Quote of the day

Courtesy of Dr. Edward Fesser's blog.  From a commenter:

I have not read Noe's post, but both of the other hostile reviews display a common tendency with naturalists. First, they point out the successes of the natural sciences, where the criteria of success are wholly pragmatic and utilitarian. Then, they tell us that because the sciences are pragmatically successful, we must defer to them for our metaphysics. So they justify scientism by appeal to purely practical considerations, while demanding that we derive our theoretical conception of the world from science on those grounds alone. 

I find this maneuver infuriating; they want play pragmatist on defense and then they want to turn around and play realist on offense. But nowhere do they ever try to seriously defend the inference from "science is really pragmatically successful" to "science tells what the world is really like." All we ever get are vague declarations about "successful research programs" and our "best theory of the world." (As if there was such a thing)