Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Science and the Studies of Man
IV
Let me begin with two prefatory remarks. The first is that
naturalism is not a school of thought in the sense that idealism
or phenomenology is. It is a conviction about the universe that
is elaborated in diverse "vays. "Orthodox" naturalism, so to speak,
adds to the proposition that nothing happens except by natural
means another proposition, namely, that the only way to know
what happens is to bring it within the purvie"v of science. This
second proposition has been elaborated with gre.at care by positivists
and instrumentalists who are committed to belief in "the
unity of science." There are, however, naturalists who do not
accept the doctrine of the unity of science.
The second prefatory remark is this: It is widely held today
that naturalis,m is one of the indispensable foundations of science.
I heard an academic psychologist recently assert, with a warmth
one does not expect of a scientist, that psychology is, possible
only on a naturalistic foundation. However widespread this belief
may be, it is false. Scientific activity of the most rigorous kind is
consistent with an indeterminate number of philosophical convictions.
The business of the scientist is to discover the invariant
relations operative in the domain of his competence. What is to
be found beyond the purview of scientific inquiry he need not
make any assumptions about. He does not even need to believe,
as has been alleged, that nature is through and through governed
by the order that is expressed in scientific laws. When he espouses
naturalism, his views do not have the authority that his scientific
hypotheses have. When scientists speak of mathematics or geometry
as the alphabet of nature, as the men of the seventeenth
century did, they speak as philosophers; they do not speak as
scientists. A scientist can say, with'Kant, that nature is the realm
of law. But if he does, he must stop there, and he does not even
have the right, qua scientist, to say that what we ordinarily call
nature, the spatiotemporal world, is completely governed by law.
Of course, in his inquiries he discovers laws-these are what he
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