Thank you for your reply. I’m new to Lemmy, and while replies like yours are why I’m still falling in love with it (since no platform has felt as representative of the human experience as Reddit before Helen Pao) it is a genuine pleasure to be met with careful intellectual consideration rather than misguided reductionism.

To address your point: yes, it is true that there are alternative ways to describe the practice of human abstraction of the natural realm, or "Science" which is a word that will be met by scrutiny under any ethics review for a university paper but works perfectly well in the common and fun daily discussions of any intellectually curious human.

Karl Popper is the one who perfected this for us, owing to the parallel contributions of two Jinns of knowledge who shook human and natural disciplines to their foundational assumptions: Einstein and Freud . Each published groundbreaking works using profoundly different methodologies. Popper, perhaps unintentionally—and arguably by mistake—brought this tension into sharp focus, setting in motion the philosophical move that ultimately negated Freud’s claim to scientific status and is now an (imo highly slanderous) general point of view that psychoanalysis has no merit and should therefore be discarded. By extension, this helped solidify a framework in which only certain forms of inquiry were deemed truly “scientific.” This, in turn, is why naturalistic physical abstraction and the echoes of scientism are now “painting the walls white” in every reflection of what we understand our world to be.

I was initially drawn into this because I am male and a lover of all scientific knowledge—knowledge acquired through hypothesis synthesis, verification via empirically and statistically supported evidence, and peer review. I also practice and teach at a Canadian university, though I’d prefer not to leave identifying details online. My husband (a brilliant art historian and big advocate member of the LGBTQ+ community and reform of logically outdated concepts such as race, gender, work and others), had the insight to engage me in a careful, sustained dialogue debating and reflecting on every facet of my materialist worldview. Through this, it became easier to understand why societal mental health is in its current state, and why humans seem (at least to my eyes) less self-aware than in prior eras. It had also a profound effect in allowing me to understand so much of myself and only got better as I became more and more nuanced in how I abstracted upon thoughts. But it also kept being a friction point on linguistics and academic nomenclature and yes, I do still believe that the abuse of language often made by calling academic disciplines "Science" is why "common sense" and popular points of views have done such a disservice to "human sciences" (despite them not using the scientific method).

This dialogue brought me to realize that the natural sciences are merely the tip of the iceberg, and that humanistic discourse plunges into far deeper waters. The journey has been mentally taxing, if I may share my lived experience, and I now feel a certain intellectual jealousy toward my husband's discipline. I’ve come to believe that the humanities, scientism, and, by extension, the common abuse of language (such as treating “Science” as a monolithic entity) do a profound disservice to the second half of what it means to see the world as a human. Human and Natural sciences operate in a dichotomy after all and this is why the world can be interpreted as; There is everything outside of you, and then there is everything inside of you. The interior world remains a profound puzzle, one that still demands enormous focus. In my view, significant reforms in scientific methodology are urgently needed, especially as the dominant model has been a systemic impediment to disciplines like psychology and anthropology. And if I can pique your curiosity; below is a good paper on the issue if you happen to be tied to academic practice and if you are looking for a good challenge, natural sciences (in my eyes as I now get older and wiser) are total child's play compared to how more robust and taxing humanities can be from a logical standpoint.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368879558_Hoskins_1_Emerson_in_the_Digital_Age_The_Transcendent_Potential_of_Human_Nature