Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Introduction xi
conventionally associate with the natural sciences. Scientistic doctrinaires
chose to ignore the fact that these few methods were by
no means the only approaches used in the natural sciences. Bertalanffy's
paper cites striking examples of this naivete.
Fritz Machlup blames part of this on a semantic confusion and
remarks that in German-speaking countries certain excesses of
scientism may not have appeared for the simple reason that the
word wissenschaftlich embraces a larger number of methods and
approaches than does, "scientific" in the English-speaking world. 4
And when we examine prenineteenth-century uses of the word
Wissenschaft-from the Teutonic weight of which the word
"science" obtained some additional glamor around the turn of the
century-we find that learned men, around 1780, understood
W issenschaft primarily to mean "worth knowing" or "worth
noticing." When we are critical of a fashionable brand of scientism,
we do not intend to belittle the necessity and actual power
of the method of obervation. We plead for more courage in observing
phenomena, even if the .methodologist tells us that his
tools are not yet ready for them, or never will be.
We might heed what so eminent an economist as Jacob Viner
wrote about his field: 5
And for some time in the future there will be problems of interest to
the economist which will be elusive of the application of the techniques
of precise nleasurement and which will have to be dealt with
by methods of. inquiry which in the dogmatics of the laboratory scientist
have lost their respectability. It is true, however, even of the
physical sciences, or at least so I gather from the recent writings of the
more articulate physicists, that they are losing some of their late
Nineteenth Century preference for naive as against sophisticated
metaphysics, and also that until they have devis,ed quantitative
methods of dealing with problems they proceed brazenly by means of
inferior methods without much apparent injury to their self-esteem.
And even John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment;,
Interest and Money (pp. 297 f.), was well aware ofa fact
that most of his ardent followers seem to have forgotten. He
warned: