Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Social Science As A utonomous Activity 247
full control. Unless he has, his discoveries. cannot be the final
ground for action.
When his formulations are nevertheless accepted as the final
ground for action, the assumption must be that his knowledge is
complete, that the real problems and their natural, necessary
solutions are known. To act on the basis of such knowledge is in
fact to order variables in the light of what is conceived as indubitably
real or true. Such ordering.constitutes the exercise of
control. Since it is possible to obtain certain empirical knowledge
only of those relations which men have transfused by their will,
which men have actually constructed and in which they can ultimately
encounter only themselves, empirical science demands. the
exercise of the will, a grappling with a nature which insists on
having its intrinsic properties. It becomes exasperating and challenging
to realize that speculative, reflective knowledge of the
world, because of the all-pervasiveness of bias, because man is a
determined creature, can be only coincidentally accurate. Being
so much part of nature, man cannot truly find out what it is. He
cannot look upon it with objectivity; he cannot assess it from
above; he cannot gain a disinterested view of it.
But by no means does this require him to give up his quest for
knowledge. He feels. free to reinterpret the quest, to make it become
one for survival within nature, one for natural power over
the competing forces of life. Thus, the purpose of science becomes
a pseudo purpose: control, not in reference to a transcending
objective, but for its own sake. Thereby science, equated with
spontaneous right action, gains autonomy, a condition not likely
to he frowned upon when its ethos is wholly identified with a
rationale for liberal-democratic institutions. 21 It becomes. self-reliant
and self-justifying; it is measured, not against a higher order
of reality, not against standards anteceding the conventions of
empirical science, but against an ideal which values the capacity
to exercise power, to be effective, to flex one's instruments (including
ideologies and myths) for the control of nature, of society,
and of man. Thus a genuine science is manipulative knowledge;
it is a body of concepts viewed as valid when they yield results in