Abstract
Especially since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, a vibrant enthusiasm for the sciences has led to increasing faith in empirical methods of learning. At its best, this tendency pits speculation and curiosity against careful scientific investigations of physical reality. At its worst, it becomes a narrow fixation on specific and reductive ways of understanding reality. This latter sort of scientism is unfortunate, whereas science itself contains huge optimism about reality and our understanding of it. The sciences seem to give great explanatory power, being able even to explain the most fundamental dynamical laws of micro-causal interactions right up to macro-scale effects. To the early scientist and learned community at large, the sciences could reveal and explain the hidden designs of nature, or to usurp the supposed role for a divine design entirely, depending upon how one viewed the results of Newton, for example.
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Rainey, S. (2023). Research Contexts. In: Philosophical Perspectives on Brain Data. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27170-0_2
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