Two by the Maverick Philosopher:
Why Steven Pinker doesn't get it:
...Pinker's definition is essentially this. Scientism is the view that all of our intellectual life ought to be governed by two ideals, the ideal that the world is intelligible and the ideal that knowledge-acquisition is difficult.Now that is a pretty sorry excuse for a definition of scientism...
A short piece by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough. Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude":
The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can lead to confusion.
He has some other useful things to say about philosophy's role in conceptual clarification. But there is no mention of what ought to strike one as a major task: an explanation of how recherché physical theories relate to the world we actually live in, the world in its human involvement, what Edmund Husserl called die Lebenswelt, the life-world. This is a task that falls to philosophy, but not to contemporary analytic philosophy with its woeful ignorance of the phenomenological tradition. On the other hand, judging by the philosophical scribblings of physicists, they would make a mess of it too.
Good points all.
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