Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson
Scientism
Scientism has two meanings. One is the almost religious belief that science may eventually understand and solve all natural and human problems. This kind of scientism has also been called “scientific fundamentalism.”
The second meaning refers to the partial or deceptive use of methods generally recognized as scientific.
Indeed, there are situations where people actively deceive and try to appear scientific for some kind of personal, economic or political gain. For examples of this see Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Hall of Science by W. Broad and N. Wade (1982).
Also related to the second meaning, a specious argument may be given a scientific gloss so as to seem legitimate. We find this in so many TV ads where professional actors wear white lab coats, trying to look like authoritative scientists or doctors while selling products ranging from automobiles to toothpaste.
Likewise, statistics may be disproportionally represented in bloated or extended bar graphs to make results look more significant than they really are, another common advertising trick that could rightly be called scientism.
Because the entire definition of science is problematic, one could say that the idea of scientism, itself, is also fraught with difficulty.
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