Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

According to the author, Scientism is an extreme faith in the power of science. It is one, he claims, that is falsely premised on the belief that the social sciences employ the scientific method as accurately as do the natural sciences. Postman discusses this in Chapter 9, which begins with an attempt to show the fallacy of the social sciences. These disciplines use scientific techniques borrowed from the natural sciences to apply to social and individual behavior. In the author’s view, this is impossible. He states that the defining characteristic of science is that its theories can be proven false, but there are no experiments that can do this for social science theories. However, this forms only one part of Scientism. The belief in the social sciences goes one step further to create what Postman calls an “illusory” faith that science can provide moral guidance in answering the big questions humans face, such as how to behave and what the meaning of life is.

These are disciplines such as sociology and psychology that examine societies and social relationships. They have their origins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when French intellectuals at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris attempted to apply scientific methods used in the natural sciences to study society and human behavior.