David J Stump. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Volume 5, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
Pseudoscience is a term applied to a field of inquiry by critics claiming that it is a pretended or spurious science because it does not meet established standards. The term pseudoscience is reserved for fields that claim to be a science, that make claims about the world and give explanations of natural processes. Statements of personal values or beliefs are neither scientific nor pseudoscientific, nor are works of art or literature. Religion is not a pseudoscience because it does not make scientific claims, but a faith-based alternative to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory would be. Freudian psychology is an example of a theory considered pseudoscientific by some and defended as legitimate by others. Since the term pseudoscience is general, it is used to dismiss an entire field, rather than a specific study or the work of a particular individual. Alternative medicine might be dismissed, for example, when there are no double-blind controlled studies to support the claims of various treatments.
Criterion of Meaning
The prefix pseudo is taken directly from the ancient Greek, and it has been applied to a multitude of terms. While the labeling of various fields as pseudoscience is especially associated with the philosophers of science of the early twentieth century, the term predates them by eighty years or so. The members of the Vienna Circle and their collaborators, often called logical positivists, embarked on a campaign to rid philosophy, and culture in general, of metaphysical and pseudoscientific elements. The logical positivists focused on meaning, claiming that any word or sentence that did not ultimately connect to some possible sensory experience was meaningless. Thus Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970) would object to the use of pseudoconcepts and pseudosentences. Most famously, he attacked Martin Heidegger’s obscurantism, which he felt hid the true social and political situation from the reader. In contrast to his attitude toward Heidegger, Carnap accepted Friedrich Nietzsche’s works because of their literary, rather than pseudoscientific, form.
The verificationist theory of meaning was criticized within philosophy and was never found to be a successful way to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Carl Hempel’s 1950 article summarizing the arguments surrounding the theory is usually taken to be its death knell. The project of ridding philosophy and culture in general of pseudoscientific elements continued, however, within the philosophy of science, but the focus shifted to what Karl Popper (1902-1994) called the demarcation problem—how to define science and pseudoscience so as to make a clear distinction between the two and show that all of the contemporary and historical cases of “good science” meet the standards of the definition. Although Popper claimed not to be very interested in the project of eliminating metaphysics and pseudoscience, he recognized that his project of characterizing science in general terms is equivalent to the project of demarcation. If science can be accurately characterized, it is easy to separate science and pseudoscience. Every mode of inquiry that fits the definition is science, while any mode of inquiry that makes claims about the nature of the world and the processes in it without fitting the definition is pseudoscience.
Scientific Method
Popper and other twentieth-century philosophers of science focused on method. They claimed that all of the sciences, as opposed to other fields of inquiry, shared a common methodology that deserves the name of “the scientific method.” Philosophers disagreed about what this method was, but no one doubted that a single scientific method characterized all of science from the time of the scientific revolution, which they also saw as a single event. According to inductivists, scientists must find data that support a hypothesis or theory. Testing that provides positive results confirms a scientific theory and shows how it is grounded in reality. Thus, in the inductivist model of science, pseudoscience is a system of beliefs unconfirmed by experimental data. On the other hand, Popper and other supporters of the hypothetico-deductive method reject the idea of confirming theories, since there are always alternative hypotheses that can account for the same data and thus can be just as well confirmed. They argue instead that scientists formulate hypotheses and then test them by making predictions on the basis of the hypotheses and checking the validity of their predictions. If the predictions are inaccurate, the hypothesis must be rejected; if they are accurate, the hypothesis is accepted, but only tentatively as a hypothesis that has withstood the test and has not yet been falsified. According to Popper, the mark of a scientist is his or her willingness to subject a hypothesis to refutation. Scientific theories are those in which refuting instances can be specified. Pseudoscience, by contrast, is not refutable, since its practitioners construct an explanation for any data that seem to contradict their beliefs.
The notion that there is a single scientific method that defines science has been severely challenged, especially by historians and sociologists of science. Thomas Kuhn famously argued that each domain and period of science is defined by a “paradigm” that sets up problems to be solved and the methods for doing so. However, we find that the sciences are a diverse and disunified collection of practices and that there is no uniform scientific method common to all paradigms, which makes the task of finding a single definition that defines science and separates it from pseudoscience seem impossible.
Current Debates
While many philosophers may have convinced each other that the problem of demarcation is unsolvable, scientists feel that there are obvious differences between science and pseudo-sciences and many want to continue to use the distinction. The editors of the Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience (2000) reply to the problem by taking an ecumenical approach that presents differing views on the nature of pseudoscience and includes for discussion almost any scientific claim that has led to controversy. Instead of looking for an essence, it may be possible to show that there is a “family resemblance” among genuine sciences and clear differentiation between science and pseudoscience in many cases.
There are extremely strong practical reasons to make a general distinction between science and pseudoscience. First, we cannot investigate everything. Much of our knowledge is simply taken on authority. Scientists immediately dismiss certain kinds of claims in order to spend more time on what they hope will be more productive research. Stephen Braude complains that it seems almost impossible to conduct an open inquiry into psychic phenomena because most scientists insist that there is no good evidence for the existence of such phenomena, without even looking at evidence that has been published. These dismissals of evidence seem more like close-minded prejudice than open-minded scientific inquiry, but they may be necessary to allow effective allocation of resources to projects that are considered more fruitful. The difficult issue is to know when to open an area for investigation and when to stop investigating and consider an issue settled. We inevitably take many majority opinions as fact, without question. As William James put it, “Our knowledge lives on the credit system.” Second, to settle some issues, we must make some principled distinction between science and pseudo-science. Given that the United States Constitution forbids government-established religion, attempts to require the teaching of creationism (an alternative to Darwin from which overt references to religion have been removed) force courts to decide whether creationism really is science or pseudoscience. Having politicians determine which scientific theories to teach in schools is problematic, but requiring the teaching of religion in disguise is unconstitutional.