Scientism; How Metaphysics gets Mistaken for Science
Part One: The Diagnosis
My thanks to Will Ryan ..here the first of the first 5 four- or five-para essays. I did state some days back I would ‘do’ one a day..
That of course depends on my enormous other reading & publishing commitments at this epochal pre-apocalypse 2029 moment in the history of the last 10k years..
Jul 29, 2026
People who refuse to have anything to do with philosophy have become enslaved to outdated forms of it
— Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By
1
Have you ever noticed how people become what they oppose?
Just look at our politics. Conservatives now seem willing to reinvent society to ‘protect’ traditional values from meddling progressives; while progressives seek to ‘liberate’ people from the weight of historical oppression by enforcing conformity through censorship. Or look at religion, and the twisted things people do in the name of moral purity. Or tech, and the AI race induced by factions breaking away in the name of safety. The list goes on…1
There’s a cruel irony at work: to define yourself against something is still to be defined by it, which gives it power over you.
It’s an all too human irony, and it’s one to which defenders of science are also susceptible. To stamp out unfounded speculation, some hold that all legitimate investigation must be scientific. But to have any substance, this relies on a host of speculative assumptions, betraying its own motivation and morphing it into its opposite.
This is what I’ll refer to as (to use a notoriously tendentious word) scientism,2 and I want to show why it boils down to metaphysics. In short, it’s because justifying its assumptions entails defending some form of the foundational metaphysical premise: that there is a single, ultimate description of reality – or at least that there is a single, ultimate way to describe reality. In this regard, the “scientist”3 is unwittingly in thrall to a metaphysical tradition that has had a grip on us at least since Plato. One to which the 20th century’s best philosophy went to lengths to cure us.
To be clear, I firmly believe in the importance of science, and in sustained, meaningful collaboration between philosophy and science. Our best scientific accounts of the world place strict constraints on what philosophers can say about it, and failure to observe those constraints leads philosophy to idle speculation. Equally though, science needs help unpacking its philosophical baggage and painting a coherent big picture.4
But in this relationship, as in any other, mutual understanding and reciprocity is necessary if it is to work. Scientism jeopardises a crucially important conversation – one without which our collective horizons become narrow and empty. By giving a brief crash-course in what I believe to be the most insightful philosophy of our times, I want to show exactly why this is the case and what a fuller perspective looks like, in the hope that it might reveal to some “scientists” out there a glimpse of what they’re overlooking.
This essay is the first of two. It includes a quick sketch of philosophy from the perspective of scientism, before diagnosing it by giving an inevitably schematic historical account of the metaphysical undercurrents that drove the formation of modern science. This can be read as a groundwork for the follow up essay, which shows what the conversation between science and philosophy could look like if we were really to avoid metaphysical speculation.
Footnotes ☞
1Some more interesting ones: The more we ‘save’ time by doing things more efficiently, the busier we become and the faster it goes. Similarly, fear of ageing actively speeds up the ageing process at the cellular level.
2I’m aware that few will actively own my description here. Some defend scientism with heavy qualifications (e.g. Ladyman & Ross, et al., (2007), to whom I don’t think anything said in this article applies as they accept that only ‘strong metaphysics’ could ‘convert’ people to their ‘scientistic stance’ (64–65)), while others will see it as a caricature of their views. Nonetheless, I’ve been witnessing a number of people on Substack lately that I believe more or less fit the bill, and to whom this piece is ultimately addressed. It feels like bad form to single people out, so I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the position that unfolds throughout this essay finds an accurate target.
3It’s unfortunate that the agent noun derived from ‘scientism’ is ‘scientist’. I certainly don’t want to imply that being a scientist entails scientism, so I’ll use scare quotes to mark the agent of scientism. One can be a scientist without being a “scientist”, and vice versa.
John Blundell
Australia
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