Last Wednesday, October 27, the second session of the department seminars was held at Philosophy. Professor Joseph Milburn gave a discussion paper entitled "The (in) coherence of scientism".

The goal of the session was to present his own reformulation of the "fundamental argument" that the Dutch philosopher Rik Peels proposes against scientism. Specifically, he focuses his attention on the fourth premise of the argument: "If pre-scientific beliefs (perception, report and intuition) are not knowledge valid, there is no scientific knowledge that is valid either".

Milburn went through the session, step by step, unpacking the argument and making it more and more compact and simple. He began with the GIGO principle - a term employee in the tech world that stands for "garbage in, garbage out" -whose epistemological formulation would be as follows: a conclusion can have no greater epistemic value than the premises have. "There is this idea that a stream cannot rise higher than its source... this may be true for rivers and streams, but not for beliefs." This was accepted with laughter and nods from the audience.

From agreement with Professor Milburn, sometimes there is inferential knowledge that is correct but starts from false premises, which nullifies the GIGO principle. Likewise, another alternative principle is that we cannot have inferential knowledge without already having some relevant knowledge. But such relevant knowledge comes from report, intuition or perception. For Milburn, the answer against scientism is a simpler one and he hits the nail on the head with a definitive argument, which he illustrates with the example of lung cancer: How can we distinguish a healthy lung from a diseased one except by relying on perception?