What Is Pseudoscience? A Philosopher Tries to Figure It Out
Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has carved part of his career out of efforts to identify pseudoscience and separate it from virtuous science. Two of his books are Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (U Chicago Press 2018) and Philosophy of Pseudoscience (U Chicago Press 2013), co-edited with Maarten Boudry.
He thinks that any suggestion that our minds are not merely what our brains do is “antiscientific” and that there is no free will. So it’s worth noting that, in a recent article at Skeptical Inquirer, he shows that isolating pseudoscience from virtuous science is not so easy after all:
We may disagree on some of the likely borderline cases. For instance, is SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a pseudoscience? I’d say no, but I would understand why someone might have doubts. What about parapsychology? I’d say yes, it is a pseudoscience, but, again, there may be room for disagreement.
One is tempted to wonder whether “room for disagreement” is a polite term for Not Yet Cancelled. But Pigliucci goes on to say something quite interesting: the question is much more fraught than the policing of “borderline cases” would suggest.
Whom Should We Trust?
He cites a 2023 paper by fellow philosopher Kåre Letrud of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. Letrud was trying to determine how consistently a discipline was labelled as pseudoscience. According to his Abstract, he found “inconclusive evidence for an overall agreement,” adding “However, the frequent usage of a small number of pseudoscience-cases indicates that these are considered paradigms of pseudoscience. ”
Pigliucci comments
The consensus cases were not unexpected: astrology, creationism, homeopathy, intelligent design, parapsychology, and UFOs. The situation was less clear for alternative medicine, ancient astronauts, climate change denialism, and several others. And there was almost no apparent consensus for a long list, including animal magnetism, the anthropic principle, anti-gravitational devices, the Bermuda Triangle, Feng Shui, cell phone radiation, and on and on.
MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI, “PSEUDOSCIENCE: DO WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT?,” SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, JULY/AUGUST 2024
He adds,
This is more than somewhat unexpected. If you go through the list presented by Letrud as a multi-page bar graph and available as a spreadsheet in the supplementary materials accompanying the paper, you might be surprised at so many (to me!) obvious examples of pseudoscience, including several of those I just listed, that didn’t make the cut.
PIGLIUCCI, “WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT?”
Nonplussed, Pigliucci suggests ignoring the slender philosophical literature on the topic and focusing on work published in — reader, are you ready for this? — Skeptical Inquirer itself!
The best source of serious writing on pseudoscience, I suggest, are the few magazines dedicated to the topic and published by organizations that are focused on the phenomenon, such as Skeptical Inquirer. Skeptics are the professionals, in this case, not scientists or philosophers, except for those very few philosophers of science who work specifically on pseudoscience, such as yours truly.
PIGLIUCCI, “WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT?”
And the philosophy world should also defer to his opinion — the modest opinion of a philosopher who accepts neither the independent existence of the mind nor free will.
As we noted recently, his pronouncements on these topics do not follow from any dramatic new science findings:
As a matter of fact, earlier this year David Chalmers, the very same non-materialist philosopher that Pigliucci was excoriating in that passage in his essay, won the famous 25-year bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch. In that agreed-on period, Koch was was unable to find the “consciousness spot” in the brain. It is definitely intellectual pressure, not achievement, that keeps materialism strong in the neurosciences.
What Role Does Evidence Play?
If there are criteria that demarcate science from pseudoscience, we might expect evidence to play a strong role. But evidence is not likely to be dealt with even-handedly in an environment riddled with strong philosophical (and perhaps sometimes political) commitments. To take one example, the vast evidence for fine-tuning of our universe for life would seem to imply some sort of underlying design. Yet, without blinking, otherwise intelligent people will retort, “That just shows that there are countless universes out there!”
We have evidence for the design of our universe but no evidence for the countless other universes. The decision to prefer what we don’t see to what we do see is not based on weighing evidence but on philosophical preference. And philosophical preference drives efforts to identify threatening patterns of evidence — for example, intelligent design — as pseudoscience.
Overall, it’s no wonder that few philosophers write on the topic of pseudoscience. Speaking of Skeptical Inquirers, perhaps we should be much more skeptical of the whole concept of pseudoscience, at least as it plays out now. If there is evidence for a phenomenon in nature, we can attempt to evaluate that evidence (or lack thereof) without using a label that mainly serves the interests of naturalist (materialist) atheism. Worse, use of the label elevates that perspective to the position of — an entirely undeserving — public referee of science.
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