October 21, 2021

PSEUDO IS REDUNDANT:

There is no such thing as pseudoscience (Massimo Pigliucci, 10/21/21, iai)

The demarcation problem-- the difficulty of finding criteria that distinguish science from pseudoscience -- has a long history in the western tradition. In the Charmides, a Platonic dialogue, Socrates inquires into how we can differentiate between medicine and quackery, and concludes that it takes medical-level expertise to do so. But of course, very few people have the time and resources to become doctors, physicists, biologists, psychologists, and so forth, in order to arrive at an informed assessment of the soundness of any given claim.

Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, thought he had the answer: falsificationism. He reckoned that for a statement or theory to be considered scientific it ought to be possible, in principle, to show that it is false, if in fact it is false. For instance, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is scientific because it makes precise predictions that could potentially be falsified, by way of observation or experiment. Freudian psychoanalysis, by contrast, according to Popper, is pseudoscience because there is no conceivable human behavior that Freudians could not somehow reconcile with the vague statements of their theory.

Neat, right? A bit too neat, as it turns out. Some theories that many people consider scientific, such as the notion of parallel universes, are not falsifiable, even in principle [4]. And some pseudosciences, like homeopathy, can be -- and have been -- falsified. Yet, their proponents keep acting as if nothing happened. The current consensus among philosophers of science, therefore, seems to be that there is no straightforward answer to the demarcation problem, and that a main reason for this is that both science and pseudoscience are inherently fuzzy cluster concepts: they are defined by a cluster of criteria which however are individually neither necessary nor sufficient to include or exclude all individual instances of the concept.

Posted by at October 21, 2021 6:35 PM

  

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