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Science, Practice and Mythology: A Definition and Examination of the Implications of Scientism in Medicine

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Abstract

Scientism is a philosophy which purports to define what the world ‘really is’. It adopts what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called ‘an epistemological criterion of reality’, defining what is real as that which can be discovered by certain quite specific methods of investigation. As a consequence all features of experience not revealed by those methods are deemed ‘subjective’ in a way that suggests they are either not real, or lie beyond the scope of meaningful rational inquiry. This devalues capacities that (we argue) are in fact essential components of good reasoning and virtuous practice. Ultimately, the implications of scientism for statements of value undermine value-judgements essential for science itself to have a sound basis. Scientism has implications, therefore, for ontology, epistemology and also for which claims we can assert as objective truths about the world. Adopting scientism as a world view will have consequences for reasoning and decision-making in clinical and other contexts. We analyse the implications of this approach and conclude that we need to reject scientism if we are to avoid stifling virtuous practice and to develop richer conceptions of human reasoning.

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Notes

  1. Arguably, it even undermines it: see Baker [4], Loughlin [42, 46].

  2. As a consequence the ontological status of the ‘realm of fiction’ becomes highly problematic within this world view [64, 68].

  3. Note that this inference reveals an a priori assumption that science is concerned exclusively with quantifiable properties: this is not something ‘discovered’ but is assumed at the outset.

  4. Hume [32] famously took Cartesian scepticism a stage further by questioning the external reality of causality itself.

  5. The view that reality is devoid of value, that people’s beliefs about right and wrong correspond to nothing. The only truths concern matters of fact and there are no moral facts, so the holocaust was ‘just the Nazi’s way of doing things’ [10].

  6. Is reviving a concept contrary to progress? Not necessarily. It was a good thing from the perspective of intellectual progress that the conceptual framework of atomism, considered in a primitive form by the pre-Socratics but convincingly criticised by Aristotle, was revived, albeit in a very different form, by modern science. We should be careful before consigning an idea once and for all to the ‘dustbin of history’.

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Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to John Gabbay, Paul Dieppe, Peter Fenwick and Harald Walach for their astute and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire, Crewe Green Road, Crewe Cheshire, CW1 5DU, UK

    Michael Loughlin

  2. University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK

    Michael Loughlin

  3. School of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    George Lewith

  4. Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Division of Nursing, Unit for Studies of Integrative Care, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden

    Torkel Falkenberg

  5. The Integrative Care Science Centre, Järna, Sweden

    Torkel Falkenberg

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  1. Michael Loughlin
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Correspondence to Michael Loughlin.

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Loughlin, M., Lewith, G. & Falkenberg, T. Science, Practice and Mythology: A Definition and Examination of the Implications of Scientism in Medicine. Health Care Anal 21, 130–145 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-012-0211-6

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