Scientism is a thing I learned about it in...I believe my second undergraduate degree. It’s like let’s say that I say something like: “Scientists have discovered that eating mushrooms every day is associated with lower body weight”.
And then maybe a person next to me might say, “But my friend Laura says that eating tomatoes are better for weight loss.”
Supposedly, most of us come away from hearing such an exchange with the idea that the new mushroom information is more trustworthy than the new information from some person named Laura. Simply because some form of the word “science” is used.
That is called “scientism” and it is a type of faith like having trust in any other authority figure/institution, like a religion, government, but also a boss or parent. Because the authority says it, it carries more weight than if a non-authority said it.
If anyone is interested in this kind of thing, there’s a subsection of sociology about similar cognitive short cuts called cognitive sociology:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_sociologySo ...every society has "authority figures". And the modern West is no exception. What the poster was complaining about was that for the last four centuries the West has shifted from using the Church as the authority figure to scientists as the authority figure. But he failed to explain why he considers that to be bad.
Is he saying that we should chuck Galileo and Copernicus and go back the Geocentric Universe, and chuck Darwin, and go back to a 6000 year old earth? Or what?
17 Apr 2019, 7:36 pm
