Antiscience is a set of attitudes and a form of anti-intellectualism that involves a rejection of science and the scientific method. People holding antiscientific views do not accept science as an objective method that can generate universal knowledge. Antiscience commonly manifests through rejection of scientific ideas such as climate change and evolution and the effectiveness of vaccination. It also includes pseudoscience, methods that claim to be scientific but reject the scientific method. Antiscience can lead to belief in false conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Lack of trust in science has been linked to the promotion of political extremism, corruption and distrust in medical treatments.
History In the early days of the Scientific Revolution, scientists such as Robert Boyle (1627–1691) found themselves in conflict with those such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who were skeptical of whether science was a satisfactory way to obtain genuine knowledge about the world.
Hobbes' stance is regarded by Ian Shapiro as an antiscience position: In his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics,...[published in 1656, Hobbes] distinguished 'demonstrable' fields, as 'those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself,' from 'indemonstrable' ones 'where the causes are to seek for.' We can only know the causes of what we make. So geometry is demonstrable, because 'the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves' and 'civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.' But we can only speculate about the natural world, because 'we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects.'Ian Shapiro, Reflections on Skinner and Pettit, Hobbes Studies, 22 (2009), pp. 185–191, citation from pp. 190–191 In his book Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, published in 2000, Richard H. Jones wrote that Hobbes "put forth the idea of the significance of the nonrational in human behaviour".Richard H Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 2000, p. 199 Jones goes on to group Hobbes with others he classes as "antireductionists" and "individualists", including Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and J S Mill (1806–1873), later adding Karl Popper (1902–1994), John Rawls (1921–2002), and E. O. Wilson (1929–2021) to the list.Jones, p. 213
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), claimed that science can lead to immorality. "Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality" and his "critique of science has much to teach us about the dangers involved in our political commitment to scientific progress, and about the ways in which the future happiness of mankind might be secured". Nevertheless, Rousseau does not state in his Discourses that sciences are necessarily bad, and states that figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton should be held in high regard."Bacon, Descartes and Newton, those teachers of mankind, had themselves no teachers. What guide indeed could have taken them so far as their sublime genius directed them?" In the conclusion to the Discourses, he says that these (aforementioned) can cultivate sciences to great benefit, and that morality's corruption is mostly because of society's bad influence on scientists.Compare: "But so long as power alone is on one side, and knowledge and understanding alone on the other, the learned will seldom make great objects their study, princes will still more rarely do great actions, and the peoples will continue to be, as they are, mean, corrupt and miserable." (Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses)
William Blake reacted strongly in his paintings and writings against the work of Isaac Newton, and is seen as being perhaps the earliest (and almost certainly the most prominent and enduring) example of what is seen by historians as the aesthetic or Romantic antiscience response. For example, in his 1795 poem "Auguries of Innocence", Blake describes the beautiful and natural robin redbreast imprisoned by what one might interpret as the materialistic cage of Newtonian mathematics and science.William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence". Compare from the same poem: The emmet's inch and eagle's mile Make lame philosophy to smile. He who doubts from what he sees Will ne'er believe, do what you please. If the sun and moon should doubt, They'd immediately go out. Blake's painting of Newton depicts the scientist "as a misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground".Notes to Blake's Newton, at Princeton University Blake thought that "Newton, Bacon, and Locke with their emphasis on reason were nothing more than 'the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan's Doctrine'...the picture progresses from exuberance and colour on the left, to sterility and blackness on the right. In Blake's view Newton brings not light, but night".Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason, Tate Gallery, London In a 1940 poem, W.H. Auden summarises Blake's anti-scientific views by saying that he "[broke] off relations in a curse, with the Newtonian Universe".W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter, 1940", in Collected Poems, Edited by Edward Mendelson, London: Faber, 1994, p. 203
One recent biographer of NewtonStephen D Snobelen, Writings on Newton, 2007 considers him more as a renaissance alchemist, natural philosopher, and magician rather than a true representative of scientific Enlightenment, as popularized by Voltaire (1694–1778) and other Newtonians.
Antiscience issues are seen as a fundamental consideration in the historical transition from "pre-science" or "protoscience" such as that evident in alchemy. Many disciplines that pre-date the widespread adoption and acceptance of the scientific method, such as geometry and astronomy, are not seen as anti-science. However, some of the orthodoxies within those disciplines that predate a scientific approach (such as those orthodoxies repudiated by the discoveries of Galileo (1564–1642)) are seen as being a product of an anti-scientific stance.
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882) questions scientific dogmatism: "[...] in Science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, maybe they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge – though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that Science too rests on a faith; there is no Science 'without presuppositions.' The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: 'nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it, everything else has only second-rate value".
The term "scientism", originating in science studies, was adopted and is used by sociologists and philosophers of science to describe the views, beliefs and behavior of strong supporters of applying ostensibly scientific concepts beyond its traditional disciplines.See The OED records the word from 1870 and the sense here given from 1871. Specifically, scientism promotes science as the best or only objective means to determine normative and epistemological values. The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. The word is commonly used in a pejorative sense, applying to individuals who seem to be treating science in a similar way to a religion. The term reductionism is occasionally used in a similarly pejorative way (as a more subtle attack on scientists). However, some scientists feel comfortable being labelled as reductionists, while agreeing that there might be conceptual and philosophical shortcomings of reductionism.George J. Klir, Facets of Systems Science, New York: Springer, 1991, pp. 263–265
However, non-reductionist (see Emergentism) views of science have been formulated in varied forms in several scientific fields like statistical physics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, systems theory, systems biology, ecology, information theory, etc. Such fields tend to assume that strong interactions between units produce new phenomena in "higher" levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism. For example, it is not valuable (or currently possible) to describe a chess game or gene networks using quantum mechanics. The emergentist view of science ("More is Different", in the words of 1977 Nobel-laureate physicist Philip W. Anderson) has been inspired in its methodology by the European social sciences (Durkheim, Marx) which tend to reject methodological individualism.
Political
Elyse Amend and Darin Barney argue that while antiscience can be a descriptive label, it is often used as a rhetorical one, being effectively used to discredit one's political opponents. Thus, charges of antiscience are not necessarily warranted.Amend, Elyse, and Darin Barney. "Getting It Right: Canadian Conservatives and the "War on Science"[Preliminary Edition]." Canadian Journal of Communication 41, no. 1a (2015), pp. 13–14
One expression of antiscience is the "denial of universality and... legitimisation of alternatives" and that the results of scientific findings do not always represent any underlying reality but can merely reflect the ideology of dominant groups within society.Andrew C. Wicks and R. Edward Freeman, Organization Studies and the New Pragmatism: Positivism, Anti-Positivism, and the Search for Ethics, Organization Science, 9.2, Mar–Apr. 1998, pp. 123–140 Alan Sokal states that this view associates science with the political right and is seen as a belief system that is conservative and conformist, that suppresses innovation, that resists change, and that acts dictatorially. This includes the view, for example, that science has a "bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view".Alan D Sokal, What the Social Text Affair Does and Does not Prove, Critical Quarterly, 40.2, July 1998, pp. 3–18
The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left,Victoria Daubert, Sue Ellen Moran, Origins, goals, and tactics of the U.S. anti-nuclear protest movement, Rand, 1985, p. 16Jeffrey Broadbent, Vicky Brockman, East Asian Social Movements: Power Protest and Change in a Dynamic, Springer, 2009, p. 69Anti-nuclear Campaigners and the Qwerty Keyboard, Marbury, 31 March 2011 has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power, and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy.Samuel MacCracken, The War Against the Atom, 1982, Basic Books, pp. 60–61 Opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has also been associated with the left.