In this sense, his paper reinforces an increasingly widespread understanding of science in the philosophical community (see also Dupr 1993; Pigliucci 2013). The body, its WebThe demarcation problem in philosophy of science refers to the question of how to meaningfully and reliably separate science from pseudoscience. The notion is certainly intriguing: consider a standard moral virtue, like courage. But what are we to make of some research into the paranormal carried out by academic psychologists (Jeffers 2007)? One chapter recounts the story of how at one time the pre-Darwinian concept of evolution was treated as pseudoscience in the same guise as mesmerism, before eventually becoming the professional science we are familiar with, thus challenging a conception of demarcation in terms of timeless and purely formal principles. where one will just have to exercise ones best judgment based on what is known at the moment and deal with the possibility that one might make a mistake. Am I an expert on this matter? Moberger does not make the connection in his paper, but since he focuses on BSing as an activity carried out by particular agents, and not as a body of statements that may be true or false, his treatment falls squarely into the realm of virtue epistemology (see below). (2013). Certainly, if a test does not yield the predicted results we will first look at localized assumptions. At the systemic level, we need to create the sort of educational and social environment that is conducive to the cultivation of epistemic virtues and the eradication of epistemic vices. Second, what is bad about pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy is not that they are unscientific, because plenty of human activities are not scientific and yet are not objectionable (literature, for instance). Letruds approach, then, retains the power of Hanssons, but zeros in on the more foundational weakness of pseudoscienceits core claimswhile at the same time satisfactorily separating pseudoscience from regular bad science. In the Charmides (West and West translation, 1986), Plato has Socrates tackle what contemporary philosophers of science refer to as the demarcation problem, the separation between science and pseudoscience. Brulle, R.J. (2020) Denialism: Organized Opposition to Climate Change Action in the United States, in: D.M. He uses the term pseudoscience to refer to well-known examples of epistemic malpractice, like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, ufology, and so on. Fasce (2019, 62) states that there is no historical case of a pseudoscience turning into a legitimate science, which he takes as evidence that there is no meaningful continuum between the two classes of activities. Astrology, for one, has plenty of it. The idea is to explicitly bring to epistemology the same inverse approach that virtue ethics brings to moral philosophy: analyzing right actions (or right beliefs) in terms of virtuous character, instead of the other way around. Two such approaches are particularly highlighted in this article: treating pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy as BS, that is, bullshit in Harry Frankfurts sense of the term, and applying virtue epistemology to the demarcation problem. . The virtuous moral or epistemic agent navigates a complex moral or epistemic problem by adopting an all-things-considered approach with as much wisdom as she can muster. The next time you engage someone, in person or especially on social media, ask yourself the following questions: After all, as Aristotle said: Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends (Nicomachean Ethics, book I), though some scholars suggested that this was a rather unvirtuous comment aimed at his former mentor, Plato. (2011) Immunizing Strategies and Epistemic Defense Mechanisms. Divination fails, according to Cicero, because it is logically inconsistent, it lacks empirical confirmation, its practitioners have not proposed a suitable mechanism, said practitioners apply the notion arbitrarily, and they are highly selective in what they consider to be successes of their practice. This means two important things: (i) BS is a normative concept, meaning that it is about how one ought to behave or not to behave; and (ii) the specific type of culpability that can be attributed to the BSer is epistemic culpability. It is not just the case that these people are not being epistemically conscientious. On the basis of Frankfurts notion of BSing, Moberger carries out a general analysis of pseudoscience and even pseudophilosophy. The group saw two fundamental reasons to continue scholarship on demarcation. Fasce (2018) has used his metacriterion to develop a demarcation criterion according to which pseudoscience: (1) refers to entities and/or processes outside the domain of science; (2) makes use of a deficient methodology; (3) is not supported by evidence; and (4) is presented as scientific knowledge. Accordingly, the charge of BSingin the technical sensehas to be substantiated by serious philosophical analysis. FernandezBeanato suggests improvements on a multicriterial approach originally put forth by Mahner (2007), consisting of a broad list of accepted characteristics or properties of science. Did I carefully consider the other persons arguments without dismissing them out of hand? One of the most famous slogans of scientific skepticism Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence was first introduced by Truzzi. That idea might have been reasonably entertained when it was proposed, in the 18th century, but not after the devastating criticism it received in the 19th centurylet alone the 21st. The first five chapters of The Philosophy of Pseudoscience take the form of various responses to Laudan, several of which hinge on the rejection of the strict requirement for a small set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions to define science or pseudoscience. The 2013 volume sought a consciously multidisciplinary approach to demarcation. Designed, conducted, & written by Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, & Others. After having done my research, do I actually know what Im talking about, or am I simply repeating someone elses opinion? But this does not take into account the case of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories mentioned earlier, nor the many instances of the reverse transition, in which an activity initially considered scientific has, in fact, gradually turned into a pseudoscience, including alchemy (although its relationship with chemistry is actually historically complicated), astrology, phrenology, and, more recently, cold fusionwith the caveat that whether the latter notion ever reached scientific status is still being debated by historians and philosophers of science. Riggs, W. (2009) Two Problems of Easy Credit. At the personal level, we can virtuously engage with both purveyors of pseudoscience and, likely more effectively, with quasi-neutral bystanders who may be attracted to, but have not yet bought into, pseudoscientific notions. Scientific reasoning is based on induction, a process by which we generalize from a set of observed events to all observable events. Moberger, V. (2020) Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy. ), Pigliucci, M. and Boudry, M. (eds.) The authors also explore in detail the specific example of the Chinese practice of Feng Shui, a type of pseudoscience employed in some parts of the world to direct architects to build in ways that maximize positive qi energy. But basic psychology tells us that this sort of direct character attack is not only unlikely to work, but near guaranteed to backfire. He provides a useful summary of previous mono-criterial proposals, as well as of two multicriterial ones advanced by Hempel (1951) and Kuhn (1962). The distinction between science as a body of knowledge and science as a set of methods and procedures, therefore, does nothing to undermine the need for demarcation. As the next section shows, the outcome was quite the opposite, as a number of philosophers responded to Laudan and reinvigorated the whole debate on demarcation. Conversely, some notions that are even currently considered to be scientific, are alsoat least temporarilyunfalsifiable (for example, string theory in physics: Hossenfelder 2018). What pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy have in common, then, is BS. Too often so-called skeptics reject unusual or unorthodox claims a priori, without critical analysis or investigation, for example in the notorious case of the so-called Campeche UFOs (Pigliucci, 2018, 97-98). Hansson examines in detail three case studies: relativity theory denialism, evolution denialism, and climate change denialism. The Development of a Demarcation Criterion Based on the Analysis of Twenty-One Previous Attempts. SOCRATES: No one at all, it would seem, except the physician can have this knowledgeand therefore not the wise man. For to hasten to give assent to something erroneous is shameful in all things (De Divinatione, I.7 / Falconer translation, 2014). There is a clear demarcation amongst the approaches used to compare organic and non-organic farming. The original use of the term "boundary-work" for these sorts of issues has been attributed to Thomas F. Gieryn, a sociologist, who initially used it to discuss the The volume includes a section examining the complex cognitive roots of pseudoscience. The new demarcation problem asks whether and how we can identify illegitimate values in scientific inquiry. That said, however, virtue epistemologists are sensitive to input from the empirical sciences, first and foremost psychology, as any sensible philosophical position ought to be. He ignores critical evidence because he is grossly negligent, he relies on untrustworthy sources because he is gullible, he jumps to conclusions because he is lazy and careless. WebThomas F. Gieryn. Some philosophers of science have indeed suggested that there is a fundamental disunity to the sciences (Dupr 1993), but this is far from being a consensus position. Far more promising are two different avenues: the systemic one, briefly discussed by Bhakthavatsalam and Sun, and the personal not in the sense of blaming others, but rather in the sense of modeling virtuous behavior ourselves. What we want is also to teach people, particularly the general public, to improve their epistemic judgments so that they do not fall prey to pseudoscientific claims. But virtue epistemology provides more than just a different point of view on demarcation. Bhakthavatsalam and Sun argue that discussions of demarcation do not aim solely at separating the usually epistemically reliable products of science from the typically epistemically unreliable ones that come out of pseudoscience. Dawes is careful in rejecting the sort of social constructionism endorsed by some sociologists of science (Bloor 1976) on the grounds that the sociological component is just one of the criteria that separate science from pseudoscience. The problem with this, according to Letrud, is that Hanssons approach does not take into sufficient account the sociological aspect of the science-pseudoscience divide. It is not possible to discuss all the major contributions in detail, so what follows is intended as a representative set of highlights and a brief guide to the primary literature. This did not prove that the theory is true, but it showed that it was falsifiable and, therefore, good science. Fasces criticism hinges, in part, on the notion that gradualist criteria may create problems in policy decision making: just how much does one activity have to be close to the pseudoscientific end of the spectrum in order for, say, a granting agency to raise issues? This is why we need to take a brief look at what is sometimes referred to as the skeptic movementpeople and organizations who have devoted time and energy to debunking and fighting pseudoscience. A related issue with falsificationism is presented by the so-called Duhem-Quine theses (Curd and Cover 2012), two allied propositions about the nature of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, advanced independently by physicist Pierre Duhem and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. . Quines famous suggestion that epistemology should become a branch of psychology (see Naturalistic Epistemology): that is, a descriptive, not prescriptive discipline. First, unlike deduction (as used in logic and mathematics), induction does not guarantee a given conclusion, it only makes that conclusion probable as a function of the available empirical evidence. But occasionally we may be forced to revise our notions at larger scales, up to and including mathematics and logic themselves. (2006) More Misuses of Evolutionary Psychology. For instance: One can be an astrologist while believing that Virgos are loud, outgoing people (apparently, they are not). Fasce, A. Provocatively entitled The Demise of the Demarcation Problem, it sought to dispatch the whole field of inquiry in one fell swoop. Setting aside that the notion of fallibilism far predates the 19th century and goes back at the least to the New Academy of ancient Greece, it may be the case, as Laudan maintains, that many modern epistemologists do not endorse the notion of an absolute and universal truth, but such notion is not needed for any serious project of science-pseudoscience demarcation. In the case of science, for instance, such virtues might include basic logical thinking skills, the ability to properly collect data, the ability to properly analyze data, and even the practical know-how necessary to use laboratory or field equipment. That is because sometimes even pseudoscientific practitioners get things right, and because there simply are too many such claims to be successfully challenged (again, Brandolinis Law). The organization changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in November 2006 and has long been publishing the premier world magazine on scientific skepticism, Skeptical Inquirer. The BSer is obviously not acting virtuously from an epistemic perspective, and indeed, if Zagzebski is right, also from a moral perspective. This led to a series of responses to Laudan and new proposals on how to move forward, collected in a landmark edited volume on the philosophy of pseudoscience. It contains a comprehensive history of the demarcation problem followed by a historical analysis of pseudoscience, which tracks down the coinage and currency of the term and explains its shifting meaning in tandem with the emerging historical identity of science. As for Laudans contention that the term pseudoscience does only negative, potentially inflammatory work, this is true and yet no different from, say, the use of unethical in moral philosophy, which few if any have thought of challenging. More importantly, we attribute causation to phenomena on the basis of inductive reasoning: since event X is always followed by event Y, we infer that X causes Y. We all need to push ourselves to do the right thing, which includes mounting criticisms of others only when we have done our due diligence to actually understand what is going on. It was probably inevitable, therefore, that philosophers of science who felt that their discipline ought to make positive contributions to society would, sooner or later, go back to the problem of demarcation. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, X.4). the demarcation of science by pseudoscience has both theoretical reasons (the problem of delimitation is an illuminating perspective that contributes to the philosophy of science in the same way that error analysis contributes to the study of informal logic and rational reasoning) and practical reasons (the demarcation is important for The bottom line is that pseudoscience is BS with scientific pretensions, while pseudophilosophy is BS with philosophical pretensions. The first is what he refers to as a seemingly profound type of academic discourse that is pursued primarily within the humanities and social sciences (2020, 600), which he calls obscurantist pseudophilosophy. After a by now de rigueur criticism of the failure of positivism, Laudan attempts to undermine Poppers falsificationism. It should be rescued from its current obscurity, translated into all languages, and reprinted by organizations dedicated to the unmasking of quackery and the defense of rational thought. It is far too tempting to label them as vicious, lacking in critical thinking, gullible, and so forth and be done with it. science. Hansson, S.O. Perhaps the most obvious example here is the teach both theories mantra so often repeated by creationists, which was adopted by Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. Did I interpret what they said in a charitable way before mounting a response? Hempel, C.G. The failure of these attempts is what in part led to the above-mentioned rejection of the entire demarcation project by Laudan (1983). (2016, 165). Knowledge itself is then recast as a state of belief generated by acts of intellectual virtue. First, like Fasce (2019), Fernandez-Beanato wishes for more precision than is likely possible, in his case aiming at a quantitative cut value on a multicriterial scale that would make it possible to distinguish science from non-science or pseudoscience in a way that is compatible with classical logic. The question, therefore, becomes, in part, one of distinguishing scientific from pseudoscientific communities, especially when the latter closely mimic the first ones. Various criteria have been Objectives: Scientific Reasoning. The project, however, runs into significant difficulties for a number of reasons. Seen this way, falsificationism and modern debates on demarcation are a standard example of progress in philosophy of science, and there is no reason to abandon a fruitful line of inquiry so long as it keeps being fruitful. To Popper, falsifiability is what determines the scientific status of a theory. It is certainly true, as Laudan maintains, that modern philosophers of science see science as a set of methods and procedures, not as a particular body of knowledge. The demarcation problem as I have illustrated it is, of course, very similar to the problem I inherited from Popper, who founded his philosophical reputation on his so-called falsifiability solution. I would like to read out a few passages from Karl Popper so that you can see what bothered him and his generation. Fasce, A. Arriving now to modern times, the philosopher who started the discussion on demarcation is Karl Popper (1959), who thought he had formulated a neat solution: falsifiability (Shea no date). He then proceeds by fleshing out the conceptfor instance, differentiating pseudoscience from scientific fraudand by responding to a range of possible objections to his thesis, for example that the demarcation of concepts like pseudoscience, pseudophilosophy, and even BS is vague and imprecise. Both Einstein and Planck ridiculed the whole notion that science ought to be transpicuous in the first place. Astrology is a pseudoscience because its practitioners do not seem to be bothered by the fact that their statements about the world do not appear to be true. What prompted astronomers to react so differently to two seemingly identical situations? Ever since Wittgenstein (1958), philosophers have recognized that any sufficiently complex concept will not likely be definable in terms of a small number of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. The Bhakthavatsalam, S. and Sun, W. (2021) A Virtue Epistemological Approach to the Demarcation Problem: Implications for Teaching About Feng Shui in Science Education. First, it identifies specific behavioral tendencies (virtues and vices) the cultivation (or elimination) of which yield epistemically reliable outcomes. Moberger has found a neat (and somewhat provocative) way to describe the profound similarity between pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy: in a technical philosophical sense, it is all BS. Webdemarkation / ( dimken) / noun the act of establishing limits or boundaries a limit or boundary a strict separation of the kinds of work performed by members of different trade dictum that a wise person proportions his beliefs to the evidence and has been interpreted as an example of Bayesianthinking (McGrayne 2011). This is known as the unobtainable perfection fallacy (Gauch, 2012). Curd, M. and Cover, J.A. WebThis is why the demarcation problem is not only an exciting intellectual puzzle for philosophers and other scholars, but is one of the things that makes philosophy actually Responsibilism is about identifying and practicing epistemic virtues, as well as identifying and staying away from epistemic vices. These occurrences would seem to point to the existence of a continuum between the two categories of science and pseudoscience. Regarding Laudans second claim from above, that science is a fundamentally heterogeneous activity, this may or may not be the case, the jury is still very much out. (II) History and Sociology of Bhakthavatsalam and Sun discuss two distinct yet, in their mind, complementary (especially with regard to demarcation) approaches to virtue ethics: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. What is the demarcation problem? What is Poppers solution to the demarcation problem? Here Letrud invokes the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, also known as Brandolinis Law (named after the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, to which it is attributed): The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Going pseudoscientific statement by pseudoscientific statement, then, is a losing proposition. In contrast with the example of the 1919 eclipse, Popper thought that Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalysis, as well as Marxist theories of history, are unfalsifiable in principle; they are so vague that no empirical test could ever show them to be incorrect, if they are incorrect. He concluded that what distinguishes science from pseudoscience is the (potential) falsifiability of scientific hypotheses, and the inability of pseudoscientific notions to be subjected to the falsifiability test. Contemporary philosophers of science, it seems, have no trouble with inherently fuzzy concepts. Email: mpigliucci@ccny.cuny.edu Do quacks not also claim to be experts? Moreover, Einsteins prediction was unusual and very specific, and hence very risky for the theory. Alchemy was once a science, but it is now a pseudoscience. The demarcation problem in philosophy of science refers to the question of how to meaningfully and reliably separate science from pseudoscience. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. Webplural demarcations 1 : the marking of the limits or boundaries of something : the act, process, or result of demarcating something the demarcation of property lines 2 : Bhakthavatsalam and Sun are aware of the perils of engaging defenders of pseudoscience directly, especially from the point of view of virtue epistemology. He proposed it as the cornerstone solution to both the problem of induction and the problem of demarcation.. A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable (or refutable) if it can be The demarcation problem is a classic definitional or what is it? question in philosophy. Both the terms science The point is subtle but crucial. Did I seriously entertain the possibility that I may be wrong? His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are. (1989) The Chain of Reason vs. Indeed, some of the authors discussed later in this article have made this very same proposal regarding pseudoscience: there may be no fundamental unity grouping, say, astrology, creationism, and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, but they nevertheless share enough Wittgensteinian threads to make it useful for us to talk of all three as examples of broadly defined pseudosciences. The contributors to The Philosophy of Pseudoscience also readily admit that science is best considered as a family of related activities, with no fundamental essence to define it. Popper became interested in demarcation because he wanted to free science from a serious issue raised by David Hume (1748), the so-called problem of induction. For Zagzebski, intellectual virtues are actually to be thought of as a subset of moral virtues, which would make epistemology a branch of ethics. Third, Fernandez-Beanato rejects Hanssons (and other authors) notion that any demarcation criterion is, by necessity, temporally limited because what constitutes science or pseudoscience changes with our understanding of phenomena. Modern scientific skeptics take full advantage of the new electronic tools of communication. Being a member of the New Academy, and therefore a moderate epistemic skeptic, Cicero writes: As I fear to hastily give my assent to something false or insufficiently substantiated, it seems that I should make a careful comparison of arguments []. and Novella, S.P. Plenty of philosophers after Popper (for example, Laudan 1983) have pointed out that a number of pseudoscientific notions are eminently falsifiable and have been shown to be falseastrology, for instance (Carlson 1985). One of the most intriguing papers on demarcation to appear in the course of what this article calls the Renaissance of scholarship on the issue of pseudoscience is entitled Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy, authored by Victor Moberger (2020). The conclusion at which Socrates arrives, therefore, is that the wise person would have to develop expertise in medicine, as that is the only way to distinguish an actual doctor from a quack. Konisky (ed.). Duhem pointed out that when scientists think they are testing a given hypothesis, as in the case of the 1919 eclipse test of General Relativity, they are, in reality, testing a broad set of propositions constituted by the central hypothesis plus a number of ancillary assumptions. The problem of demarcating science from non- or pseudo-science has serious ethical and political implications for science itself and, indeed, for all societies in which science is practised. Never mind that, of course, an even cursory inspection of such anomalies turns up only mistakes or misunderstandings. Two examples in particular are the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast published by Steve Novella and collaborators, which regularly reaches a large audience and features interviews with scientists, philosophers, and skeptic activists; and the Guerrilla Skepticism initiative coordinated by Susan Gerbic, which is devoted to the systematic improvement of skeptic-related content on Wikipedia. This eclectic approach is reflected in the titles of the book's six parts: (I) What's the Problem with the Demarcation Problem? This means that an understanding of its nature, and of how it differs from science, has very practical consequences. Here I present Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos accounts of science and analyse their adequacy at solving the demarcation between science and non-science, known Just like there are different ways to approach virtue ethics (for example, Aristotle, the Stoics), so there are different ways to approach virtue epistemology. The twin tales of the spectacular discovery of a new planet and the equally spectacular failure to discover an additional one during the 19th century are classic examples. In the case of pseudophilosophy, instead, we see equivocation due to conceptual impressionism, wherebyplausible but trivial propositions lend apparent credibility to interesting but implausible ones.. Dawes (2018) acknowledges, with Laudan (1983), that there is a general consensus that no single criterion (or even small set of necessary and jointly sufficient criteria) is capable of discerning science from pseudoscience. The French Association for Scientific Information (AFIS) was founded in 1968, and a series of groups got started worldwide between 1980 and 1990, including Australian Skeptics, Stichting Skepsis in the Netherlands, and CICAP in Italy. So, while both the honest person and the liar are concerned with the truththough in opposite mannersthe BSer is defined by his lack of concern for it.