Talk:Pseudoscience

Comment

This is potentially a very controversial article, trimmed from a Wikipedia article that has long suffered from disputes, mainly arising from its use as a vehicle to attack particular subjects or fields regarded as discreditable by some, but as respectable by others.

Articles should not seek to promote or to disparage particular beliefs, only to accurately report the opinions of notable authorities when argued carefully in strong, verifiable sources. This article is about the concept of Pseudoscience, and the difficulties of distinguishing pseudoscience from "real" science, and should not get sidetracked into judgements on any area of science or alleged pseudoscience except insofar as is essential to illuminate the problems encountered in trying to make a rigorous distinction. In doing so, the article should not appear either to endorse or to rebutt the proposition that any given area is "pseudoscientific", as a key issue in dispute is whether the term has more than perjorative content. As an on-line encyclopedia, sources should, wherever possible, be verifiable online (e.g. in PubMed abstracts), and some of the present sources could be improved upon in this regard especially. However some major sources are prominent books by Popper, Kuhn and others, and their use is unavoidable; key elements of their content may be available as quotations in secondary sources on-line; if so please add these. The article is still very raw, and I think that neither the views of Popper or those of Kuhn are treated adequately. There should be a section on "popular" conceptions of what constitute pseudoscience; this will be difficult to write neutrally. Gareth Leng 16:20, 28 October 2006 (CDT)

Yes, it is for that reason I was surprised it was selected as one of the pilot articles. Getting hands dirty early I see. :) I'm not sure quoting a dictionary as the first line of an encyclopedia article is something we want to encourage doing either. -- Andrew Lih 04:54, 29 October 2006 (CST)

I think you're correct that the WP article has been used for that purpose (for quite some time, I might add), and you're also quite correct that using it for that purpose is strikingly contrary to the neutrality policy. --Larry Sanger 20:45, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Good point, and fixed?Gareth Leng 08:33, 29 October 2006 (CST)

What concerns me a little is the relatively detailed discussion of 1 & only 1 subject in the last part, psychology, As the article reads, it could be judged as intended to imply that

this is where most of them are found. It may well be that a great many are to be found there, but a discussion of several fields would seem more reasonable. If there's need for a "pseudoscience in psychology" article, so be it, but that is really going to get controversial, It is not my view, but I've known people to say it includes the entire subject. DavidGoodman 23:01, 1 November 2006 (CST)

I think you're absolutely right, and that section is inappropriate and should just be deleted.Gareth Leng 03:31, 3 November 2006 (CST)

Excellent work! This article has transformed from a wholly pejorative embarrassment to a truly education experience. Makes me proud to be a part of it, but all I could find was a missing period;) Good job Gareth. --D. Matt Innis 07:54, 12 December 2006 (CST)

This article is a little weird. A lot of it really belongs under "philosophy of science." It goes on and on about that, but I saw only a handful of references of well-known pseudo-sciences. Wouldn't the reader be better served by a list of oh, five to ten representative ones, along a description of any debate over them that seems especially noteworthy?

I nominate: astrology (gotta have that one), alternative medicine (maybe with subsidiary examples like chiropractic, prayer healing, or acupuncture), ancient astronauts, and ESP / psychic research. Oh, and please trim down the other stuff, and make it not so preachy. And can we get some kind of timeline showing various skeptical campaigns? I know there were anti-Spiritualism activists in between the World Wars. Bei Dawei

Yes, this article is intended as a serious part of the phlosophy of science, and to address the question of whether the term pseudoscience has any "scientific" content at all. It is not intended to pass judgement on whether any particular subject has valid foundations. The list you give all have problems; astrology is not really capable of being confused with science so is scarcely pseudoscience except as a mere pejorative, it has been used extensively as an example, and analysing it as an example has shown how even in this clear cut case of utter rubbish, it's hard to make an objective case distinguishing it from other areas of legitimate science. Chiropractic is a licensed and regulated profession with in some areas a good record of efficacy, and a basis that is not really pseudoscience more "fuzzy" science; acupuncture theory isn't scientific at all in the conventional sense, but again acupuncture has a good record of efficacy in some conditions; prayer healing and spiritualism as religion are outside the domain of science; astronaut stuff is light popular rubbish, and is not treated seriously enough for any authoratative criticism to be citable. The main skeptical campaign that I know of was the AMA crusade against chiropractic which ended in the Wilk case, where the Supreme Court ruled that the AMA had operated a dishonest campaign in defense of its members interests that involved suppressing evidence of the effectiveness of chiropractic. This is covered in the chiropractic article in detail, but is not really relevant here as the issues in the end were about anti competitive selective use of evidence by the AMA, not about weaknesses in the foundations of chiropractic.

Overt debates about the pseudoscientific nature of particular areas don't really feature much in the serious literature except in the context of the demarkation problem (within philosophy), except in some areas of psychology, where these are largely internal debates. Partly, this is because many critics of particular areas simply do not use the term pseudoscience, partly because of the lack of an effective operational definition of pseudoscience, and partly because the pejorative overtones detract from objectivity.

The areas where there has been a lot of serious debate about the pseudoscientific status of a field are 1) intelligent design 2) psychoanalysis and psychotherapies 3) IQ science

Other areas include the social sciences, and nutritional science. I think though that serious critiques belong in their respective articles, not here, which is about the concept of pseudoscience Gareth Leng 06:22, 17 January 2007 (CST)

My point is that there is already an article on Philosophy of Science--this one shouldn't duplicate that.

Point taken re ancient astronauts, which isn't even really about science. (I thought of them because of Carl Sagan.) No objection to the three fields you mention.

"Alternative Medicine" (including chiropractic) is often discussed in medical circles, though perhaps not among philosophers of pseudo-science. I'm not proposing that the article should condemn it, only that it should receive mention as a prominent area of discussion. Bei Dawei

There are certainly overlaps with this and Philosophy of Science, and Scientific Method and also Junk science, hence the plan at the top of this Talk page. The concept of pseudoscience is a marginal issue in the philosophy of science. I have some problems with the content that you have added, mainly in that the discussion of the concept of pseudoscience makes it clear that it is not a well formed objective concept; the argument for example of McNally, Lauder, Feyeraband and Tirozzi is essentially that calling anything pseudocience presupposes that there is an objective demarkation between science and non science, and this is what is deeply disputed. This is NOT a defence of bad science, rather it is to say that something might properly be criticised as illogical, contrary to known facts, vague, incoherent, fraudulent etc, all of which can be documented objectively, but the term pseudoscience is merely an arbitrary judgement based on presumed authority; it's a label guaranteed to inflame but with no content. The problem with any examples therefore is that to sustain a critique on them which is fair requires documentation of these specific criticisms - but these criticisms still do not themselves qualify as criteria for calling something pseudoscience. Now a huge number of things have been called pseudoscience by somebody or other at some time or other in popular sources, and cataloguing these is a bit like writing an article on intelligence with lists of people who've ever been called clever or stupid. In other words I feel that there is an arbitrary editorial element in choosing which to discuss. For the serious cases, we'd be duplicating the critiques on theeir articles (intelligent design for example). I think there might be a virtue in taking one or two examples like phrenology and astrology and analysing the reasons why people have tried to label these as pseudoscience and the difficulties in so doing - philosophers have found it very difficult to find objective reasons for calling even astrology pseudoscience, while calling phrenology pseudoscience seems an ahistorical fallacy. What I'd like to suggest therefore is that this article should be restricted to the plan outlined at the top of the page, and that the bulk of your changes be translated to a rewrite of the potentially overlapping article on Junk science; I think that we we'd be developing separate themes, not designing a rather ungainly camel? What do you think? :)Gareth Leng 05:31, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Chiropractic and PS

Hey guys, while I don't consider myself an expert in PS, I do consider myself an expert in chiropractic and I suppose as long as it is going to get an honorable mention here, you probably could use my input. Anybody have any verifiabble and reliable sources that state it is pseudoscience? Otherwise, the pejorative nature of the term pseudoscience seems a little harsh. Maybe some clarification at least? --Matt Innis (Talk) 08:37, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Whether it *is* a pseudoscience, is an opinion (which I happen to accept). But as a matter of *fact*, it is often *called* a pseudoscience. For that matter, almost every form of CAM has been so labeled. If you just want a citation, I could always hunt up something from the AMA statements from those trials--Bei Dawei

Some comments on the article at present

"Pseudoscience--combining the Greek pseudo (false) and the Latin scientia (knowledge)--refers to a variety of theories and claims..." OK, this is total nit-picking, and I may be off-base, so take this with a grain of salt. We bold all article topics. Therefore, to mention rather than use the word in a title, it should also be italicized: Pseudoscience. The problem with that is that it looks jarring; people might think the article is about a book or a movie called Pseudoscience. To avoid this, then, we might change it to read: "Pseudoscience...is any of a variety of theories and claims..." But now the problem is that, clearly, we don't want to use the word, because it's a biased epithet; that's why you wrote "refers to" in the first place. It's best, with such epithets, to mention them, not use them. OK, so we can say: "Pseudoscience...is a matter of some controversy. The word pseudoscience is used to refer to any of a variety of theories and claims..." There must be a better way in any case.

OK, more later; must get pizza. --Larry Sanger 19:47, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Well, I think I'll make a few edits myself--see what you think. --Larry Sanger 20:44, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Uh, okay. You could always use quotation marks.

By the way, have we decided not to hyphenate, or did this happen more or less at random? --Bei Dawei

Compare [1] and [2], and also [3] and [4]

In popular usage, "pseudoscience" may also encompass certain theories and claims related to history (e.g., the idea that the Great Pyramid was built by space aliens) or religion (e.g., Spiritualist mediumship).

I don't think this sentence pays its own way. It may be true, but it isn't worth a special mention in the opening paragraph(s). --Larry Sanger 21:18, 18 January 2007 (CST)

My point is that the category of "pseudoscience" inevitably blurs into subjects that are not strictly scientific. For example mediums, psychics, and fortune-tellers are not merely persons championing unorthodox claims about psi, but often also religious figures. Discussions of prehistory (creationism, Atlantis) inevitably shade into discussions of history. And the same group of skeptics who go after psychics, also go after Graham Hancock. --Bei Dawei

OK, I agree with that. But then why not at the same time say that as a concept it is similar to "pseudo-psychology" or "pseudo-philosophy" or any number of other "pseudo"-field epithets--as well as "revisionist history" and so forth, even "cults" for religion (called "sects" in Europe)? If you're going to have a comparison to accusations of non-genuineness in one field, why not broaden the discussion altogether? Probably a good idea. --Larry Sanger 22:16, 18 January 2007 (CST)