Scientism as a Threat to Science: Wittgenstein on Self-Subverting Methodologies

Wittgenstein is typically viewed as concerned with one particular variety of scientism: scientism understood as the threat posed by the application of scientific practices to areas of our lives in which they do not belong. In this reading, Wittgenstein’s primary concern about scientism is that science should not overreach its purview: the scientific approach is legitimate within the boundaries of scientific enquiry, but should not encroach into other areas, where different standards and procedures apply – in particular, into ethics, religion or philosophy. I will call this the ‘dominant reading’. This understanding of Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with scientism is not unfounded and certainly comes to the fore at several junctures (e.g. CV 7). I propose to show, however, that too narrow a focus on this aspect of Wittgenstein’s treatment of scientism distorts both his thinking on science and the nature of his preoccupation with scientism. This, at any rate, is the picture that emerges when we consider this question from the perspective of his early remarks on science, in the Tractatus and ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, presented at a meeting of The Heretics Society in Cambridge, in 1929. (Although the Tractatus was written more than ten years before ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, Wittgenstein’s position on a number of key issues did not substantially change in the interim. Indeed, many of the themes from the former, including his notion of a ‘world book’ – cf. TLP 5.631 – remain central to the latter.) In section 1, I summarise the dominant interpretation of Wittgenstein’s concern over scientism. In section 2, I revisit the Tractatus’ discussion of scientific propositions and argue that the dominant interpretation misrepresents Wittgenstein’s early approach to the natural sciences. In section 3, I defend the idea that Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with scientism is part of a broader and more fundamental preoccupation with self-subverting methodologies and with the threat that these pose to all areas – including science itself.