How does pseudoscience compared to science

As part of the process of crafting scientific models and theories, scientists must brainstorm, innovate and speculate. That's the creative component of the activity. But they must also maintain a disciplined rigor to ensure that their theories and models fit into a logical and consistent interrelated structure.

The final edifice called science allows deduction of predictions about the world, predictions that may be tested against observations and against precise measurements made on nature. Nature is unforgiving of mistakes, and when experiments disagree with the predictions of scientific laws and models, then those laws and models must be modified or scrapped. Scientists' personal styles, prejudices and even limitations are ever-present realities in the process.

But rigorous and skeptical testing of the final result must be sufficiently thorough to weed out any mistakes. It's fairly easy to distinguish science from pseudoscience on the basis of the final product, the laws and theories. If the results 1 cannot be tested in any way, 2 have been tested and always failed the test, or 3 predict results that are contradictory to well established and well tested science, then we can fairly safely say that we are dealing with pseudoscience.

At the level of speculation, it's not so easy. Consider these two examples. Is the notion that hypothetical particles tachyons may travel faster than light a pseudoscientific idea? Well this speculation was proposed by scientists with perfectly respectable credentials, and other respectable experimenters took time to look for such particles. None have been found. We no longer expect to find any, but we do not consider the idea to have been "unscientific".

Is it scientific to hypothesize that one could build a perpetual motion machine that would run forever with power output, but no power input? Most scientists would answer "No. In the first case, the hypothetical tachyons would not violate any known principles of physics. In the second case, a perpetual motion machine would violate the very well-established laws of thermodynamics, and also violate even more basic laws as well, such as Newton's laws, and conservation of momentum and angular momentum.

But are the laws and theories of physics sacred? Of course not; they represent part of the logical structure called "established physics" that is the culmination of our accumulated scientific knowledge. We fully expect that future discoveries and insights will cause us to modify this structure in some ways.

This won't invalidate the whole of physics, for the old laws and theories will continue to work as well as they always did, but the newer structure may have more precision, power, breadth or scope, and may have more appealing conceptual structure. Such continual evolution and modification of physics is gradual and generally changes only a small portion of the vast edifice of physics. Once in a while, a "revolution" of thought occurs causing us to rethink or reformulate a major chunk of physics, but even that doesn't make the old formulations wrong within their original scope of applicability.

Certain principles, laws and theories of the earliest history of physics have survived unscathed. Archimedes' laws of machines, and his laws of liquids work today as well as they ever did. Newton's laws still work fine, even though relativity has extended the scope of classical mechanics tremendously. Even Ptolemy's now-discarded geocentric model of the solar system with its cycles, epicycles, eccentrics and deferents did correctly account for the data on planetary positions in the sky, and if anyone today cared to do so, that Ptolemaic model could easily be extended and improved to work with our improved data on planetary positions to predict past and future planetary positions.

But it would be useful only for that limited purpose , since it does not take gravitational forces into account and it did not correctly model the distances of planets from us and from each other. Newton's mechanics and his theory of gravity gave far greater scope to celestial mechanics, unified it with terrestrial mechanics, and made it a powerful tool for understanding the entire universe, not just our local solar system.

So is it reasonable to expect that Newton's laws and the laws of thermodynamics will suddenly be made invalid by some backyard inventor's experiments to achieve perpetual motion?

Such folks earn the label 'pseudoscientist' or even 'crank'. The seekers after perpetual motion are a textbook example of the scientific impulse gone astray. They exhibit most of the qualities of pseudoscientists of all stripes. We list below a few qualities of, or symptoms of, pseudoscience. This is also a catalog of the many things that can cause mistakes and error in science.

The history of science itself provides examples of some of these, but we hope that we have learned from the mistakes of our past history. Few pseudosciences exhibit all of these characteristics. Pseudoscientists have deficient or superficial knowledge and understanding of well-established science.

Their proposals are therefore based on faulty understanding of very basic and well established principles of physics and engineering. The inventors may not be at all aware of these flaws in their reasoning. They feel that physics is unnecessarily complicated because physicists are 'blind' to simpler explanations. The important thing to note is that theories can be rather speculative or extremely well tested -- either way, they're still theories. Some people talk as though there's a certain threshold a theory crosses to become a fact, or truth, or something more-certain-than-a-theory.

This is a misleading way of talking. Unless Popper is completely wrong that the scientist's acceptance of a theory is always tentative and this is one piece of Popper's account that most scientists whole-heartedly endorse , then even the theory with the best evidential support is still a theory.

Indeed, even if a theory happened to be completely true, it would still be a theory! You could never be absolutely certain that some future observation might not falsify the theory. So, for example, dismissing Darwin's theory as "just a theory" as if that were a strike against it is misunderstanding what science is up to.

Of course there is some uncertainty; there is with all scientific theories. Of course there are certain claims the theory makes that might turn out to be false; but the fact that there is evidence we could conceivably get to demonstrate these claims are false is a scientific virtue, not a sign that the theory is unscientific. There's no conceivable evidence we could locate that could demonstrate the claims of these theories are false.

Thus, these theories just aren't scientific. Certainly, their proponents point to all sorts of evidence that fits well with these theories, but they never make any serious efforts to look for evidence that could prove the theories false. Their acceptance of these theories isn't a matter of having proof that the theories are true, or even a matter of these theories having successfully withstood many serious attempts to falsify them.

Rather, it's a matter of faith. None of this means Darwin's theory is necessarily true and "Creation Science" is necessarily false. But it does mean in the Popperian view that most scientists endorse that Darwin's theory is scientific and "Creation Science" is not. If you enjoyed this post, consider contributing a few bucks to a project in my Giving Page in the Science Bloggers for Students challenge.

Supporting science education in public school classrooms will help young people get a better handle on what kind of attitude and methodology makes science science -- and on all the cool things science can show us about our world. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Janet D. Her explorations of ethics, scientific knowledge-building, and how they are intertwined are informed by her misspent scientific youth as a physical chemist.

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Twenty-five years later. This problem is not specific to pseudoscience, but follows directly from a parallel but somewhat less conspicuous problem with the concept of science. When an activity is recognized as science this usually involves an acknowledgement that it has a positive role in our strivings for knowledge. On the other hand, the concept of science has been formed through a historical process, and many contingencies influence what we call and do not call science.

The former part of the delimitation is largely conventional, whereas the latter is highly normative, and closely connected with fundamental epistemological and metaphysical issues. Against this background, in order not to be unduly complex a definition of science has to go in either of two directions. It can focus on the descriptive contents, and specify how the term is actually used. Alternatively, it can focus on the normative element, and clarify the more fundamental meaning of the term.

The latter approach has been the choice of most philosophers writing on the subject, and will be at focus here. Hence, political economy and sociology are counted as sciences, whereas studies of literature and history are usually not. The German term has the advantage of more adequately delimiting the type of systematic knowledge that is at stake in the conflict between science and pseudoscience. The misrepresentations of history presented by Holocaust deniers and other pseudo-historians are very similar in nature to the misrepresentations of natural science promoted by creationists and homeopaths.

More importantly, the natural and social sciences and the humanities are all parts of the same human endeavour, namely systematic and critical investigations aimed at acquiring the best possible understanding of the workings of nature, people, and human society. The disciplines that form this community of knowledge disciplines are increasingly interdependent.

Since the second half of the 20th century, integrative disciplines such as astrophysics, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, ecology, quantum chemistry, the neurosciences, and game theory have developed at dramatic speed and contributed to tying together previously unconnected disciplines. These increased interconnections have also linked the sciences and the humanities closer to each other, as can be seen for instance from how historical knowledge relies increasingly on advanced scientific analysis of archaeological findings.

The conflict between science and pseudoscience is best understood with this extended sense of science. On one side of the conflict we find the community of knowledge disciplines that includes the natural and social sciences and the humanities. On the other side we find a wide variety of movements and doctrines, such as creationism, astrology, homeopathy, and Holocaust denialism that are in conflict with results and methods that are generally accepted in the community of knowledge disciplines.

In a wider approach, the sciences are fact-finding practices , i. Other examples of fact-finding practices in modern societies are journalism, criminal investigations, and the methods used by mechanics to search for the defect in a malfunctioning machine. Fact-finding practices are also prevalent in indigenous societies, for instance in the forms of traditional agricultural experimentation and the methods used for tracking animal prey Liebenberg In this perspective, the demarcation of science is a special case of the delimitation of accurate fact-finding practices.

The delimitation between science and pseudoscience has much in common with other delimitations, such as that between accurate and inaccurate journalism and between properly and improperly performed criminal investigations Hansson In their view, the task of drawing the outer boundaries of science is essentially the same as that of drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience.

This picture is oversimplified. All non-science is not pseudoscience, and science has non-trivial borders to other non-scientific phenomena, such as metaphysics, religion, and various types of non-scientific systematized knowledge.

Science also has the internal demarcation problem of distinguishing between good and bad science. A comparison of the negated terms related to science can contribute to clarifying the conceptual distinctions. The latter term differs from the former in covering inadvertent mismeasurements and miscalculations and other forms of bad science performed by scientists who are recognized as trying but failing to produce good science.

Etymology provides us with an obvious starting-point for clarifying what characteristics pseudoscience has in addition to being merely non- or un-scientific. Many writers on pseudoscience have emphasized that pseudoscience is non-science posing as science. The foremost modern classic on the subject Gardner bears the title Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. The former of the two criteria is central to the concerns of the philosophy of science. Its precise meaning has been the subject of important controversies among philosophers, to be discussed below in Section 4.

The second criterion has been less discussed by philosophers, but it needs careful treatment not least since many discussions of pseudoscience in and out of philosophy have been confused due to insufficient attention to it. Proponents of pseudoscience often attempt to mimic science by arranging conferences, journals, and associations that share many of the superficial characteristics of science, but do not satisfy its quality criteria. An immediate problem with the definition based on 1 and 2 is that it is too wide.

There are phenomena that satisfy both criteria but are not commonly called pseudoscientific. One of the clearest examples of this is fraud in science. This is a practice that has a high degree of scientific pretence and yet does not comply with science, thus satisfying both criteria.

The reason for this can be clarified with the following hypothetical examples Hansson According to common usage, 1 and 3 are regarded as cases of bad science, and only 2 as a case of pseudoscience. What is present in case 2, but absent in the other two, is a deviant doctrine. Isolated breaches of the requirements of science are not commonly regarded as pseudoscientific.

Pseudoscience, as it is commonly conceived, involves a sustained effort to promote standpoints different from those that have scientific legitimacy at the time. This explains why fraud in science is not usually regarded as pseudoscientific. Such practices are not in general associated with a deviant or unorthodox doctrine. To the contrary, the fraudulent scientist is usually anxious that her results be in conformity with the predictions of established scientific theories.

Deviations from these would lead to a much higher risk of disclosure. In the individuated sense, biochemistry and astronomy are different sciences, one of which includes studies of muscle proteins and the other studies of supernovae. Pseudoscience is an antithesis of science in the individuated rather than the unindividuated sense. There is no unified corpus of pseudoscience corresponding to the corpus of science. For a phenomenon to be pseudoscientific, it must belong to one or the other of the particular pseudosciences.

In order to accommodate this feature, the above definition can be modified by replacing 2 by the following Hansson :. Most philosophers of science, and most scientists, prefer to regard science as constituted by methods of inquiry rather than by particular doctrines. This, however, may be as it should since pseudoscience often involves a representation of science as a closed and finished doctrine rather than as a methodology for open-ended inquiry.

In this sense, pseudoscience is assumed to include not only doctrines contrary to science proclaimed to be scientific but doctrines contrary to science tout court, whether or not they are put forward in the name of science. The following examples serve to illustrate the difference between the two definitions and also to clarify why clause 1 is needed:.

As the last two examples illustrate, pseudoscience and anti-science are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Promoters of some pseudosciences notably homeopathy tend to be ambiguous between opposition to science and claims that they themselves represent the best science.

Various proposals have been put forward on exactly what elements in science or pseudoscience criteria of demarcation should be applied to. Proposals include that the demarcation should refer to a research program Lakatos a, — , an epistemic field or cognitive discipline, i.

It is probably fair to say that demarcation criteria can be meaningfully applied on each of these levels of description. A much more difficult problem is whether one of these levels is the fundamental level to which assessments on the other levels are reducible. However, it should be noted that appraisals on different levels may be interdefinable. For instance, it is not an unreasonable assumption that a pseudoscientific doctrine is one that contains pseudoscientific statements as its core or defining claims.

Conversely, a pseudoscientific statement may be characterized in terms of being endorsed by a pseudoscientific doctrine but not by legitimate scientific accounts of the same subject area. Derksen differs from most other writers on the subject in placing the emphasis in demarcation on the pseudoscientist, i. His major argument for this is that pseudoscience has scientific pretensions, and such pretensions are associated with a person, not a theory, practice or entire field.

However, as was noted by Settle , it is the rationality and critical attitude built into institutions, rather than the personal intellectual traits of individuals, that distinguishes science from non-scientific practices such as magic. The individual practitioner of magic in a pre-literate society is not necessarily less rational than the individual scientist in modern Western society.

What she lacks is an intellectual environment of collective rationality and mutual criticism. Some authors have maintained that the demarcation between science and pseudoscience must be timeless. If this were true, then it would be contradictory to label something as pseudoscience at one but not another point in time.

This argument is based on a fundamental misconception of science. It is an essential feature of science that it methodically strives for improvement through empirical testing, intellectual criticism, and the exploration of new terrain. A standpoint or theory cannot be scientific unless it relates adequately to this process of improvement, which means as a minimum that well-founded rejections of previous scientific standpoints are accepted.

The practical demarcation of science cannot be timeless, for the simple reason that science itself is not timeless.

Nevertheless, the mutability of science is one of the factors that renders the demarcation between science and pseudoscience difficult. Derksen , 19 rightly pointed out three major reasons why demarcation is sometimes difficult: science changes over time, science is heterogenous, and established science itself is not free of the defects characteristic of pseudoscience. Philosophical discussions on the demarcation of pseudoscience have usually focused on the normative issue, i.

One option is to base the demarcation on the fundamental function that science shares with other fact-finding processes, namely to provide us with the most reliable information about its subject-matter that is currently available. This could lead to the specification of critierion 1 from Section 3. This definition has the advantages of i being applicable across disciplines with highly different methodologies and ii allowing for a statement to be pseudoscientific at present although it was not so in an earlier period or, although less commonly, the other way around.

Hansson At the same time it removes the practical determination whether a statement or doctrine is pseudoscientific from the purview of armchair philosophy to that of scientists specialized in the subject-matter that the statement or doctrine relates to. Philosophers have usually opted for demarcation criteria that appear not to require specialized knowledge in the pertinent subject area. Around , the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle developed various verificationist approaches to science.

The basic idea was that a scientific statement could be distinguished from a metaphysical statement by being at least in principle possible to verify. This standpoint was associated with the view that the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification see the section on Verificationism in the entry on the Vienna Circle.

This proposal has often been included in accounts of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience. However, this is not historically quite accurate since the verificationist proposals had the aim of solving a distinctly different demarcation problem, namely that between science and metaphysics. He rejected verifiability as a criterion for a scientific theory or hypothesis to be scientific, rather than pseudoscientific or metaphysical.

Popper , Although Popper did not emphasize the distinction, these are of course two different issues Bartley Strictly speaking, his criterion excludes the possibility that there can be a pseudoscientific claim that is refutable.

Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted Culver and Ianna ; Carlson Similarly, the major threats to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, another of his major targets, do not come from claims that it is untestable but from claims that it has been tested and failed the tests. Defenders of Popper have claimed that this criticism relies on an uncharitable interpretation of his ideas.

They claim that he should not be interpreted as meaning that falsifiability is a sufficient condition for demarcating science. Some passages seem to suggest that he takes it as only a necessary condition Feleppa , Other passages suggest that for a theory to be scientific, Popper requires in addition to falsifiability that energetic attempts are made to put the theory to test and that negative outcomes of the tests are accepted Cioffi , 14— A falsification-based demarcation criterion that includes these elements will avoid the most obvious counter-arguments to a criterion based on falsifiability alone.

However, in what seems to be his last statement of his position, Popper declared that falsifiability is a both necessary and a sufficient criterion. A theoretical sentence, he says, is falsifiable if and only if it logically contradicts some empirical sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe Popper [] , A statement can be falsifiable in this sense although it is not in practice possible to falsify it. Logical falsifiability is a much weaker criterion than practical falsifiability.

However, even logical falsifiability can create problems in practical demarcations. This statement has been criticized by evolutionary scientists who pointed out that it misrepresents evolution. The theory of natural selection has given rise to many predictions that have withstood tests both in field studies and in laboratory settings Ruse ; In a lecture in Darwin College in , Popper retracted his previous view that the theory of natural selection is tautological.

However, in spite of his well-argued recantation, his previous standpoint continues to be propagated in defiance of the accumulating evidence from empirical tests of natural selection. According to Kuhn, the way in which science works on such occasions cannot be used to characterize the entire scientific enterprise. In puzzle-solving, current theory is accepted, and the puzzle is indeed defined in its terms.

Since antiquity, astronomy has been a puzzle-solving activity and therefore a science. Therefore, according to Kuhn, astrology has never been a science. A theory may be scientific even if there is not a shred of evidence in its favour, and it may be pseudoscientific even if all the available evidence is in its favour. On this view, the demarcation criterion should not be applied to an isolated hypothesis or theory, but rather to a whole research program that is characterized by a series of theories successively replacing each other.

In his view, a research program is progressive if the new theories make surprising predictions that are confirmed. In contrast, a degenerating research programme is characterized by theories being fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts. Progress in science is only possible if a research program satisfies the minimum requirement that each new theory that is developed in the program has a larger empirical content than its predecessor. If a research program does not satisfy this requirement, then it is pseudoscientific.

According to Paul Thagard , , a theory or discipline is pseudoscientific if it satisfies two criteria. A major difference between this approach and that of Lakatos is that Lakatos would classify a nonprogressive discipline as pseudoscientific even if its practitioners work hard to improve it and turn it into a progressive discipline.

In later work, Thagard has abandoned this approach and instead promoted a form of multi-criterial demarcation Thagard , In a somewhat similar vein, Daniel Rothbart emphasized the distinction between the standards to be used when testing a theory and those to be used when determining whether a theory should at all be tested. The latter, the eligibility criteria, include that the theory should encapsulate the explanatory success of its rival, and that it should yield testable implications that are inconsistent with those of the rival.

According to Rothbart, a theory is unscientific if it is not testworthy in this sense. George Reisch proposed that demarcation could be based on the requirement that a scientific discipline be adequately integrated into the other sciences. The various scientific disciplines have strong interconnections that are based on methodology, theory, similarity of models etc.

Creationism, for instance, is not scientific because its basic principles and beliefs are incompatible with those that connect and unify the sciences. More generally speaking, says Reisch, an epistemic field is pseudoscientific if it cannot be incorporated into the existing network of established sciences Reisch ; cf. Bunge ,