The Problem of the Hammer
My father is a retired urban planner. For some of his career, he worked with civil engineers. Over the years, he mentioned on several occasions that his engineering colleagues had trouble thinking outside their engineering boxes. They treated every problem as if it were an engineering problem, and consequently became torpefied when they realized that they couldn’t solve non-engineering problems with engineering methods.
It is tempting for some people to assume that one of their tools – one which is reliable at solving a particular kind of problem – is thus apt for solving all kinds of problems. This is the problem of the hammer. For some folks, when they have a hammer, everything looks to them like a nail.
In our society, science is a successful enterprise – though the precise nature of this success is debated. Is the success of science a matter of its capacity to provide us with knowledge? Does science provide knowledge? (It depends on the definition of ‘knowledge.’) Or is the success of science to be found in some other epistemic good, say, (merely) reasonable belief? Maybe science is successful primarily because it provides us with technology, a fruit of applied science which enables us to control the natural environment in various ways. Perhaps the methods of science help us to predict some things in a dependable manner, or to gather evidence responsibly. These are interesting questions to pursue in another post. For now, however, I want to explore the hammer problem.
Many believe that because science is relatively reliable for solving problems about the natural world, science is, therefore, able to solve every problem and, moreover, that science is our only problem-solving tool. This is the position of scientism, which is (roughly) the epistemological view and corresponding attitude that propositions can be known only via scientific methodology.[1] But many of our important problems are not about the natural world.[2] Faced with this fact, the advocate of scientism might be inclined to deny that they are legitimate problems.
In short, a society of scientism treats every problem as if it were a nail to be pounded with a scientific hammer. If it cannot be so pounded, then it is dismissed as a non-problem, thus leaving it unresolved.
[1] This is a self-refuting claim, since the claim itself cannot be known via such methods.
[2] That is, assuming that ontological naturalism is false.