How does pseudoscience differ from normal science

There is much more agreement on particular cases of demarcation than on the general criteria that such judgments should be based upon. This is an indication that there is still much important philosophical work to be done on the demarcation between science and pseudoscience. Demarcations of science from pseudoscience can be made for both theoretical and practical reasons Mahner , From a theoretical point of view, the demarcation issue is an illuminating perspective that contributes to the philosophy of science in much the same way that the study of fallacies contributes to our knowledge of informal logic and rational argumentation.

From a practical point of view, the distinction is important for decision guidance in both private and public life. Since science is our most reliable source of knowledge in a wide range of areas, we need to distinguish scientific knowledge from its look-alikes.

Due to the high status of science in present-day society, attempts to exaggerate the scientific status of various claims, teachings, and products are common enough to make the demarcation issue pressing in many areas.

The demarcation issue is therefore important in practical applications such as the following:. Climate policy : The scientific consensus on ongoing anthropogenic climate change leaves no room for reasonable doubt Cook et al.

Science denial has considerably delayed climate action, and it is still one of the major factors that impede efficient measures to reduce climate change Oreskes and Conway ; Lewandowsky et al. Decision-makers and the public need to know how to distinguish between competent climate science and science-mimicking disinformation on the climate.

Environmental policies : In order to be on the safe side against potential disasters it may be legitimate to take preventive measures when there is valid but yet insufficient evidence of an environmental hazard. This must be distinguished from taking measures against an alleged hazard for which there is no valid evidence at all.

Therefore, decision-makers in environmental policy must be able to distinguish between scientific and pseudoscientific claims. Healthcare : Medical science develops and evaluates treatments according to evidence of their effectiveness and safety. Pseudoscientific activities in this area give rise to ineffective and sometimes dangerous interventions. Healthcare providers, insurers, government authorities and — most importantly — patients need guidance on how to distinguish between medical science and medical pseudoscience.

Expert testimony : It is essential for the rule of law that courts get the facts right. The reliability of different types of evidence must be correctly determined, and expert testimony must be based on the best available knowledge.

Sometimes it is in the interest of litigants to present non-scientific claims as solid science. Therefore courts must be able to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Philosophers have often had prominent roles in the defence of science against pseudoscience in such contexts. Pennock Science education : The promoters of some pseudosciences notably creationism try to introduce their teachings in school curricula.

Teachers and school authorities need to have clear criteria of inclusion that protect students against unreliable and disproved teachings. Journalism : When there is scientific uncertainty, or relevant disagreement in the scientific community, this should be covered and explained in media reports on the issues in question. Equally importantly, differences of opinion between on the one hand legitimate scientific experts and on the other hand proponents of scientifically unsubstantiated claims should be described as what they are.

Public understanding of topics such as climate change and vaccination has been considerably hampered by organised campaigns that succeeded in making media portray standpoints that have been thoroughly disproved in science as legitimate scientific standpoints Boykoff and Boykoff ; Boykoff The media need tools and practices to distinguish between legitimate scientific controversies and attempts to peddle pseudoscientific claims as science.

However it was not until the 20th century that influential definitions of science have contrasted it against pseudoscience. In more recent years, the problem has been revitalized. Philosophers attesting to its vitality maintain that the concept can be clarified by other means than necessary and sufficient criteria Pigliucci ; Mahner or that such a definition is indeed possible although it has to be supplemented with discipline-specific criteria in order to become fully operative Hansson The word has been in frequent use since the s Thurs and Numbers Throughout its history the word has had a clearly defamatory meaning Laudan , ; Dolby , It would be as strange for someone to proudly describe her own activities as pseudoscience as to boast that they are bad science.

An essentially value-laden term has to be defined in value-laden terms. This is often difficult since the specification of the value component tends to be controversial. 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. Some argue that it is against Christianity. Nonetheless, holy books does not have an explicitly written text about genetic screening. The arguments are only constructed from implications of the holy texts.

As the holy texts might hold many different meanings, who can know for sure, if genetic screening is just or unjust way? As this topic is very complicated dilemma and needs a further debates to come to a common consensus, one should consider two outcomes: when it is morally accepted and when it is condemned as unethical thing to do. It has not been studied in depth such as medical science. I would also tell them that they should consider that science is focused on helping people to acquire a better understanding of the world.

Barry also uses questions to show the mysterious nature of scientific research. Barry asks several questions, but does not answer them. This shows that scientists must also ask a lot of questions, therefore showing how many unknown factors exist in. Scientific thinking is distinguished from non-scientific thinking by its reliance on testable facts and evidence. Scientists are supposed to adhere to stipulated rules and principle in their inquiry and reporting.

Press releases, on the other hand, are not confined by any inquiry or reporting rules. Journalists thus have unlimited freedom in their writing, and they often misrepresent facts and information during reporting to suit their needs. Press releases are prone to factual misrepresentations and generalizations, and this greatly reduces their credibility.

What is the science? What are differences between science and pseudoscience? The word science comes from the Latin "scientia," meaning knowledge. Science attained through study or practice and can be rationally explained and reliably applied.

Modern science is typically subdivided into the natural sciences, which study the material world, the social sciences which study people and societies, and the formal sciences like mathematics.

The formal sciences are often excluded as they do not depend on empirical observations. This innate intelligence traveling through the spinal cord and the nerves is what keeps the organs and the parts of the body healthy. The blockage of that flow, therefore, causes illness, disease, and symptoms. He believed that he freed up the flow of this life energy in this patient, enabling them to hear and curing their deafness.

At the time though, he was not aware that the nerves that subsume hearing in at no point pass through the neck. Another example is the founder of Iridology. Iridology is the notion that the iris of the eyes reflects the health and disease of the whole body. This is based upon a general approach called the homunculus approach to diagnosis, the belief that the entire self is represented in one small part or piece of the body, in this case, the iris of the eye.

Principles may not be based on just a simple or a single observation, but on a philosophical idea, a philosophy that itself has not been empirically tested or developed as a scientific theory or discipline. Before having a thorough understanding of all of the physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, and the processes that go to make up a living organism, it was hypothesized that there must be some life energy that gives life to some things while others remain inanimate.

In the final analysis, it was really a placeholder, an argument from ignorance, if you will. Eventually, we were able, however, to explain all the processes of life, at least to a reasonable degree of detail and there simply was nothing left for life energy to do.

It was a philosophical idea of how the body works, never supported or tested by science. Learn more about logical fallacies. Another aspect of pseudoscience is that simple answers are often offered to very complex or multi-factorial problems. One example of that is Hulda Clarke. She believed that liver flukes are the cause of all human diseases; therefore, all diseases can be cured by treating this liver fluke.

Therefore, she has the cure for all disease, or at least she had before she died. Both pseudoscience and science purport to exalt evidence , yet only science reliably, repeatedly, and rigorously tests hypotheses to discover evidence which either supports or denies the hypothesis.

Pseudoscience looks only for evidence that supports the hypothesis. Although sometimes the line between science and pseudoscience can be hazy , what it ultimately comes down to is that pseudoscientific claims can be shaped to meet just about any outcome.

In other words, they cannot be proven true or false, as opposed to a scientific claim. Examples of pseudoscience include phrenology, homeopathy, full moon lunacy, astrology, and intelligent design. How can we separate the two and acknowledge a grey area in between? What is Pseudoscience? The Grey Zone Many legitimate sciences may incorporate one or more features normally associated with pseudoscience.

Learn more about several specific examples of pseudoscience Recognizing Pseudosciences Examining extreme cases of pseudoscience is like a doctor studying an advanced form of a disease. Lloyd Pye The Galileo Process is a common red flag for pseudoscience. An iris chart used in i ridology. Q: Do pseudoscience and science share anything in common? Q: How do you draw the line between science and pseudoscience?

Q: How do you avoid pseudoscience?