"[5] With respect to the philosophy of science, the term scientism frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism[6][7] and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek,[8] philosophers of science such as Karl Popper,[9] and philosophers such as Mary Midgley,[10] the later Hilary Putnam,[10][11] and Tzvetan Todorov[12] to describe (for example) the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methods and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measured or confirmatory.
[21] The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism with respect to all topics of human knowledge.
[34] He predicted that "in coming years, the chief political dividing line will fall less and less among the traditional division between 'right' and 'left', but increasingly between the adherents of scientism, who advocate 'technological progress at any price', and their opponents, i.e., roughly speaking, those who regard the enhancement of life, in all its richness and variety, as being the supreme value".
[39] Philosophers John N. Gray and Thomas Nagel have made similar criticisms against popular works by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, atheist author Sam Harris, and writer Malcolm Gladwell.
[52] Christian philosopher Peter Williams argued in 2013 that it is only by conflating science with scientism that New Atheists feel qualified to "pontificate on metaphysical issues".
[53] Daniel Dennett responded to religious criticism of his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by saying that accusations of scientism "[are] an all-purpose, wild-card smear ...
[55] Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton argued that Christopher Hitchens possessed an "old-fashioned scientistic notion of what counts as evidence" that reduces knowledge to what can and cannot be proven by scientific procedure.
[57] Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, discussed resemblances between scientism and traditional religions, indicating the cult of personality that develops for some scientists.
[29] Genetic biologist Austin L. Hughes wrote in the conservative journal The New Atlantis that scientism has much in common with superstition: "the stubborn insistence that something ... has powers which no evidence supports.
In his essay Against Method he depicted the process of contemporary scientific education as a mild form of indoctrination, intended for "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rules".
Scientism has been explicitly opposed by dogmatists and obscurantists of all stripes, such as the neoliberal ideologist Friedrich von Hayek and the "critical theorist" Jürgen Habermas, a ponderous writer who managed to amalgamate Hegel, Marx, and Freud, and decreed that "science is the ideology of late capitalism.
[75] In the introduction to his collected works on the sociology of religion, Max Weber asked why "the scientific, the artistic, the political, or the economic development [elsewhere] ... did not enter upon that path of rationalization which is peculiar to the Occident?"
Indeed it is precisely modernization research that has contributed to the currency of the expression "postmodern" even among social scientists.Habermas is critical of pure instrumental rationality, arguing that the "Social Life–World" of subjective experiencing is better suited to literary expression, whereas the sciences deal with "intersubjectively accessible experiences" that can be generalized in a formal language, while the literary arts "must generate an intersubjectivity of mutual understanding in each concrete case".