Ritualistic Science

From Blog of the Borg

Much of “science” today is not so much scientific as scientistic. That means that the forms and behaviors of science are used, but the underlying logic is missing. Scientism is very much like the phenomenon of cargo cults, in which Pacific islanders built airports and control towers out of wood in order to bring back the planes that came with World War II. They didn’t realize that air traffic control panels actually did something, so they simply built facsimiles out of wood.

We can see scientism in every aspect of published research today. We see it in papers that think that theory is a set of interconnected hypotheses, rather than as the reason why X leads to Y. We see it in work in which each hypothesis is justified by a collection of independent, even mutually contradictory, reasons why the hypothesis must be true. Instead of the hypotheses being tests of an underlying theory, the hypotheses are the principal claims of the theory, and the justifications for these hypothesis can be a smorgasbord of ideas that embody entirely different theories.

Another aspect of scientism is the belief that there are universal best practices in research that are independent of the research question and the research setting. As a result, there is a great deal of argumentation from authority. E.g., we use this measure because so and so did. We even see it used to justify hypothesis: we expect X to lead to Y because so-and-so said it would.