Quotes About Scientism

#1. For Habermas, scientism means science's belief in itself: that is, 'the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science'.

Simon Critchley

#2. The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

Thomas Szasz

#3. We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism
a Mongoloid metaphysic.

Edward Abbey

#4. Unlike scientism, science in the true sense of the word is open to unbiased investigation of any existing phenomena.

Stanislav Grof

#5. Scientism is gnosticism wrapped in a post-modern package".

~R. Alan Woods [2009]

R. Alan Woods

#6. To say that science is the measure of all true knowledge is not a scientific truth but a philosophic claim about science. It's scientism posing as science.

Scott Klusendorf

#7. Distortion and suppression of the truth is encouraged by a prevailing attitude of scientism, not science itself but rather a certain attitude of veneration toward science as the exclusive means of obtaining truth

Angus J.L. Menuge

#8. I am critical of modernity giving science and technology a blank check as if it were the fountain of all truth. That is not true. And I think I may have introduced a word which has now caught on quite a bit, scientism. Science is good. It simply reports a discovery.

Huston Smith

#9. Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

Jurgen Habermas

#10. Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

William Dunbar

#11. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Freeman Dyson

#12. Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg

#13. Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low.

William Shakespeare

#14. Americans don't bother to notice anybody else in the world.

Randall Robinson

#15. It is a scientifically proven fact that all scientifically proven facts have originated from original and thereby unproven theories.

Silvia Hartmann

#16. The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

Jurgen Habermas

#17. The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

Timothy Keller

#18. Her skin was apparently covered with super-powered nerve endings that hadn't done a damn thing her whole life, but came alive like ice and fire and bee stings as soon as Park touched her.

Rainbow Rowell

#19. An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.

Terry Eagleton

#20. One of my good friends said, in a reggae riddim, don't jump in the water if you can't swim ...

Bob Marley

#21. To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

David Bentley Hart

#22. Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.

Jeanette Winterson

#23. The quest for absolute certainty is an immature, if not infantile, trait of thinking.

Herbert Feigl