Against Scientific Imperialism

Opponents of the unity of science have generally been concerned with horizontal relations between theories, with attempts, that is, to subsume scientific accounts of complex objects under accounts of the behavior of their constituent parts. In this paper I suggest that scientific pluralism should be defended not only against this traditional physicalistic and mechanistic reductionism, but also against the imperialistic expansion of quite specialized scientific perspectives into ever wider domains of application. This tendency is particularly prevalent in scientific approaches to human behavior, and is most clearly illustrated by the imperialist aspirations of economics and evolutionary biology. Here I illustrate the problem primarily with reference to some of the worst excesses of imperialist economics.