Pseudoscience

A pseudoscience is any theory, or system of theories, that is deceptively claimed to be scientific. The term is a pejorative one, and its use is thus inevitably controversial; the term also is problematical because it is difficult to define rigorously what science is. Some ideas (like phrenology in human biology) were once considered respectable sciences, but were later dismissed as pseudoscience. Others (like plate tectonics in earth science) were initially scorned as pseudoscience, but came to be accepted, and indeed are now considered basic tenets within their disciplines. There are a few, such as psychoanalysis, about which there is a serious dispute as to whether they may properly be considered pseudoscience.

The term "pseudoscience", which combines the Greek root pseudo, meaning "false", and the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge", seems to have been used first in 1843 by the French physiologist François Magendie (1783-1855), who referred to phrenology as "a pseudo-science of the present day". Among its early uses was one in 1844 in the Northern Journal of Medicine, I 387: "That opposite kind of innovation which pronounces what has been recognized as a branch of science, to have been a pseudo-science, composed merely of so-called facts, connected together by misapprehensions under the disguise of principles".

Introduction

Casting horoscopes based on the appearance of the night sky has been used to predict the future for at least two thousand years, long before the establishment of the scientific method. Although many contemporary astrologers continue in this mystical tradition, some of them argue that their methods are actually scientific - a view that opens the practice of astrology to the charge of "pseudoscience!" by scientists. Astrology is generally regarded as nonsense by scientists, but sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between an idea that is plausible but not generally accepted and one that is simply unsound.

Generally, pseudoscientific claims either (1) lack supportive evidence, or (2) are based on evidence that is not established by scientific methods or (3) cite well-established evidence but do not use that evidence logically to support the conclusions asserted in the claim. Science (especially the "hard sciences" like physics and the "exact sciences" of mathematics and logic), have considerable prestige in most modern industrialized societies. (Often, to call something "scientific" is to suggest that it is true.) Desire for this prestige prompts claims that a particular belief is "scientifically proven". Theories that do not follow the methods of science are therefore likely to be dismissed -- not only as "unscientific" or "pseudoscientific", but as fallacious.

For those whose sincerely-held theories are dismissed as "pseudoscience," that label often cuts to the quick. The charge of pseudoscience can be used to imply poor training, inadequate education, faulty judgment, or outright fraud by the proponents of the idea, and thereby prompts defensive outrage among those advocates. Among non-scientists who nevertheless attribute truth and power to the sciences, rejecting their claims as "unscientific" can provoke a different defensive reaction, a concern that their practices are being called invalid as opposed to simply unproven.

Paradigmatic examples

Phrenology is a classic example of pseudoscience.

Many theories, claims, and practices have been attacked as pseudoscientific, and many continue to be so regarded. But some—including the theory of evolution, plate tectonics, and the Big Bang (a term originally chosen by Fred Hoyle to poke fun at the idea have since won general acceptance. In retrospect, the delay in acceptance was clearly a result of the challenges that they posed to the accepted doctrines of the time, and of the difficulty in gathering evidence for new theories.

Astrology

Astrology (not to be confused with the science of astronomy) refers to a species of 'fortune-telling' based on the position (relative to earth) of the sun, moon, stars, and/or constellations. Some astrologers claim scientific status for their discipline, or some aspects of it; the activity at least makes certain assumptions which ought to be subject to scientific testing.

It is always possible that some astrological claims might turn out to be true. However unlikely it seems, it is not impossible that the movements of the moon or planets might have an influence on human activity or emotions. The major criticism of astrology is that there is no good evidence for its claims, and no rational, logical structure to its theories. In fact, it often functions essentially as a religious activity, impervious to research.

Astrological researchers often complain that they cannot receive a fair hearing in scientific circles, and find it hard to have their research published in scientific journals. They claim that their scientific critics have wrongly dismissed studies which do support astrology. An example would be Michel Gauquelin's purported discovery of correlations between some planetary positions and certain human traits such as vocations.

IQ studies

Cognitive scientists do not agree on what, if anything, intelligence is, let alone how to test for it. Nevertheless one particular measure--scores from a range of standardized Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests -- is widely used. Originally designed for educational and military use, the classic Stanford-Benet Intelligence Scale and its offshoots measure several cognitive capabilities such as language fluency, or three-dimensional thinking. While these may seem unrelated, test scores do in fact tend to correlate. The premise of IQ tests is that such capabilities all depend on some underlying factor, called the general intelligence factor. To critics, the concept smacks of metaphysics. Does "IQ" in fact measure anything at all?

Subsidiary questions relating to intelligence and IQ involve the relative importance of nature vs nurture, and the distribution of IQ between men and women, and among the various races (cf. intelligence and race). Accusations of pseudoscience are not difficult to find in these discussions.

Psychotherapy

Freud's proposal that mental illness might be treated through talk rather than surgery, drugs, or hypnosis was only one of the startling features of psychoanalysis contrasting it to earlier conceptions of psychiatry. The concept remains controversial today. Does psychotherapy "work"? Is it any more effective than ordinary talk? (Effective at what?)

Critics also wonder precisely what ontological status is being claimed for various abstract entities beloved of psychological theory, such as Freud's ego and id, which would seem unavailable for scientific inspection. In what way do psychoanalysis and its successors differ from religions? The question is even more sensitive in the case of Jungian psychology and Transpersonal psychology, which are more interested in the spiritual dimension.

In The Myth of Mental Illness and other works, Thomas Szasz proposed that the entire concept of 'mental illness' is a tool of social control at the hands of a 'pharmacracy'. In his view, a disease must be something concrete and measurable, not an abstract condition which comes into existence by vote. In this light, current attitudes toward mental illness are no more rational than 19th-century campaigns against onanism.

Intelligent design

Intelligent design, as promoted by members of the Discovery Institute, argues that the complexity and harmony of the universe and especially of life on earth, implies the existence of an intelligent creator. To its critics, the theory was designed to circumvent U.S. prohibitions against the teaching of Creation Science as part of the scientific curricula of public schools. If so, the strategy did not work. In his decision for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Judge John E. Jones III agreed that intelligent design is "a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory". He went on to say that

"...ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community." (p.64)

Other

For many people, at least some 'pseudoscientific' beliefs, for example that the pyramids were built not by men but by prehistoric astronauts, are harmless nonsense. Horoscopes are read for fun by many, but taken seriously by few. Others, notably the "brights" movement, feel that such beliefs are always harmful. According to Scott Lillenfeld, popular psychology is rife with pseudoscientific claims: self-help books, supermarket tabloids, radio call-in shows, television infomercials and 'pseudodocumentaries', the Internet, and even the nightly news promote unsupported claims about, amongst other things, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, satanic ritual abuse, polygraph testing, subliminal persuasion, out-of-body experiences, graphology, the Rorschach Inkblot Test, facilitated communication, herbal remedies for memory enhancement, the use of hypnosis for memory recovery, and multiple personality disorder. He suggests that critically interrogating these claims is a good way of introducing students of psychology to understanding the scientific method, while also bearing in mind Stephen Jay Gould's aphorism that "exposing a falsehood necessarily affirms a truth".

"James Oberg, NASA engineer and science writer, is famously quoted as observing “You must keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” The reference from which that quote is taken points out that there is a qualitative difference between the level of uncertainty that must be overcome when proving something that is another case of a phenomenom that is already well established, and proving something that attempts to show the complete opposite of the accepted understanding of the world, or a brand new untested view of things. For example, if a new type of narcotic is synthesized, and testing in a group of subjects indicates that it relieves pain but is addictive- that is consistent with many other studies that show similar qualities of drugs with similar chemical structures. If, however, there is statistical indication that this new drug relieves pain but is not addictive, that flies against expectations and the results of years of other research. Could it be true? Yes, but the level of proof required is higher. Advocates of the non-addictive qualities of the second drug might argue that the drug is not addictive. It takes a sophisticated understanding of the use of statistics to recognize this as pseudoscience, that such an exagerated claim is not warranted except by more rigorous proof, and that the same statistical tests may not be applicable in both situations.

The Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman recognized the importance of unconventional approaches to science, but he was bemused by the willingness of people to believe "so many wonderful things." He was however much more concerned about how ordinary people could be intimidated by experts propounding "science that isn't science", and "theories that don't work":

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down ... And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way — Or a parent ... feels guilty ... because she didn't do 'the right thing', according to the experts... Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science

For Feynmann, it came down to a certain type of integrity, a "kind of care not to fool yourself", that was missing in what he called 'cargo cult science'.

Pseudoscience and the philosophy of science

The concept of 'pseudoscience' is, of course, strictly related to that of science. Distinguishing what science is from what it is not is a fundamental problem of the philosophy of science, and is known as the Problem of demarcation.

There is much disagreement not only about whether 'science' can be distinguished from 'pseudoscience' reliably and objectively, but also about whether trying to do so is even useful. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend argued that all attempts to distinguish science from non-science are flawed. He argued that the idea that science can or should be run according to fixed rules is "unrealistic and pernicious... It makes our science less adaptable and more dogmatic:"  Often the term 'pseudoscience' is used simply as a pejorative to express a low opinion of a field, regardless of any objective measures; thus according to McNally, it is "little more than an inflammatory buzzword for quickly dismissing one’s opponents in media sound-bites." Similarly, Larry Laudan suggested that 'pseudoscience' has no scientific meaning: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘unscientific’ from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us".

Skepticism is generally regarded as essential in science, but skepticism is properly defined as doubt, not denial. The sociologist Marcello Truzzi distinguished between 'skeptics' and 'scoffers'. Scientists who are scoffers fail to apply the same professional standards to their criticism of unconventional ideas that would be expected in their own fields; they are more interested in discrediting claims of the extraordinary than in disproving them, using poor scholarship, substandard science, ad hominem attacks and rhetorical tricks rather than solid falsification. Truzzi quotes the philosopher Mario Bunge as saying: "the occasional pressure to suppress [dissent] in the name of the orthodoxy of the day is even more injurious to science than all the forms of pseudoscience put together."

Because science is so diverse, it is hard to find rules to distinguish between what is scientific and what is not that can be applied consistently. The philosopher Imre Lakatos suggested that we might however distinguish between 'progressive' and 'degenerative' research programs; between those which evolve, expanding our understanding, and those which stagnate. Paul Thagard proposed more formally that a theory can be regarded as pseudoscientific if "it has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations"

Kuhn saw a circularity in this, and questioned whether a field makes progress because it is a science, or whether is it a science because it makes progress? He also questioned whether scientific revolutions were in fact progressive, noting that Einstein's general theory of relativity is in some ways closer to Aristotle's than either is to Newton's. Most progress in science, according to Kuhn, is not at times of scientific revolution, when one theory is replacing another, but when one paradigm is dominant, and when scientists who share common goals and understanding fill in the details by puzzle solving. He argued that, when a theory is discarded, it is not always the case (at least not at first), that the new theory is better at explaining facts. Which of two theories is 'better' is largely a matter of opinion. The reasons for discarding a theory may be that more and more anomalies that reveal its weaknesses become apparent, but there is no point at which the followers of one theory abandon it in favor of a new one; instead, they cling tenaciously to the old theory, while seeking fresh explanations for the anomalies. A new theory takes over not by converting followers of the old theory, but because, over time, the new view gains more and more followers until it becomes dominant, while the older view is held in the end only by a few "elderly hold outs". Kuhn argued that such resistance is not unreasonable, or illogical, or wrong; instead he thought that the conservative nature of science is an essential part of what enables it to progress. At most, it might be said that the man who continues to resist the new view long after the rest of his profession has adopted a new view "has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist"

As Kuhn described them to be, the motives of the true scientist are to gain the respect and approval of his or her peers. When technical jargon is misused, or when scientific findings are represented misleadingly, to give particular claims the superficial trappings of science for some commercial or political gain, this is easily recognized as an abuse of science ; it is not an abuse that is confined to popular literature however.

Despite the complexity of the issue, in the 20th century solutions to the problem of demarcation have been proposed, which can be collected into two main lines of thinking (see also problem of demarcation, scientific method, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn for further discussion).

Defining science by the falsifiability of theories

The philosopher Karl Popper described science as an "objective product of human thought", as much as a nest can be seen as an objective product of a bird. Consequently, he dismissed as insignificant the philosophical tendency to regard knowledge as subjective, which includes the definition of science by the behavior of scientists as described above.

Popper's solution of the problem of demarcation is extensively treated in his 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery a book that Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, called "one of the most important documents of the twentieth century". Popper suggested that science does not advance because we learn more and more facts. Science does not start with observations and then somehow assemble them to provide a theory; any attempt to do so would be logically unsound, because a general theory contains more information than any finite number of observations. Popper shows this with a simple example. Let's say we have seen millions of white swans. We may be tempted to conclude, by the process called induction, that "All swans are white". But however many white swans we have seen, the next swan we see might be black. (In fact, such a theory may well have been implicitly accepted by Europeans before Australia was discovered, and black swans were found).

Rather, the advance of science consists of three steps: (1) we find a problem; (2) we try to solve the problem by a new theory; (3) we critically test our theory and, while doing this, we learn from our errors. It is in the process of critical testing of theories that Popper finds the distinguishing characteristics of science.

For Popper, there is no way a scientific theory can be proven to be true; a theory comes to be accepted because it has survived all attempts to disprove it, but it is only accepted provisionally, until something better comes along. This may be explained again with the example of swans. How could we ever prove the truth of our theory that "all swans are white"? Only by observing all swans of the universe in all past, present and future times, and showing they are all white. This is, of course, impossible. Yet, an assertion such as our "all swans are white" is a scientific statement (although a false one).

Following Popper, scientific theories must include falsifiable universal assertions, i.e., general statements that cannot proven to be true, but can eventually be found false when a new observation, e.g., of a black swan, disproves them. Assertions that are not falsifiable are non-scientific, and the refusal to critically discuss a theory is a non-scientific attitude as well. As Popper puts it, "those who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game".

Accordingly, a 'pseudoscience' is a system of assertions with a superficial resemblance to science, but which is empty, in being in principle incapable of disproof. Scholars that refuse to engage in a critical discussion of their doctrine exhibit a 'pseudoscientific' attitude. Popper argued that astrology, Marxism, and Freudian psychoanalysis are all 'pseudoscientific' because they make no predictions by which their truth can be judged; accordingly they cannot be falsified by experimental tests, and have thus no connection with the real world.

Defining science by the behavior of scientists

Popper's vision of the scientific method was itself tested by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn concluded, from studying the history of science, that science does not progress linearly, but undergoes periodic 'revolutions', in which the nature of scientific inquiry in a field is transformed. He argued that falsification had played little part in such revolutions, because rival world views are incommensurable - he argued that it is impossible to understand one paradigm through the concepts and terminology of another.

For Kuhn, whatever we mean by scientific progress, we must account for it by examining how scientists behave, and by discovering what they value, what they tolerate, and what they disdain. He concluded that they value most the respect of their peers, and they gain this by solving difficult 'puzzles', while working with shared rules towards shared objectives. Kuhn maintained that typical scientists are not objective, independent thinkers, but are conservatives who largely accept what they were taught. Most aim to discover what they already know - "The man who is striving to solve a problem ... knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly."

Such a closed group imposes its own expectations of rigor, and disparages claims that are, by their conventions, vague, exaggerated, or untestable. Within any field of science, scientists develop a technical language of their own; to a lay reader, their papers may seem full of jargon, pedantry, and obscurantism. What seems to be bad writing is often just bad writing, but these things also reflect an obsession with using words precisely. Sometimes the technical terms have strict definitions in terms of things that can be measured (operational definitions). Other terms 'stand for' things not yet understood in detail - even in theoretical physics for instance, although most terms have some connection with observables, they are seldom of the sort that would enable them to be used as operational definitions. As Churchland observed, "If a restriction in favor of operational definitions were to be followed ... most of theoretical physics would have to be dismissed as meaningless pseudoscience!" Scientists also expect any claims to be subject to peer review before publication and acceptance, and demand that any claims are accompanied by enough detail to enable them to be verified and, if possible, reproduced. Some proponents of unconventional 'alternative' theories avoid this often ego-bruising process, sometimes arguing that peer review is biased in favor of conventional views, or that assertions that lie outside what is conventionally accepted cannot be evaluated fairly using methods designed for a conventional paradigm.

Popper saw dangers in the closed worlds of specialists, but while admitting that at any one moment we are 'prisoners caught in the framework of our theories', he denied that different frameworks are like mutually untranslatable languages, and argued that clashes between frameworks have stimulated some of the greatest intellectual advances. Popper accepted that he had overlooked what Kuhn called 'normal science', but for him, such 'normal' science was the activity of "the not-too critical professional, of the science student who accepts the ruling dogma of the day;... who accepts a new revolutionary theory only if almost everybody else is ready to accept it." Popper acknowledged its existence, but saw it as the product of poor teaching, and also doubted whether 'normal' science was indeed normal. Whereas Kuhn had pictured science as progressing steadily during long periods of stability within a dominant paradigm, punctuated occasionally by scientific revolutions, Popper thought that it was rare for a single paradigm to be so dominant, and that there was always a struggle between sometimes several competing theories.

Popper's analysis of science was prescriptive, he described what he thought scientists ought to do, and claimed that this is what the best scientists did. Kuhn, by contrast, claimed to be describing what scientists in fact did, not what he thought they ought to do, but nevertheless he argued that it was rational to attribute the success of science to the scientists' behavior. Whereas Popper was scathing about the conservative scientist who accepted the dogma of the day, Kuhn proposed that such conservatism might be important for progress to occur. According to Kuhn, scientists do not normally try to overthrow theories, but rather they try to bring the accepted theory into closer agreement with observed facts and other areas of knowledge and understanding. Accordingly, they tend to ignore research findings that threaten the existing paradigm, and so "novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation".

Yet there are controversies in every area of science, and these lead to continuing change and development. In this internal debate, scientists are scornful of the selective use of experimental evidence - presenting data that seem to support claims while suppressing or dismissing data that contradict them - and peer-reviewed journals generally insist that published papers cite others in a balanced way. Imre Lakatos attempted to accommodate this in what he called 'sophisticated falsification', arguing that it is only a succession of theories and not one given theory which can be appraised as scientific or pseudoscientific. A series of theories usually have a continuity that welds them into a research program; the program has a 'hard core' surrounded by "auxiliary hypotheses" which bear most tests, but which can be modified or replaced without threatening the core understanding.