The prevailing discriminator is use of the ‘scientific method’: sciences all use the scientific
method, and pseudosciences either do not use it, misapply it, or minimize a crucial portion of it. The
problem with this criterion, however, is its invalid premise -- that a single scientific method is used
by all sciences. This book is based on a different premise: the sciences share a suite of scientific
methods, but the emphasis on individual techniques varies among and within sciences.
This revised discriminator -- use of the suite of scientific methods -- is employed by scientists with reasonable success. Astrology, UFO’s, and psychic healing are considered by many to be pseudosciences, because they lack a well-controlled observation base. Parapsychology, in contrast, is very rigorous experimentally, yet most scientists reject it because of inadequate replicatability and because its results challenge their key assumptions (e.g., can the outcome of an experiment be affected by the experimenter’s wishes?). Immanuel Velikovsky’s [1967, 1977] ideas about colliding planets are rejected in spite of his volumes of supporting evidence, because of his complete absence of objectivity in evidence evaluation.
Are political science and sociology really sciences? For many scientists, the answer to that question depends less on each field’s methods than on respect for their results. That decision should be based on reading the original literature or at least textbooks, rather than on such ‘data’ as newspaper editorials.
The challenge of separating science from pseudoscience has intrigued many philosophers of science. This goal inspired the birth of falsificationism, Karl Popper’s philosophy that science should concentrate on trying to falsify hypotheses (Chapter 7). Popper was uncomfortable with the ‘scientific’ theories of Marx, Freud, and Adler, particularly in the way these theories seemed to account for any observation:
“What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of the theory. But this meant very little, I reflected, since every conceivable case could be interpreted in the light of Adler’s theory, or equally of Freud’s. . . It was precisely this fact -- that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed -- which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favor of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.” [Popper, 1963]
The line that Popper found to separate science from pseudoscience was the criterion of falsifiability: “statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable, observations.” Hypothesis testing certainly is an integral component of all sciences.
Thomas Kuhn used a quite different discriminator: every science has a ruling paradigm that explains a wide variety of observations and guides research, whereas fields that lack such a paradigm are in the ‘pre-science’ stage. Kuhn’s discrimination of pre-paradigm and paradigm-guided research is useful (Chapter 7), but it does not follow that pre-paradigm fields are pre-science or pseudoscience. For example, sociology and parts of psychology lack consensus on a unifying paradigm, but that lack does not constitute grounds for rejecting their findings.
Why have scientists largely ignored the efforts to identify a science/pseudoscience demarcation? They reject the premise of this quest: “I define the criterion that determines whether you are a scientist or pseudoscientist.” The label of ‘pseudoscience’ accomplishes more harm than good.
