{"id":277,"date":"2013-02-02T22:02:08","date_gmt":"2013-02-02T11:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=277"},"modified":"2013-02-02T22:07:04","modified_gmt":"2013-02-02T11:07:04","slug":"sharon-hill-on-the-trouble-with-pseudoscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/02\/02\/sharon-hill-on-the-trouble-with-pseudoscience\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharon Hill on the trouble with pseudoscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sharon Hill has an article on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s website, entitled “The Trouble with Pseudoscience\u2014It Can Be a Catastrophe”<\/a>. The article\u00a0is mainly about Immanuel Velikovsky and the way his\u00a0work was received by scientists (who were very hostile) and historians (who pretty much ignored it).\u00a0However, it gets deeper into philosophical issues relating to the “demarcation problem”<\/a> – the problem of how you can tell science from non-science, and in particular from pseudoscience.<\/p>\n

What I like about Hill’s take is that she does not put forward some simplistic proposal that supposedly creates a clear boundary. She seems correct that there is no single criterion or set of criteria that will enable us to make straightforward judgments about where science (including incompetent or otherwise bad science) ends and pseudoscience begins.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that we cannot reasonably classify a body of claims as pseudoscience – of course we can, in many cases. We can find various extensive sets of propositions that ape bodies of scientific theory and are supported by arguments that ape scientific styles of reasoning… but which are bogus. We might even be able to talk about what makes them bogus. For example, we may be able to show a lack of good faith, perhaps even fraud, or that these “theories” have been more or less plucked out of the air, then rationalised, and they have not proceeded through the incremental process of scientific justification that is more typical of genuine science. The people putting forward the “theories” may be obvious charlatans, the “theories” themselves may integrate\u00a0badly or not at all with robust scientific findings from contiguous areas, and so on. In a\u00a0large class of cases, the situation is fairly clear cut. In these cases, we can say with confidence that\u00a0a body of propositions, with its\u00a0associated line of inquiry and process of justification,\u00a0\u00a0is a kind of bogus aping of the superficial appearance of science, rather than the real thing. There’s no reason, in that case,\u00a0not to call it “pseudoscience”.<\/p>\n

Still, what do we make of other categories, such\u00a0as\u00a0merely bad<\/em> science,\u00a0dubious science,\u00a0fringe science, or highly speculative science? Should we classify Creation Science as pseudoscience or “only”\u00a0as very bad science. I’m inclined to go for the former, but possibly because I can imagine very bad science being done in good faith, whereas I am inclined to think that Creation Science is not even a good faith attempt at scientific investigation – but is that really so? What is “good faith” for this purpose? Or “bad faith”, if it comes to that\u00a0– does it require an actual attempt at fraud? Is it enough if the practitioners believe in key conclusions on some other basis and will never accept that those conclusions are incorrect?<\/p>\n

I don’t have a neat answer to the demarcation problem. As far as I can see, there will be all sorts of grey areas, though there will also be plenty of clear cases of pseudoscience.<\/p>\n

At any rate, although Hill goes into\u00a0some of\u00a0this she does not try to\u00a0solve the\u00a0problem.\u00a0 In considering Velikovsky’s claims and methods – a\u00a0rather clear-cut case of pseudoscience – she raises interesting questions about the best tactics for dealing with popular varieties of pseudoscience. Do you engage or ignore? If you engage, how aggressive or personally nasty should you be? If it depends, what does it depend on? Can even\u00a0pseudoscience sometimes contain a grain of inspiration or insight that is worth investigating?<\/p>\n

These are good questions, so check out the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharon Hill has an article on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s website, entitled “The Trouble with Pseudoscience\u2014It Can Be a Catastrophe”. The article\u00a0is mainly about Immanuel Velikovsky and the way his\u00a0work was received by scientists (who were very hostile) and historians (who pretty much ignored it).\u00a0However, it gets deeper into philosophical issues relating to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,130],"tags":[134,133,132],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-science","category-skepticism","tag-demarcation-problem","tag-pseudoscience","tag-sharon-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}