Source: Facebook

SCIENTISM IS SHAMING UNLESS YOU MEAN POSITIVISM – I DON’T. I DO TESTIMONIALISM.

—“I may be mistaken here, but your thinking on economics, identity politics, making choices, is based on Scientism.”—Mark Goodkin

Well, that’s just name calling unless we can operationalize that as a test of truth, contingency, or falsehood.

As far as I know we continuously converge on increases in precision using logical and physical instrumentation (science), and we reorganize our network of categories, relations and value judgements (and narratives) in response to those increases.

We do this because increases in precision (particularly those above and below human scale) increase our agency (ability to act).

Only a justificationist (which is false) prioritizes representation (meaning) over action (demonstration).

No matter what we understand or how we understand it, our actions produce decreasingly divergent consequences or not. It’s true that we have a psychological bias to prefer fixed answers because it lowers the cost of constant reorganization but the evidence is that we are extraordinarily successful at increases in parsimony and the result of that parsimony is convergence on marginal indifference.

Choice on the other hand (preference and good) are something else. Generally speaking we have found that increases in agency (truth) have produced greater choices with higher returns, while we have also found that philosophy(justificationary rationalism) has produced profound delays and horrors – not the least of which was the Rousseau> Kant> Marx/Freud/Boas> Lenin/Trotsky> Keynesian > Neocon/Libertarian/Postmodern series. That’s before we go back to theological – which is the deadliest information system ever invented by man, and second only to malaria and the great plagues.