In essence, pseudoscientists use the processes of science, superficial processes, or similarities of science to science—to scientifically rationalize a conclusion that they wish to be true, rather than using the methods of science to determine if their belief is true or not. What they have failed to do is make a concerted effort, therefore, to prove their own theories wrong.
That should always be the first step of any scientist. When you come up with a new idea or hypothesis, the first step is to do everything possible to disprove your own theory. Find every way possible to conduct an experiment or an observation that can falsify the theory. When the theory or the hypothesis has survived every attempt you can think of to prove it wrong, only then is it reasonable to give it provisional assent, to think this is a theory that may be true.
Can they think of any methods you missed that could be an alternative to the theory that you have or that could potentially prove it wrong? The Galileo Process is a common red flag for pseudoscience. In this case, far-reaching claims that overturn entire segments of well-established science are extrapolated from very little research or small bits of evidence.
This results from this chain reaction of pseudoscientific claims. Pye believes, for example, that there were ancient civilizations unknown to modern archeology, that aliens were somehow involved in human history—even evolution—and that this ties into observations of Big Foot and other humanoid creatures unknown to science.
In each case, when he has a specific explanation or a specific claim that conflicts with archeology, paleontology, biology, or even modern physics. By the end of it, you have replaced all of science with an alternative version of reality, or the idea that everything scientists claim must therefore be wrong. Learn more about the nature of perception.
Another example is the comic book artist turned pseudoscientist, Neal Adams, who is a proponent of the hollow or growing Earth idea. This is the notion that the planet Earth was much smaller in the historical past and has been slowly increasing in size over time, by the generation of new matter. He believes this is true because the continents of the Earth fit together like puzzle pieces. We know that they do fit together to some extent because of plate tectonics, but he thinks they fit together all the way around because at one point in time they were all connected on a small Earth, which later expanded with the oceans filling in the cracks that emerged in between.
However, there are major scientific problems with this theory. Where is this new matter coming from? How is gravity increasing on the Earth? If all of the planets of the solar system were increasing, as he believes, how could their orbits be stable? Each time one of these reasonable scientific objections is raised to this theory, he simply waves his hand and wipes away another discipline of science.
Ingrained cognitive biases play a role, as does inverted snobbery about educational privilege. But we must battle on, says this scientist. P seudoscience is everywhere — on the back of your shampoo bottle, on the ads that pop up in your Facebook feed, and most of all in the Daily Mail. Magnetic wristbands improve your sporting performance, carbs make you fat , and just about everything gives you cancer.
Science is full of people who disagree with one another. If we all thought exactly the same way, we could retire and call the status quo truth. But when people think snake oil is backed up by science, we have to challenge that. So why is it so hard? Academics have a reputation for being blinkered, arrogant, patronising and intolerant of those whose specialities differ from their own. Sunk cost fallacy is the reason that people who have already wasted money on tickets to a terrible film also waste their evening watching it.
Partly, I think, he wanted to compare science to non-science-that-looks-a-lot-like-science in other words, pseudo-science so that he could work out precisely what is missing from the latter. He doesn't think we should dismiss pseudo-science as utterly useless, uninteresting, or false. It's just not science. Of course, Popper wouldn't be going to the trouble of trying to spell out what separates science from non-science if he didn't think there was something special on the science side of the line.
He seems committed to the idea that scientific methodology is well-suited -- perhaps uniquely so -- for building reliable knowledge and for avoiding false beliefs. Indeed, under the assumption that science has this kind of power, one of the problems with pseudo-science is that it gets an unfair credibility boost by so cleverly mimicking the surface appearance of science.
The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.
There is a corresponding difference that Popper sees in the form of the claims made by sciences and pseudo-sciences: Scientific claims are falsifiable -- that is, they are claims where you could set out what observable outcomes would be impossible if the claim were true -- while pseudo-scientific claims fit with any imaginable set of observable outcomes. What this means is that you could do a test that shows a scientific claim to be false, but no conceivable test could show a pseudo-scientific claim to be false.
Sciences are testable, pseudo-sciences are not. So, Popper has this picture of the scientific attitude that involves taking risks: making bold claims, then gathering all the evidence you can think of that might knock them down. If they stand up to your attempts to falsify them, the claims are still in play.
But, you keep that hard-headed attitude and keep you eyes open for further evidence that could falsify the claims. If you decide not to watch for such evidence -- deciding, in effect, that because the claim hasn't been falsified in however many attempts you've made to falsify it, it must be true -- you've crossed the line to pseudo-science.
This sets up the central asymmetry in Popper's picture of what we can know. We can find evidence to establish with certainty that a claim is false.
However, we can never owing to the problem of induction find evidence to establish with certainty that a claim is true. So the scientist realizes that her best hypotheses and theories are always tentative -- some piece of future evidence could conceivably show them false -- while the pseudo-scientist is sure as sure as can be that her theories have been proven true.
Of course, they haven't been -- problem of induction again. So, why does this difference between science and pseudo-science matter? As Popper notes, the difference is not a matter of scientific theories always being true and pseudo-scientific theories always being false. He first presented it at a lecture sponsored by the British Council at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge in , and it was later published in Conjectures and Refutations. This post—World War II articulation of his demarcation criterion has often obscured its Austrian origins, though Popper in the lecture stressed its historical roots in post—World War I Vienna.
According to the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle, a theory is scientific if it is verified by empirical data. For Popper, this condition was grossly insufficient.
According to this view, a theory is scientific if it is verified by empirical data. There was plenty of data that apparently confirmed psychoanalysis, he claimed. Every piece of data about personalities might be another brick in the confirmatory edifice for Freud, just as every event in politics or economics seemingly further confirmed Marxist theories such as the centrality of class conflict in history or the surplus value of labor. What this meant for Popper is that logical empiricists were looking at things the wrong way around.
The issue was not whether a theory was confirmed—anything might be interpreted as confirming if you formulated the theory flexibly enough. The point was whether it was possible to falsify the theory. Was there any imaginable observation such that, should it be found, Freudians or Marxists would concede that their theories were false?
If the answer was no, these were not sciences. The appeal of falsificationism is obvious. It provides a bright line, and it rewards the boldness that we often like to see exemplified in science. How well does it work? The short answer is: not very. Philosophers of science recognized this almost immediately, for two main reasons. First, it is difficult to determine whether you have actually falsified a theory.
How do you determine that an observation actually constitutes a confirmation of a theory? Well, you interpret it within its framework, and sometimes those interpretations produce the lamentable distortions that Popper decried.
But the same holds true for falsifying a theory, too. Suppose you did an experiment in your laboratory to test a theory, which predicts that under certain conditions your fact-o-meter should register a value of What do you do? Should you run to the journals and proclaim the death of that theory? For Popper, the logical empiricists were looking at things the wrong way around.
The issue was not whether a theory could be confirmed, but whether it could be falsified. Not so fast. How do you know that your experimental result was accurate? Maybe the reason you did not get the value of As a matter of fact, the results of that expedition were more equivocal than Eddington made them seem.
It was several years before absolutely incontrovertible results in support of general relativity were obtained, largely by observatories in California.
If any disconfirming result stood to invalidate a theory, then every tenet of modern science would have already been falsified by middle school science students failing to replicate utterly uncontroversial standard experiments. This is clearly nonsense. While it sounds like a good idea to insist on falsifying observations, it is far from straightforward to determine when precisely this has been done—and that defeats the purpose of having a bright-line standard.
The very minimum we should expect from a demarcation criterion is that it slices the sciences in the right places.
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