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Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
What sets the practice of rigorously tested, sound science apart from pseudoscience? In this volume, the contributors seek to answer this question, known to philosophers of science as “the demarcation problem.” This issue has a long history in philosophy, stretching as far back as the early twentieth century and the work of Karl Popper. But by the late 1980s, scholars in the field began to treat the demarcation problem as impossible to solve and futile to ponder. However, the essays that Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry have assembled in this volume make a rousing case for the unequivocal importance of reflecting on the separation between pseudoscience and sound science. Moreover, the demarcation problem is not a purely theoretical dilemma of mere academic interest: it affects parents’ decisions to vaccinate children and governments’ willingness to adopt policies that prevent climate change. Pseudoscience often mimics science, using the superficial language and trappings of actual scientific research to seem more respectable. Even a well-informed public can be taken in by such questionable theories dressed up as science. Pseudoscientific beliefs compete with sound science on the health pages of newspapers for media coverage and in laboratories for research funding. Now more than ever the ability to separate genuine scientific findings from spurious ones is vital, and The Philosophy of Pseudoscience provides ground for philosophers, sociologists, historians, and laypeople to make decisions about what science is or isn’t.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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675 people want to read
About the author
Massimo Pigliucci
83 books1,130 followersMassimo Pigliucci is an author, blogger, podcaster, as well as the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York.
His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press).
His new book is Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (The Experiment). More by Massimo at https://massimopigliucci.org.
His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press).
His new book is Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (The Experiment). More by Massimo at https://massimopigliucci.org.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 10, 2014
I've spent a fair chunk of my life living in academia, and one thing academics do is go to conferences. I am deplorably familiar with the conference life so well described in David Lodge's Small World: you spend a few days hanging out with odd people you don't have a great deal in common with, eating indigestible meals and drinking horrible coffee, and, in between, listening to papers which in most cases are poorly written, badly presented, and give you an irresistible urge to catch up on the sleep you didn't get the night before. It couldn't be more obvious that you're wasting your time and your university's money. And yet, by some magic process that I'm still unable to explain, you fly home, get over your jetlag, and discover to your surprise that you've learned a great deal. Somehow, while you were snoozing through all those dull talks, you've picked up a heap of useful information which will over the next year influence your own research, point you towards interesting things that you'd never thought of reading, and very likely get quoted in your own papers -- which, needless to say, are infinitely superior to all the nonsense that's just been inflicted on you.
Reading Pigliucci and Boudry (hereafter P&B) felt rather like attending a virtual conference on the philosophy of pseudo-science, a subject which I'd barely even suspected might exist until I stumbled across their book. The editors have collected together 23 chapters, each about 20 pages long, where a variety of people have been invited to contribute their thoughts on the question of how to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. Given the format, it was inevitable that there would be overlap and repetition, and that some of the papers would be appallingly soporific. And yet, the magic effect has worked again. I don't know how it's happened, but I'm suddenly fascinated by this odd little corner of philosophy. Even more mysteriously, I seem to know a certain amount about it.
Why would anyone even want to study such a thing? Isn't it obvious? I mean, uh, scientists are these guys in white coats who use mathematical formulas and put things in test tubes, and pseudo-scientists are crazies who believe in creationism and UFOs and astrology and shit. Right? Well, actually, no. First of all, I was startled to learn that the default position among philosophers of science is that you can't give unambiguous criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science. An influential paper written in 1983 by a guy called Laudan, whom I'd never heard of, had convinced most people that the question isn't even interesting; P&B's book is a reaction to the accepted orthodoxy, intended to reopen the debate.
I was even more startled to learn why Laudan had written his paper. There had been a high-profile 1981 case, McLean v Arkansas, which sought to overturn a ruling that so-called "Creation Science" would be taught in Arkansas schools. In order to win the case, the petitioners were obliged to convince the judge that "Creation Science" was not in fact science at all, but religion in disguise, the teaching of which would violate laws on the separation of church and state. The petitioners won, but some philosophers of science were unhappy with their tactics. Laudan argued that "Creation Science" is in fact science, because it makes falsifiable predictions -- a property which many philosophers, following Popper, took as the hallmark of what constitutes science. There's no reasonable doubt about the falsifiability, since virtually all of the predictions made by Creationism have indeed been falsified. So, at least on this argument, it's not pseudo-science, just bad science. But there's no law against teaching bad science, which is why the lawyers in McLean v Arkansas took the line they did. Laudan thought that the expediencies of the case had violated sound philosophical principles. He argued, to many people's satisfaction, that you can't give general grounds for distinguishing between pseudo-science and science; you can only distinguish, on a case-by-case basis, between good science and bad science.
In P&B, many, though by no means all, of the contributors argue against Laudan, but it's amazing how slippery the reasoning is. Yes, there's no doubt that some belief systems can safely be labelled pseudo-science. Unless you are willing to hypothesize ubiquitous, all-powerful conspiracies capable of distorting or suppressing any inconvenient fact, there's no way Young Earth Creationism or astrology can possibly be correct. Similarly, if you are at all familiar with the evidence, it is impossible to believe that Newtonian physics and neo-Darwinian evolution are not at least good approximations to what is actually happening in the world. In clear cases of the first kind, the people supporting the "pseudo-scientific" theories are transparently dishonest or deluded, and in clear cases of the second kind it is equally evident that the "scientific" theories are being proposed by honest, hard-working researchers who have a mountain of facts to support their claims. But, unfortunately, the devil is in the detail, and there are so many examples which inconveniently fall in between these two extremes.
Nowadays, most people with a scientific world-view consider evolution as a proven fact; but, when you look at the history, it turns out that it was classified as pseudo-science for quite a long time. In the opposite direction, there were several decades when majority opinion considered Freudian psychology as scientific, but most of the people in P&B who refer to it put it in the pseudo-science bin. There is an uneasy reluctance to talk about string theory; it's mentioned as "borderline" a couple of times, and as "science" a couple of times, but no one feels keen to discuss the fact that it fails Popper's test, by not making any obviously falsifiable predictions. One very nice contribution by Schackel considers the ethics of belief, another subject I'd never even heard of. When we say "one ought to believe X", what exactly do we mean? Are we just saying that the weight of the evidence strongly supports X, or are we also taking into account the moral and ethical implications of believing or disbelieving X? Shackel elegantly argues that you can't, in fact, leave morals and ethics out of it; there's no such thing as "objective analysis of the facts". And scientists, as Kuhn has taught us, are very far from immune. They're all driven by their convictions; they have hunches and guesses they want to check out, and they're prepared to write off a certain amount of contrary evidence as misleading noise in the data. But how far can you push this process? Is there a clear line separating the brilliant scientist who doggedly follows his intuition where it leads him, and the crank who won't give up even when the facts are staring him in the face? You want to say that there is, but it's terribly hard to explain where the line goes.
Those damn philosophers! When I started the book, I thought I had some answers, and now all I have is a bunch of questions. If you enjoy straightforward, entertaining stuff that leaves you feeling you understand things better, then don't read it. You have been warned.
_________________________________
Having now read The Genesis Flood and briefly discussed the issues with one of the editors of this book, I am very doubtful about Laudan's argument that creationism makes falsifiable claims, and is thus bad science rather than pseudoscience. The authors of The Genesis Flood state clearly, many times, that they do not consider it possible for science to say anything definitive about the past, because they believe that the laws of nature were different then; the only way we can gain any certain knowledge of the past is through reliable eyewitness testimony. In the case of the Flood, they go on to say, the only witnesses were Noah, his immediate family, and God, and the only reliable testimony we have is the contents of the Book of Genesis.
So there is no way we can falsify a creationist claim. If it turns out that the claim is wildly at odds with our present scientific knowledge, they respond by saying that the laws of nature were different then, so the argument doesn't apply. Which does of course beg the question of why the greater part of The Genesis Flood consists of attempts to try and justify their account in terms of modern-day science - but that is another story.
Reading Pigliucci and Boudry (hereafter P&B) felt rather like attending a virtual conference on the philosophy of pseudo-science, a subject which I'd barely even suspected might exist until I stumbled across their book. The editors have collected together 23 chapters, each about 20 pages long, where a variety of people have been invited to contribute their thoughts on the question of how to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. Given the format, it was inevitable that there would be overlap and repetition, and that some of the papers would be appallingly soporific. And yet, the magic effect has worked again. I don't know how it's happened, but I'm suddenly fascinated by this odd little corner of philosophy. Even more mysteriously, I seem to know a certain amount about it.
Why would anyone even want to study such a thing? Isn't it obvious? I mean, uh, scientists are these guys in white coats who use mathematical formulas and put things in test tubes, and pseudo-scientists are crazies who believe in creationism and UFOs and astrology and shit. Right? Well, actually, no. First of all, I was startled to learn that the default position among philosophers of science is that you can't give unambiguous criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science. An influential paper written in 1983 by a guy called Laudan, whom I'd never heard of, had convinced most people that the question isn't even interesting; P&B's book is a reaction to the accepted orthodoxy, intended to reopen the debate.
I was even more startled to learn why Laudan had written his paper. There had been a high-profile 1981 case, McLean v Arkansas, which sought to overturn a ruling that so-called "Creation Science" would be taught in Arkansas schools. In order to win the case, the petitioners were obliged to convince the judge that "Creation Science" was not in fact science at all, but religion in disguise, the teaching of which would violate laws on the separation of church and state. The petitioners won, but some philosophers of science were unhappy with their tactics. Laudan argued that "Creation Science" is in fact science, because it makes falsifiable predictions -- a property which many philosophers, following Popper, took as the hallmark of what constitutes science. There's no reasonable doubt about the falsifiability, since virtually all of the predictions made by Creationism have indeed been falsified. So, at least on this argument, it's not pseudo-science, just bad science. But there's no law against teaching bad science, which is why the lawyers in McLean v Arkansas took the line they did. Laudan thought that the expediencies of the case had violated sound philosophical principles. He argued, to many people's satisfaction, that you can't give general grounds for distinguishing between pseudo-science and science; you can only distinguish, on a case-by-case basis, between good science and bad science.
In P&B, many, though by no means all, of the contributors argue against Laudan, but it's amazing how slippery the reasoning is. Yes, there's no doubt that some belief systems can safely be labelled pseudo-science. Unless you are willing to hypothesize ubiquitous, all-powerful conspiracies capable of distorting or suppressing any inconvenient fact, there's no way Young Earth Creationism or astrology can possibly be correct. Similarly, if you are at all familiar with the evidence, it is impossible to believe that Newtonian physics and neo-Darwinian evolution are not at least good approximations to what is actually happening in the world. In clear cases of the first kind, the people supporting the "pseudo-scientific" theories are transparently dishonest or deluded, and in clear cases of the second kind it is equally evident that the "scientific" theories are being proposed by honest, hard-working researchers who have a mountain of facts to support their claims. But, unfortunately, the devil is in the detail, and there are so many examples which inconveniently fall in between these two extremes.
Nowadays, most people with a scientific world-view consider evolution as a proven fact; but, when you look at the history, it turns out that it was classified as pseudo-science for quite a long time. In the opposite direction, there were several decades when majority opinion considered Freudian psychology as scientific, but most of the people in P&B who refer to it put it in the pseudo-science bin. There is an uneasy reluctance to talk about string theory; it's mentioned as "borderline" a couple of times, and as "science" a couple of times, but no one feels keen to discuss the fact that it fails Popper's test, by not making any obviously falsifiable predictions. One very nice contribution by Schackel considers the ethics of belief, another subject I'd never even heard of. When we say "one ought to believe X", what exactly do we mean? Are we just saying that the weight of the evidence strongly supports X, or are we also taking into account the moral and ethical implications of believing or disbelieving X? Shackel elegantly argues that you can't, in fact, leave morals and ethics out of it; there's no such thing as "objective analysis of the facts". And scientists, as Kuhn has taught us, are very far from immune. They're all driven by their convictions; they have hunches and guesses they want to check out, and they're prepared to write off a certain amount of contrary evidence as misleading noise in the data. But how far can you push this process? Is there a clear line separating the brilliant scientist who doggedly follows his intuition where it leads him, and the crank who won't give up even when the facts are staring him in the face? You want to say that there is, but it's terribly hard to explain where the line goes.
Those damn philosophers! When I started the book, I thought I had some answers, and now all I have is a bunch of questions. If you enjoy straightforward, entertaining stuff that leaves you feeling you understand things better, then don't read it. You have been warned.
_________________________________
Having now read The Genesis Flood and briefly discussed the issues with one of the editors of this book, I am very doubtful about Laudan's argument that creationism makes falsifiable claims, and is thus bad science rather than pseudoscience. The authors of The Genesis Flood state clearly, many times, that they do not consider it possible for science to say anything definitive about the past, because they believe that the laws of nature were different then; the only way we can gain any certain knowledge of the past is through reliable eyewitness testimony. In the case of the Flood, they go on to say, the only witnesses were Noah, his immediate family, and God, and the only reliable testimony we have is the contents of the Book of Genesis.
So there is no way we can falsify a creationist claim. If it turns out that the claim is wildly at odds with our present scientific knowledge, they respond by saying that the laws of nature were different then, so the argument doesn't apply. Which does of course beg the question of why the greater part of The Genesis Flood consists of attempts to try and justify their account in terms of modern-day science - but that is another story.
October 18, 2013
I learned some things from this book, but overall didn't like it. (To be honest, some of it whizzed over my head.) The authors admit, over and over again, that there's no really satisfying definition of what exactly science is. So, of course, it's a bit tricky to demarcate the borderline between science and pseudoscience. Good subject to think about, but I don't think this book is quite worthwhile. Really liked Pigliucci's previous book "Nonsense on Stilts" better - on similar topics but much more readable.
August 9, 2014
Interesting collection of essays surrounding the demarcation problem of science and pseudoscience. While somewhat of a follow-up to Nonsense on Stilts, this is much more technical in nature. Still an interesting read for those really interested.
December 6, 2021
If you’re looking for a simple answer on pseudoscience, you won’t find it here. That said, simple answers are rarely accurate. The chapters in this book are well-written and thought provoking. I’ve recommended it multiple times.
February 26, 2014
We live in an age where science is a privileged epistemology (with good reason!), and as such, it becomes important to be able to distinguish what is science from what is not. Yet as this volume demonstrates, it's much easier to say what is pseudoscience (creationism, astrology, homoeopathy) and what is legitimate science (big bang, evolution, germ theory) than it is to give an account of why something fits in either category. After reading these 23 entries, one should be clearer on why.
Popper, so it is argued, erred when he tried for a single criteria demarcation. The first few essays try to rescue Popper's project from Laudan's 1983 criticism. I can only call it that because neither the Popper papper nor Laudan's grace this volume - not too much of a problem for an academic with access to the supplementary material, but trying to figure out Laudan's criticisms on the fly is the task confronting the layman in the early chapters.
One of the things that surprised me was that the focus of the demarcation problem isn't so much an academic issue as it is a cultural one - while there's the issue of what's funded and what's worthy of study in the scientific community, largely the problem is for non-experts to recognise the difference between science and non-science. One interesting essay was by the philosopher Jean Paul Van Bendegem who argued for the ethical imperative to fight pseudoscientific rhetoric by turning it back on them.
Aside from Van Bendegem's essay, other highlights included Maarten Boudry's essay on the boundaries of demarcation, Barbara Forrest's essay on how Hume's ideas apply to the problem, John Wilkins' essay on the rationality of pseudoscientific beliefs, Konrad Talmont-Kaminski's essay on the same subject, and Filip Buekens' essay on the prevalence agency-based thinking. All the essays were worth reading, even if a couple of essays tended to be heavy on the jargon.
Popper, so it is argued, erred when he tried for a single criteria demarcation. The first few essays try to rescue Popper's project from Laudan's 1983 criticism. I can only call it that because neither the Popper papper nor Laudan's grace this volume - not too much of a problem for an academic with access to the supplementary material, but trying to figure out Laudan's criticisms on the fly is the task confronting the layman in the early chapters.
One of the things that surprised me was that the focus of the demarcation problem isn't so much an academic issue as it is a cultural one - while there's the issue of what's funded and what's worthy of study in the scientific community, largely the problem is for non-experts to recognise the difference between science and non-science. One interesting essay was by the philosopher Jean Paul Van Bendegem who argued for the ethical imperative to fight pseudoscientific rhetoric by turning it back on them.
Aside from Van Bendegem's essay, other highlights included Maarten Boudry's essay on the boundaries of demarcation, Barbara Forrest's essay on how Hume's ideas apply to the problem, John Wilkins' essay on the rationality of pseudoscientific beliefs, Konrad Talmont-Kaminski's essay on the same subject, and Filip Buekens' essay on the prevalence agency-based thinking. All the essays were worth reading, even if a couple of essays tended to be heavy on the jargon.
July 27, 2019
This is a good collection of articles on a longstanding and contentious issue. While the general idea is quite interesting, the chapters are somewhat hegerogeneous in treatment and scope. This is certaintly a problem that pervades every multiauthored volume, and this book is not the exception. Topics range from internalist approaches such as those dealing with the feasibility of finding demarcation criteria between science and pseudoscience to more externalist and sociological perspectives such as the role played by institutions in the maintenance of pseudoscientific claims. I found some chapters quite useful but others are not worth reading as they don’t add conceptual nor empirical novelty to the issue. Notwithstanding, in spite of limitations, I would recommend reading this book to any scholar interested in the science/pseudoscience debate.
March 20, 2016
A collection of essays discussing the problem of separating science from pseudoscience from a philosophical point of view. Thought provoking. I plan to read it again. Definitely recommend for anyone interested in science and/or philosophy.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews