Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

x Introduction
not convince them. Indeed, we can always startle our positivistic
friends in the social sciences by asking them to name just one
major policy decision or law that came about, against the popular
and political preferences for it, on the strength of quantitative
data. Can we recapture the proper-i.e., most fertile-balance
between elements of measurement, of quality, and of form in
the study of social man?
Over a number of years participants in this symposium, and
others, have shown, in their individual publications, increasing
concern with the harm done to the true study of man, especially
as a social being, by a form of scientism that takes various disguises
of strict scientificalness. It is. not merely neopositivism, which, by
the way, has been criticized by a number of· able men; it is also
more than a cult of quantification. Scientism implies a cynical
world view-in the original meaning of the word: it is a doglike
view of man, or shall we say riatlike? Man is best understood, so
the scientistic expert holds, when seen from th'e level of a rodent
eager to learn the ins and outs of a maze. He can be conditioned
to put up with almost anything the few wise designers of the maze
have mapped out for him.
And yet a critical attitude toward scientism is not to be confused
with an antievolutionary position. On the contrary, we see
scientistic sociologists and anthropologists refuse to learn from
research on animals because it might challenge their creed of environmental
determinism. As A. L. Kroeber observed not long
ago, 3 many of his colleagues in America are studiedly ignorant of
the work of the ethologists, including such renowned men as Karl
von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz, who explore species-specific innate
behavior patterns.
Thus, we should ask just which aspects of the presocial and
nonsocial sciences appeal to those afflicted with scientism.? And
why are they enthralled and to what effect? The scientistic students
of social man have isolated their field from meaningful •reality
by an arbitrary barrier of methodology. "What we cannot study
does not exist-for the time being." This was done partly 'by
reserving the 'labels: "scientific" and "scholarly" (wissenscha/tlich)
for a few approaches' to reality which laymen and social' scientists