In the course of reviewing a manuscript I’d submitted to a journal, a referee inquired about what I’d meant when I invoked the term “pseudoscience.” This was an excellent question. We bandy the term “pseudoscience” about without realizing how complex a process it is to distinguish science from pseudoscience and other forms of human knowledge. Philosophers describe the problem that arises when one tries to distinguish science from non-science as “the demarcation problem.”
What is “science” and what makes it different from non-science? Is all non-science pseudoscience?
Finnish philosopher, Raimo Tuomela, has tried to define the boundaries between and among science, pseudoscience, non-science and proto-science (developing science).
In his article, “Science, Protoscience, and Pseudoscience,” Tuomela wrote that the scientific method, an important protocol for understanding the world, is a criterion by which these terms can be distinguished. Of the method of science, Tuomela noted that, in comparison with magic, religion, and pseudoscience, science is plastic and progressive in the sense that it can correct both its method and results. According to Tuomela, a developing science, what he calls a protoscience, can wither and become pseudoscience, if it does not develop according to the scientific method.
The criteria or characteristics of science include objectivity, “criticalness,” autonomy, and progress, asserts Tuomela. Science must also be public (or at least public in principle) and reproducible and scientists must have a critical and skeptical attitude.
Any presuppositions of science, concepts, theories, hypotheses, theoretical inferences, experimental set-ups, experiments, and conclusions drawn from data must all be subject to critical examination. Finally, science must be testable (and falsifiable). Wrote Tuomela: “if science does not fulfill the requirement of testability it does not reproduce and develop but stiffens and turns into pseudoscience” (Tuomela 1987).
A belief or faith field is subject to change by means other than the scientific method. Economic interest, political interest, religious influence or “brute violence” can put pressure on belief or faith fields to change. Tuomela writes that “[A] [pseudoscience is a cognitive field (often but not always a belief field) which is non-scientific (and typically permanently so) but which its proponents still advocate as science” (Tuomela 1987).
In this section, examples of pseudoscience will be described and discussed. Below are suggested readings on the topic.
References on the meaning of “pseudoscience” and the demarcation problem:
Raimo Tuomela, “Science, Protoscience, and Pseudoscience,” in Rational Changes in Science, J.C. Pitt and M. Pera, eds. (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987).
George M. Sternberg, “Science and Pseudo-science in Medicine,” Science 5, no. 110 (1897): 199–206, doi.org/10.1126/science.5.110.199.
Alex Wellerstein, “Heterodoxy and Its Discontents,” Science 338, no. 6104 (2012): 194–5, doi.org/10.1126/science.1227959.
Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, eds, Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226051826.001.0001.
David B. Resnik, “A Pragmatic Approach to the Demarcation Problem,” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 31, no. 2 (2000): 249–67, doi.org/10.1016/S0039-3681(00)00004-2.
Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Science,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 781–95, doi.org/10.2307/2095325.
