Is Scientism a significant threat to science?

I'd argue that it can't be.The argument would go something like this. Suppose we found some non-scientific method of gaining knowledge about some subject, let's call it an "oracle". Of course, for it to really have found this method, for us to use it, and for it to "surpass" what we presently have, we have to know that that's what we've found. How would we know, then, that the oracle was a valid method of gaining knowledge at all? Well, we'd have to test it against reality to see if it works. But once we've done that, and found that it works, then the oracle is a scientific instrument, it has been validated by the scientific method, and the fact that it works is a scientific fact. The oracle would just be another thing like a thermometer or a spectrometer that we've shown can be used to find stuff out.It's like that joke: "What do you call alternative medicine that's been tested and proved effective? --- Medicine!" In the same way, a method for finding things out that has been demonstrated to work empirically is de facto part of the scientific method.

But how would we know that it worked, if not by comparing what it told us to the facts?Let's suppose that someone comes forward and says that he can perform psychic remote viewing. "OK," we say, "I'll go into the other room, and you tell me what I'm doing." If he can do that, then we have verified his psychic sense scientifically, just as we can verify my more mundane powers of sight and hearing.But suppose he replies, "Ah, my method only works on planetary surfaces no nearer to us then the Andromeda galaxy. Let me tell you the freaky things the aliens are doing over there." Suppose, moreover, that he was telling the truth. Then we wouldn't know that he was telling the truth, because we'd have no way of telling whether he really did have this power or was merely making stuff up. He himself, if he was honest, wouldn't know whether he was really capable of remote viewing or just of inducing complex hallucinations in himself.I could perhaps think of a better and more rigorous example if I thought about it a bit longer, but you see what I'm getting at?Science does not, after all, really "bootstrap" itself, it is not a closed system of thought. It ascends not by tugging on its own bootlaces but by climbing laboriously upwards from the level plain of our qualia.