Science and Scientism  A review of On Being: A Scientist's
Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence, by Peter Atkins
and The Tyranny of Science, by Paul Feyerabend  Posted April 23,
2012 Print This  Scientism is the view that all real knowledge
is scientific knowledge—that there is no reliably objective,
rational form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. It is
a key ingredient of the work of New Atheist writers like Richard
Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, and its proponents
dismiss philosophy's and theology's claims to provide
distinctive but equally rational and objective avenues to truth.
But the view faces a notorious problem: scientism is not itself
a scientific thesis, but a metaphysical one. Hence it is either
self-defeating, or implies so broad a construal of what is
allowed to count as "science" that the claim that all real
knowledge is scientific knowledge becomes trivial.  Convinced
that non-scientific modes of inquiry are not worth
investigating, proponents of scientism ten