Scientism is the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values.
Scientism exists in contexts where there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify a scientific conclusion. It includes an excessive deference to the claims of scientists or an uncritical eagerness to accept any result described as "scientific".
This can be a counterargument to appeals to scientific authority. It can also address the attempt to apply "hard science" methodology and claims of certainty to the social sciences, which Friedrich Hayek described in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) as being impossible, because that methodology involves attempting to eliminate the "human factor", while social sciences (including his own field of economics) center almost purely on human action.
"The belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry",or that "science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective"[5] with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological [and spiritual] dimensions of experience".
Tom Sorell provides this definition: "Scientism is a matter of putting too high a value on natural science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture."
Paul Feyerabend, who was an enthusiastic proponent of scientism in his youth, later came to characterize science as "an essentially anarchic enterprise" and argued emphatically that "science" merits no exclusive monopoly over "dealing in knowledge" and that scientists have never operated within a distinct and narrowly self-defined tradition. In his essay Against Method he depicted the process of contemporary scientific education as a form of indoctrination, aimed at "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rules."
"Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science. In a democracy, scientific institutions, research programs, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science".
Scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
