Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Introduction xiii
sometimes pejorative, terms without which a chemist or anatomist
could not even communicate in his profession. If this, were
because of a humanistic self-consciousness, we could hardly find
fault with it, but it becomes ludicrous when the taboo is imposed
on the ground that we have to follow the natural sciences.
Under cover of this confusion some social scientists foolishly
or mischievously undermine forms of social (political, economic)
life the defense of which ought to employ cognitive and evaluative
means (and terms) that still constitute the major tools of many
natural sciences. If social scientists really knew what natural
scientists do, they could hardly derive a mandate for aggressive
social reforms from their ambition to be scientists. Natural
scientists are often compelled, in certain fields, to let the internal
arrangement of their subject matter alone. A scientific grasp of,
and approach to, the world around us is by no means synonymous
with the wish to change things. There are several disciplines whose
masters are committed to, and trained for, the most careful conservation
and restoration of past structures. Archaeology, linguistics,
medical arts, plant and animal ecology, limnology, to name a
few, apply scientific method and care in order to preserve or restore
structures and arrangements which came about without benefit
of a human planner. For instance, sociology could benefit from
the morphological approach used in the life-sciences (e.g., comparative
anatomy). Of course, there is no ontological congruity
between the objects studied in these fields. What I should like to
stress here is the heuristic value of this type of categorization,
since I shall show this in detail later.
A famous archaeologist once complained that the advent of
photography corrupted the young generation of scholars in his
field. They no longer needed to draw ,\That they saw. They simply
shot a picture, but in the process of doing this they forgot, or
never learned in the first place, how to observe. Drawing with a
pencil on white paper some glimpses deep down in a cave was
hard schooling. It taught ho,v to see.
Similarly, I am afraid, the arrival and pushing of quantitative
methods in the social sciences corrupted young sociologists and
social psychologists. They are so proud of the presumed power