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Antiscience is a set of attitudes and a form of anti-intellectualism that involves 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 and the effectiveness of vaccination. It also includes pseudoscience, methods that claim to be scientific but reject the scientific method. Antiscience can lead to belief in false conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Lack of trust in science has been linked to the promotion of political extremism, corruption and distrust in medical treatments.
Hobbes' stance is regarded by Ian Shapiro as an antiscience position:
In his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics,...published 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.'Ian Shapiro, Reflections on Skinner and Pettit, Hobbes Studies, 22 (2009), pp. 185–191, citation from pp. 190–191In 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".Richard H Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 2000, p. 199 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. O. Wilson (1929–2021) to the list.Jones, p. 213
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), claimed that science can lead to immorality. "Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality" and his "critique of science has much to teach us about the dangers involved in our political commitment to scientific progress, and about the ways in which the future happiness of mankind might be secured". Nevertheless, Rousseau does not state in his Discourses that sciences are necessarily bad, and states that figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton should be held in high regard. "Bacon, Descartes and Newton, those teachers of mankind, had themselves no teachers. What guide indeed could have taken them so far as their sublime genius directed them?" In the conclusion to the Discourses, he says that these (aforementioned) can cultivate sciences to great benefit, and that morality's corruption is mostly because of society's bad influence on scientists. Compare: "But so long as power alone is on one side, and knowledge and understanding alone on the other, the learned will seldom make great objects their study, princes will still more rarely do great actions, and the peoples will continue to be, as they are, mean, corrupt and miserable." (Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses)
William Blake (1757–1827) reacted strongly in his paintings and writings against the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and is seen as being perhaps the earliest (and almost certainly the most prominent and enduring) example of what is seen by historians as the aesthetic or Romanticism antiscience response. For example, in his 1795 poem "Auguries of Innocence", Blake describes the beautiful and natural European robin imprisoned by what one might interpret as the materialistic cage of Newtonian mathematics and science. William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence". Compare from the same poem:
The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Blake's painting of Newton depicts the scientist "as a misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground". Notes to Blake's Newton, at Princeton University Blake thought that "Newton, Bacon, and John Locke with their emphasis on reason were nothing more than 'the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan's Doctrine'...the picture progresses from exuberance and colour on the left, to sterility and blackness on the right. In Blake's view Newton brings not light, but night". Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason, Tate Gallery, London In a 1940 poem, W.H. Auden summarises Blake's anti-scientific views by saying that he "broke off relations in a curse, with the Newtonian Universe".W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter, 1940", in Collected Poems, Edited by Edward Mendelson, London: Faber, 1994, p. 203
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
One recent biographer of Newton Stephen D Snobelen, Writings on Newton, 2007 considers him more as a renaissance alchemy, natural philosopher, and magician rather than a true representative of scientific Enlightenment, as popularized by Voltaire (1694–1778) and other Newtonianism.
Antiscience issues are seen as a fundamental consideration in the historical transition from "pre-science" or "protoscience" such as that evident in alchemy. Many disciplines that pre-date the widespread adoption and acceptance of the scientific method, such as geometry and astronomy, are not seen as anti-science. However, some of the orthodoxies within those disciplines that predate a scientific approach (such as those orthodoxies repudiated by the discoveries of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)) are seen as being a product of an anti-scientific stance.
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882) questions scientific dogmatism:
"... in Science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, maybe they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge – though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that Science too rests on a faith; there is no Science 'without presuppositions.' The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the principle, the faith, the conviction is expressed: 'nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it, everything else has only second-rate value".
The term "scientism", originating in science studies, was adopted and is used by and philosophers of science to describe the views, beliefs and behavior of strong supporters of applying ostensibly scientific concepts beyond its traditional disciplines. See The OED records the word from 1870 and the sense here given from 1871. Specifically, scientism promotes science as the best or only objective means to determine normative and epistemological values. The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards. The word is commonly used in a pejorative sense, applying to individuals who seem to be treating science in a similar way to a religion. The term reductionism is occasionally used in a similarly pejorative way (as a more subtle attack on scientists). However, some scientists feel comfortable being labelled as reductionists, while agreeing that there might be conceptual and philosophical shortcomings of reductionism.George J. Klir, Facets of Systems Science, New York: Springer, 1991, pp. 263–265
However, non-reductionist (see Emergentism) views of science have been formulated in varied forms in several scientific fields like statistical physics, chaos theory, Complex systems, cybernetics, systems theory, systems biology, ecology, information theory, etc. Such fields tend to assume that strong interactions between units produce new phenomena in "higher" levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism. For example, it is not valuable (or currently possible) to describe a chess game or using quantum mechanics. The emergentist view of science ("More is Different", in the words of 1977 Nobel-laureate physicist Philip W. Anderson)
The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left,Victoria Daubert, Sue Ellen Moran, Origins, goals, and tactics of the U.S. anti-nuclear protest movement, Rand, 1985, p. 16Jeffrey Broadbent, Vicky Brockman, East Asian Social Movements: Power Protest and Change in a Dynamic, Springer, 2009, p. 69 Anti-nuclear Campaigners and the Qwerty Keyboard, Marbury, 31 March 2011 has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power, and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy.Samuel MacCracken, The War Against the Atom, 1982, Basic Books, pp. 60–61 Opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has also been associated with the left.
Characteristics of antiscience associated with the right include the appeal to conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe what they believe, in an attempt to undermine the confidence or power usually associated to science (e.g., in global warming conspiracy theories). In modern times, it has been argued that right-wing politics carries an anti-science tendency. While some have suggested that this is innate to either rightists or their beliefs, others have argued it is a "quirk" of a historical and political context in which scientific findings happened to challenge or appeared to challenge the worldviews of rightists rather than leftists.Kerr, John Richard. "Why do we argue about science? Exploring the psychological antecedents of rejection of science." (2020), p. 26Lewandowsky, Stephan, and Klaus Oberauer. "Motivated rejection of science." Current Directions in Psychological Science 25, no. 4 (2016): 217–222 220
A frequent basis of antiscientific sentiment is religious theism with literal interpretations of sacred text. Here, scientific theories that conflict with divinely inspired knowledge are regarded as flawed. Over the centuries, religious institutions have been hesitant to embrace such ideas as heliocentrism and planetary orbit because they contradict the dominant interpretation of various passages of scripture. More recently, the body of creation theologies known collectively as creationism, including the teleological theory of intelligent design, has been promoted by Religion theists (primarily Fundamentalism) in response to the process of evolution by natural selection.Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, Shinji Okamoto Public Acceptance of Evolution Science 11 August 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 765–766 One of the more extreme creation theologies, young Earth creationism, also finds itself in conflict with research in cosmology, historical geology, and the abiogenesis. Young Earth creationism is predominantly exclusive to fundamentalist Protestantism, though it is also present in Catholic Church and Judaism, albeit to a lesser extent.
Studies suggest that a belief in spirituality rather than religion may better indicate an anti-science position.
To the extent that attempts to overcome antiscience sentiments have failed, some argue that a different approach to science advocacy is needed. One such approach says that it is important to develop a more accurate understanding of those who deny science (avoiding stereotyping them as backward and uneducated) and also to attempt science outreach via those who share cultural values with target audiences, such as scientists who also hold religious beliefs.
Recent developments and discussions around antiscience attitudes reveal how deeply intertwined these beliefs are with social, political, and psychological factors. A study published by Ohio State News on July 11, 2022, identified four primary bases that underpin antiscience beliefs: doubts about the credibility of scientific sources, identification with groups holding antiscience attitudes, conflicts between scientific messages and personal beliefs, and discrepancies between the presentation of scientific messages and individuals' thinking styles. These factors are exacerbated in the current political climate, where ideology significantly influences people's acceptance of science, particularly on topics that have become politically polarized, such as vaccines and climate change. The politicization of science poses a significant challenge to public health and safety, particularly in managing global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The following quotes explore this aspect of four major areas of antiscience: philosophy, sociology, ecology and political.
Many philosophers are "divided as to whether reduction should be a central strategy for understanding the world". However, many agree that "there are, nevertheless, reasons why we want science to discover properties and explanations other than reductive physical ones". Such issues stem "from an antireductionist worry that there is no absolute conception of reality, that is, a characterization of reality such as... science claims to provide". Peter W. Ross and Dale Turner, "Sensibility Theory and Conservative Complacency"
Glazer also criticises the therapists and patients, "for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world-view". In contrast, Brian Martin criticized Gross and Levitt by saying that "their basic approach is to attack constructivists for not being Positivism," and that science is "presented as a unitary object, usually identified with scientific knowledge. It is portrayed as neutral and objective. Second, science is claimed to be under attack by 'antiscience' which is composed essentially of ideologues who are threats to the neutrality and objectivity that are fundamental to science. Third, a highly selective attack is made on the arguments of 'antiscience'". Such people allegedly then "routinely equate critique of scientific knowledge with hostility to science, a jump that is logically unsupportable and empirically dubious". Having then "constructed two artificial entities, a unitary 'science' and a unitary 'academic left', each reduced to epistemology essences, Gross and Levitt proceed to attack. They pick out figures in each of several areas – science studies, postmodernism, feminism, environmentalism, AIDS activism – and criticise their critiques of science".
The writings of Young serve to illustrate more antiscientific views: "The strength of the antiscience movement and of alternative technology is that their advocates have managed to retain Utopian vision while still trying to create concrete instances of it". Robert M. Young, Science is Social Relations "The real social, ideological and economic forces shaping science...have been opposed to the point of suppression in many quarters. Most scientists hate it and label it 'antiscience'. But it is urgently needed, because it makes science self-conscious and hopefully self-critical and accountable with respect to the forces which shape research priorities, criteria, goals".
Genetically modified foods also bring about antiscience sentiment. The general public has recently become more aware of the dangers of a poor diet, as there have been numerous studies that show that the two are inextricably linked. Carol Tucker Foreman, Genetic Modification of Foods: The Public's Mistrust of Science and Science's Misunderstanding of the Public, "Consumer Choice" Anti-science dictates that science is untrustworthy, because it is never complete and always being revised, which would be a probable cause for the fear that the general public has of genetically modified foods despite scientific reassurance that such foods are safe.
Antivaccinationists rely on whatever comes to hand presenting some of their arguments as if scientific; however, a strain of antiscience is part of their approach.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, conflicting responses to public health measures and vaccine acceptance have highlighted the extent to which science has been politicized. Such polarization suggests that for some, rejecting scientific consensus or public health guidance serves as an expression of political allegiance or skepticism towards perceived authority figures.
This politicization of science complicates efforts to address public health crises and undermines the broader social contract that underpins scientific research and its application for the public good. The challenge lies not only in combating misinformation but also in bridging ideological divides that affect public trust in science. Strategies to counteract antiscience attitudes may need to encompass more than just presenting factual information; they might also need to engage with the underlying social and psychological factors that contribute to these attitudes, fostering dialogue that acknowledges different viewpoints and seeks common ground.
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