In post 10 of this series, I quoted a Jesuit philosopher, John Wellmuth, who saw in scientism an enemy of metaphysics. By contrast, Wittgensteinian critiques of scientism are more likely to see scientism, itself, as symptomatic of a residual attachment to metaphysics. For example, here's Warren Goldfarb in 1989:
It does make him [Wittgenstein] antiscientistic, against the smug and unexamined assurance that what wants explanation is obvious, and that scientific tools are immediately applicable. For Wittgenstein, scientism is just as misguidedly metaphysical as traditional, more transparently a prioristic, approaches. An immediate inclination to look to science for answers can in fact be an expression of a philosophical picture. Goldfarb, 'Wittgenstein, Mind, and Scientism', Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989)Beyond the sphere of Wittgenstein interpretation, one finds several prominent analytic philosophers disapproving of scientism. For instance, Michael Dummett, in the course of reviewing Chomsky's Rules and Representations, observes that Chomsky's attitude 'contrasts not only with the widespread irrationalism of our day but with the equally repellent scientism usually opposed to it' (London Review of Books, 1981). In The Nature and Future of Philosophy, Dummett says that scientism involves regarding the 'natural sciences as the only true channel of knowledge' (p. 35). That's from a chapter called 'Psychology and Scientism'.
Here's Hilary Putnam in his Gifford Lectures, which were published as Renewing Philosophy:
Analytic philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism. Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like. ('Preface', p. x)E. J. Lowe defined scientism as 'the doctrine that such legitimate metaphysical questions as there are belong to the province of the empirical sciences' (The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time, p. 5).
These philosophers take scientism to include a metaphysical project in which metaphysical questions will be answered by the modern, natural sciences. The metaphysical impulse thus survives in scientism, at least in the sense that the old metaphysical questions are still treated as well-formed foci of inquiry. Analytic critics of scientism then divide into, on the one hand, those (e.g., Wellmuth and Lowe) who accept the metaphysical questions as legitimate but seek the answers outside the natural sciences and, on the other hand, those (e.g., Wittgensteinians) who reject the metaphysical questions themselves as involving conceptual confusions.
I noted my surprise (in post 9 of this series) that accusations of 'scientism' were directed in the 1870s at members of the X Club and not so much at positivists. Presumably, consistent positivists hold towards metaphysics the same attitude as Wittgensteinians; specifically, the attitude that once we expose the illegitimacy of metaphysical questions, we will (or ought to?) cease engaging in metaphysics. Perhaps 19th-Century critics of scientism were willing to allow that the positivists of their day really did avoid metaphysical beliefs; or perhaps the critics saw that accusing positivists of inconsistently harboring metaphysical commitments would require more argument and judged this extra effort to be not worth their time in view of the slighter influence of positivism in the anglophone nations. Perhaps the critics saw the more prominent and influential X-Clubbers, who were not positivists, as being a bigger threat and interpreted some X-Clubbers as explicitly touting a metaphysical position (materialism) based on the natural sciences. If so, then these 19th-Century critics seem to have been making an argument very similar to those advanced by Wellmuth and Lowe, the focus of which was not to catch the positivists out but was, instead, to take on the metaphysical scientists, the scientists who drew metaphysical conclusions from evidence proffered by the natural sciences.
