Scientism

In the AI Story

The distinction matters because defenders of scientism frequently accuse their critics of being anti-science. Midgley rejected the accusation forcefully. She argued that she was more respectful of what science actually does than the scientists who inflated its findings into worldviews. Respect for a tool involves understanding its scope. The person who insists a hammer can also be used as a screwdriver does not respect the hammer. She abuses it. Scientism abuses science by asking it to do work — metaphysical, ethical, existential — that science is not equipped to do.

The AI discourse is a natural home for scientism because it involves scientists and engineers who have achieved genuine technical breakthroughs and whose authority as experts has been extended, often without examination, to questions outside their expertise. The engineer who built a large language model is an authority on language models. She is not, by virtue of that expertise, an authority on consciousness, meaning, or the moral significance of the outputs her model produces. But the cultural deference to scientific expertise treats these additional authorities as automatic, and the result is a discourse in which metaphysical claims are presented as technical findings.

Midgley's treatment of scientism was particularly sharp in Science as Salvation (1992), where she traced the historical emergence of scientism as a quasi-religious formation — complete with prophets, sacred texts, eschatological narratives, and promises of salvation through technical progress. The Singularity is the most recent iteration of this pattern. The promise is the same promise the Christian tradition offered: transcendence of embodied limitation, immortality, the fulfillment of all human longing. The vocabulary has been updated. The structure has not.

Origin

Though the term 'scientism' predates Midgley, she gave it its most sustained twentieth-century development. Her treatment was shaped by her Oxford contemporaries — Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot — who shared her resistance to the logical positivist attempt to confine meaningful discourse to what could be empirically verified. Midgley extended this resistance into a positive program: the complementarity of vocabularies, each describing genuine features of reality, none reducible to any other.

Key Ideas

Not anti-science. Scientism is a philosophy about science, not science itself — and recognizing the distinction is the first step in defending science from its self-appointed champions.

Self-refuting structure. The claim that only science produces knowledge cannot itself be established scientifically, which means scientism fails its own test.

Quasi-religious formation. Scientism has acquired the shape of a religion — complete with eschatology, soteriology, and sacred promises — precisely as it denies the legitimacy of religion.

Expertise creep. The cultural deference to scientific authority extends that authority to domains where the science has nothing to say, producing metaphysical claims dressed as technical findings.