If another civil war happens, it will be the culmination of the culture war that has been going on since long before I was born. It is a war of worldviews.
My preferred label for the worldview I happen to accept is scientific rationalism. It is the claim that reason and empirical observation are separately necessary and jointly sufficient to produce whatever useful knowledge we may have about ourselves and world we inhabit. It is a melding of empiricism and rationalism, regarding both as essential and denying priority to either. It rejects pure rationalism on grounds that we can learn nothing by reason alone. It rejects pure empiricism on grounds that observation unaided by reason is uninformative. It denies priority to either in recognizing that neither can be justified by appealing to the other. As David Hume might have put it, reason tells us how to think while observation tells us what we have to think about.
The history of philosophy is sometimes portrayed as an ongoing conflict between rationalists and empiricists. It is unlikely that any important philosopher ever was purely one or the other, at least in actual practice, though some are habitually assigned to one camp or the other. Historically, Plato perhaps came closest to advocating a pure rationalism. Aristotle, though credited with the first formulation of the rules of logic, is also customarily designated the originator of empiricism. Most of the work in philosophy since their time has been construed as favoring one or the other, with occasional attempts, such as Kant’s, at reconciliation. Scientific rationalism says no reconciliation is necessary. It says that the proper exercise of one cannot be in conflict with the proper exercise of the other.
That leaves room, according to some, for a large body of speculation that, we are assured by its advocates, does not contradict established science but rather contradicts only a dogmatic adherence to a kind of scientific orthodoxy. Scientific rationalism does tend to support the orthodoxy, but it denies doing so dogmatically. The scientific enterprise is defined by its history, and it has historically put the burden of proof on those who challenge whatever is the prevailing orthodoxy. That challenge has been met, successfully, often enough to refute those who claim that scientific orthodoxy never permits itself to be overturned.
We then come to certain ideas, variously called transcendental, metaphysical, or faith-based, for which their advocates admit to having no observational basis. These are ideas are admitted to be outside the purview of science, and we are asked not to hold that against them. We are told that their insusceptibility to empirical confirmation is not sufficient reason to doubt them.
Scientific rationalism, in response, claims that doubt needs no reason. It is our beliefs that we must justify, not our unbelief.
But must that justification be scientific? Scientific rationalists generally think so, but I intend no dogmatism on this point. I offer scientific rationalism not as a set of epistemological doctrines that must be accepted as the One True Philosophy, but rather as what the sociologist Max Weber called an ideal type, with which probably no one is or could be in complete conformity. And by “ideal,” I intend no connotation of “perfect.” The perfect scientific rationalist, if such a person could exist, would not be a perfect thinker. (Not that a perfect thinker could exist, either.)
What I would say, if I reject some proposition on grounds that it is scientifically indefensible, is that I am not making a culpable mistake even if the proposition happens to be true. I will concede that those who believe the proposition could be right for all I know, and that whatever means they use to defend their belief could possibly provide them all the justification they need. But having conceded that, I am persuaded that I remain justified in rejecting that belief, and that its scientific indefensibility is all the justification I need for rejecting it.
The roots of scientific rationalism are in the European Enlightenment, a perhaps unfortunate and certainly oversimplified label for the historical period so designated. Insofar as the period’s thinkers were promoting such ideals as reason, science, and humanism, the Enlightenment was characterized more by its methodology than its conclusions. Some Enlightenment philosophers, such as Hume, were noted for their religious skepticism, but others, such as Berkeley and Kant, championed the use of reason to defend religious belief. Similarly, a variety of political philosophies seemed to be consistent with Enlightenment ideals.
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(This page last updated on November 7, 2019.)