We tend to think of scientific knowledge as the paradigm case of what knowledge should look like. But the dominant image of science does not reflect what actually goes on in the making of scientific knowledge. Real scientific knowledge relies heavily on human judgment. And it relies heavily on communities.

Humanities scholarship is hard to classify as knowledge because it normally takes a form that is quite different from scientific research, which has become nearly synonymous with knowledge. Our popular picture of scientific knowledge is a based on a caricature — the Scientific Method — which misrepresents the nature of scientific inquiry in a way that makes it look fundamentally at odds with the tenor of the humanities. When we look at how scientific knowledge actually develops, however, we find that both the process by which this occurs and the structure of the scholarly communities that oversee it are surprisingly similar to those that have defined the humanities since antiquity. This book argues for a kind of knowledge — disciplinary knowledge — that is characterized by certain social practices surrounding the production of knowledge. Both the humanities and the natural sciences routinely create disciplinary knowledge.

If the arguments in favour of historicism are so compelling, why does historicism have such relative difficulty in gaining a strong foothold, even after decades of the historical turn? This conclusion chapter focuses the structural constraints historicism faces in IR in particular and the social sciences in general. It first discusses why IR’s particular American origins as a discipline (as well the continued domination of US standards in the evaluation of IR scholarship globally) makes it difficult for historicist calls such as the one advanced by this volume to resonate in the wider discipline. It also argues, however, that the problem will not be solved automatically as American influence in the discipline and the world decreases. Approaches to IR hailing from other parts of the world have their own motivations to reject historicism even as they seem to care more about history than US based approaches. Historicism needs to be realistic about the obstacles it faces.

This chapter takes a closer look at three cognitive frameworks that are conducive to atheism: evidentialism, distantionism, and, particularly, scientism. It also explores whether scientism can rightly be considered a variety of fundamentalism.

Chapter 6, which is the last chapter, considers the importance and contemporary relevance of Thomas’s understanding of the virtues in light of what has been established in the previous chapters. The virtues are not basic to Thomas’s understanding of moral goodness in the way that they are in some contemporary versions of virtue ethics. Nevertheless, they are needed to organize and account for the various ways of living a full life. Contemporary sciences might add precision or material to Thomas’s account, but it is not clear that they require radical changes to it.

‘Scientism’ is not the artificial dissolution of an otherwise natural and good boundary that divides modern science from other interpretations of the world, such as religion or metaphysics, but constitutes the essence of modern science precisely to the extent that this latter understands itself as making a radical break with the prior study of the world that called itself ‘natural philosophy’. This chapter argues that science becomes ‘scientism’ the moment it denies it is a philosophy of the whole of reality, and pretends instead to limit itself simply to quantitative abstractions and strictly empirical methods. In restricting the scope of its inquiry, and thus claiming a certain ‘epistemic humility’ or ‘modesty’ for itself, science follows a pattern that can be discovered in other instances of the rise of modernity, such as that in politics or economics, and presents analogous problems. The only way to avoid scientism, that is, the totalitarian domination of an abstract conception of nature, is to recover the original aspiration of science as an inquiry into being qua mobile: science must recognize itself most basically as an interpretation of nature, understood as the internal principle of motion and rest that sets the defining horizon for things.

In Chapter 1, I discuss scientism, or the belief that scientific knowledge is the most (or only) legitimate form of knowledge. My argument is that scientism mischaracterizes science as an epistemically privileged and unified method. Actual scientific practice, however, has demonstrated tremendous variability in theory and method across time, place, and disciplinary context, and can best be understood as a historically contingent human activity. Drawing on historical and philosophical critiques, I characterize scientism as a kind of science fundamentalism that insulates scientists from social and moral critique and so contributes to the institutionalization of exceptionalism and privilege. I discuss elements of scientism in professional psychology, using historical and contemporary examples to show that it is a common (perhaps even a majority) position.

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian speculative worlds are explored through their extant literature and assessed as scholarship, speculation, or philosophy. Though metaphysically and epistemologically complex, the lack of a speculative tradition with prescribed philosophy helps to explain why Assyriologists and Egyptologists often put Israel in league with the Greeks rather than the ANE world.

Contemporary philosophers often talk about the difference (and conflict) between the so-called manifest and scientific images of the world, a distinction famously introduced in 1962 by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars favoured what he termed a ‘stereoscopic’ vision of the relationship between the two images, according to which a major task of philosophy is to articulate a view of the world that simultaneously takes account of the two perspectives. Sellars’s students soon divided into two camps. One group (e.g., Patricia and Paul Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Jay Rosenberg) has taken the position that whenever a conflict arises, the scientific image trumps the manifest one. A second group (e.g., Robert Brandom, John McDowell, Richard Rorty), by contrast, thinks that certain differences between the two images actually point to some of the limits of science, especially, but not only, when it comes to social categories and phenomena. This chapter explores two examples that encapsulate the debate between the so-called right and left wings of Sellarsian thought, suggesting a renewed research programme for philosophy in general, aiming at articulating the original stereoscopic vision that defines human understanding of the world as an integration of the two images – essentially, a confluence of common sense and scientific sense.

This chapter explores why we should think common sense has epistemic authority. First, it lays out exactly what common sense and the supposed epistemic authority of common sense amount to. It then assesses seven proposals that we find in the literature as to why common sense has epistemic authority. They say, respectively, that common-sense beliefs are irresistible; that there are no serious epistemic alternatives to thinking that common-sense beliefs have epistemic authority; that common-sense beliefs are certain, or at least more certain than any alternatives; that common-sense beliefs are instances of knowledge; that common-sense beliefs are vague and ambiguous and, therefore, likely to be true; that common-sense beliefs are the product of a reliable process of cultural evolution; and, finally, that God would not deceive us on such a large scale. The chapter argues that the first five answers are not convincing, not even jointly, but that the sixth answer is and that the seventh reply may well be combined with it.