Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

xiv Introduction
of statistical tools, of measurement of attitudes, for instance,
that they never learn how to observe significant phenomena in
their field of study. They learn all about "measuring" attitudes
before they can tell one attitude from another by looking at a
human being in social action.
This helplessness of our social scientists is shown, for instance,
by their failure to come to grips with the phenomenon of aggression.
Learned teams have tried to discover what makes human
beings aggressive. They have studied international tensions, hostilities,
frustrations, and other surface phenomena. It has hardly
occurred to them to go beyond the terms "aggression" or "hostility."
If they had been as open to such problems as, were our
students of man in the nineteenth century, it could not have
escaped their attention that envy is a much more basic common
denominator for various phenomena of "aggression" or "hostility"
than "frustration," although a less flattering motive with
which to excuse the perfidy of a Hitler or a Castro. The frustration
theory nearly allows one to put the blame on the alleged
frustrator; in the case of envy, this is a little more difficult.
w. T. Couch has made pertinent comments on this point: the
developments we have come to call scientism are probably, in
part, responsible for the facility with which social scientists
circumvent crucial phenomena of human action that have traditionally
form,ed a link between the empirical observation of
man and normative philosophy.
NOTES
1. See) for instance, Sylvia Thrupp: "An audience of historians is not
enough. Yet will the average sociologist join the audience? Will he be
afraid, if he is seen reading a journal of 'Comparative Studies in Society
and History,' of being thought unscientific, antiquarian, a deviant in his
profession, maladjusted?" "History and Sociology: New Opportunities for
Co-operation," American Journal of Sociology) LXIII (1957), 14.
Probably one of the earliest uses of the term scientism in a critical and
derogatory vein can be found in Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und
die Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1926), p. 271. Recently one could note an increasing
use of the terms "scientism" and "scientistic" in scholarly and
scientific writing. Here are a few examples.
". . . scientism may be described as an addiction to science. Among the