It's nearly always a strawman, waiting for someone to come along and rescue it with a steelman. And that seems to be what Bergson is trying to do.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
It has a couple of definitions but the relevant one here is a blinkered, complacent over-confident belief in the power of science to explain everything, often accompanied by an ignorant dismissal of philosophy.
Well, that seems like a very silly belief system to have.
That said I can’t imagine having a good faith discussion about it; there’s nobody to defend the idea, because obviously nobody believes that they have a blinkered, over-confident belief in anything. They just think the domain of problems that their method can address is larger than the domain you think it has, I guess.
I guess I can’t imagine the mindset that would “see how the sausage is made” in science, and think that method was going to solve the universe. Everyone is aware that we’re becoming increasingly over-focused on tiny little niches.
Thankfully, "making my case" for a standard definition is not something I need to do.
It's very basic stuff.
If you are unable to work it out from the original link and description I gave or the previous reply, I think any more effort on my part will be a pointless time sink.
No, you do need to make your case--i.e. mount an argument based on evidence and reason--if you want me to believe "scientism" is real. That it has a "standard definition" is not enough. After all, you can look up in any dictionary the standard definitions for other things that are also not real, like clairvoyance, telekinesis, and palmistry. Until you or someone else does make a case, I'm going to continue believing scientism is little more than a cry from charlatans who lost the attention of their audience.
