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Identifying Pseudoscience: A Social Process Criterion

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Abstract

Many philosophers have come to believe there is no single criterion by which one can distinguish between a science and a pseudoscience. But it need not follow that no distinction can be made: a multifactorial account of what constitutes a pseudoscience remains possible. On this view, knowledge-seeking activities fall on a spectrum, with the clearly scientific at one end and the clearly non-scientific at the other. When proponents claim a clearly non-scientific activity to be scientific, it can be described as a pseudoscience. One feature of a scientific theory is that it forms part of a research tradition being actively pursued by a scientific community. If a theory lacks this form of epistemic warrant, this is a pro tanto reason to regard it as pseudoscientific.

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Notes

  1. For lists of such features, see, for example, the work of Mario Bunge (1991, 46) and Martin Mahner (2013, 38–39). (Bunge regards these features as jointly necessary, while Mahner favours a “family-resemblance” approach.)

  2. My spectrum resembles Pigliucci’s (2013, 18), but differs from it insofar as it does not label activities at the non-scientific end of the spectrum “pseudoscience,” for such activities are pseudoscientific only when they mimic science (see Sect. 1.2).

  3. Thagard later modified this view (1988, 168), but continued to acknowledge that it is not enough to examine the characteristics of theories; we need to look at the behaviour of the community that employs them. Indeed he went further, to discuss the communal nature of science and what he called “group rationality” (1988, 187).

  4. In 2015 Thomson Reuters removed this journal from its Journal Citation Reports because of its 71% self-citation rate (see https://archive.is/RFzYo), an indicator of pseudoscientific status that is consistent with what I am arguing here.

  5. While the present paper uses Laudan’s terminology of research traditions, the argument could be recast by reference to what Lakatos (1970) called research programmes. The feature in question would then be that of having been refused admission to, or excluded from, the relevant research programme.

  6. Even though the scientists who rejected the theory did not regard it as pseudoscientific, we may be able to do so, if there are those who continue to espouse it after its rejection by the relevant scientific community (see Sect. 4).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    Gregory W. Dawes

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Dawes, G.W. Identifying Pseudoscience: A Social Process Criterion. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 283–298 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9388-6

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