Antiscience

Antiscience is a set of attitudes that involve 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. It also includes pseudoscience, methods that claim to be scientific but reject the scientific method. Antiscience leads to belief in conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Lack of faith in science has been linked to promote political extremism and distrust in medical treatments. 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.' 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". 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.