Scientism is the view that only scientific claims are meaningful. It is often widely abused as a term to refer to science and attitudes associated with science, and its primary use these days is as a pejorative.[1]
The non-pejorative, and therefore boring, sense of the term denotes the “methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist.”[2][3] This meaning is rarely seen in the wild.
The pejorative sense, in which it is a general-purpose snarl word, is the one you will see in action.[4] This usage seems to date to Friedrich von Hayek’s 1943 essay “Scientism and the Study of Society.”[5] Because the mad scientists are prowling the streets! ==>
