who follow Markov's approach to Algorithms and Computer Science (Wikipedia q.v.). Oddly I have just found a recent paper which finds that "Markov's Principle" has found its way into "Asset Pricing" which Keen also criticises. Again should Finance (perhaps also Economic Theory) be assuming axioms like this and if so why?
Many of these axioms relate to Intuitionistic Logic, which has an agent centric semantics (Kripke) (as well as Sheave/Topology semantics). So one is actually reasoning about Agents. I am trying to find a good explanation for what "Markov's Principle" actually (IE in non-logical terms) means. I have a conjecture, which is remarkably consistent with its use (or is it misuse?) in Asset Pricing.
As for Differential equations, applied mathematicians - let alone Physicists, Economists etc - are going to apply results which are only locally valid to the entire space without a moment's thought...