Philosophical Sentiments Toward Scientism: A Reply to Bryant

In a reply to Mizrahi (2019), Bryant (2020) raises several methodological concerns regarding my attempt to test hypotheses about the observation that academic philosophers tend to find “scientism” threatening empirically using quantitative, corpus based methods. Chief among her methodological concerns is that numbers of philosophical publications that mention “scientism” are a “poor proxy for scholarly sentiment” (Bryant 2020, 31). In reply, I conduct a sentiment analysis that is designed to find out whether academic philosophers have negative, positive, or neutral sentiments toward “scientism.” The results of this analysis suggest that, for the most part, articles on “scientism” written by academic philosophers tend to contain mostly negative rather than positive (or neutral) sentiments about “scientism.”