Antiscience

Antiscience is a position that rejects science and the scientific method. People holding antiscientific views do not accept that science is an objective method, or that it generates universal knowledge. They also contend that scientific reductionism in particular is an inherently limited means to reach understanding of the complex world we live in.

In the beginnings of the scientific revolution, scientists such as Robert Boyle found themselves in conflict with those such as Thomas Hobbes, who were skeptical of whether science was a satisfactory way to obtain genuine knowledge about the world.

Hobbes' stance is sometimes regarded 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.'

It was also Hobbes who "put forth the idea of the significance of the nonrational in human behaviour." Jones goes on to group Hobbes along with others he classes as 'antireductionists' and 'individualists,' such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham and J S Mill, and then he adds Karl Popper, John Rawls, and E. O. Wilson.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, 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. 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.

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