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Home , Demarcation problem, Fuzzy logic, Karl Popper, Larry Laudan, Massimo Pigliucci, Problem of induction

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766 successful. Its assumption that firms maximize profits, or equivalently shareholder value, was falsi- PSEUDOSCIENCE fied when empirically tested in the 1950s. Instead of revising the , neoclassical economists argued The term pseudoscience refers to a highly heteroge- that managers should be given appropriate incen- neous set of practices, beliefs, and claims sharing the tives to maximize profits, namely, stock options. property of appearing to be scientific when in Thanks in part to their , companies they contradict either scientific findings or the meth- adopted this form of compensation, and maximizing ods by which proceeds. Classic examples shareholder value became a social norm. As a result, of pseudoscience include , parapsychol- short-term profit maximization—as neoclassical ogy, and ; more recent entries are the denial theory predicts—is more true today. of a causal link between the HIV virus and AIDS A self-fulfilling prophecy is not easy to demon- or the claim that cause . To distin- strate empirically. Only experimental intervention guish between science and pseudoscience is part of can ensure that actors’ beliefs are not influenced by what the referred to as the prior reality. To return to the example used at the , a project that has been dis- outset, the investigator can select a few students at missed by another philosopher, , but random and convince their teacher that they have that keeps gathering much interest in , been diagnosed with exceptional ability. Their subse- , educators, and policymakers. quent academic achievement should be greater than This entry provides the basics of the debate about average, if a self-fulfilling prophecy is to be opera- demarcation, as well as a brief discussion of why it tive. Such experimentation is limited by the difficulty is of vital importance not just intellectually but for of manipulating beliefs in beings, especially at large. when investigation is bound by informed consent. Experimental results will inevitably underestimate Popper and the Demarcation Problem the causal impact of . Self-fulfilling prophecies have an abiding fascina- Popper began working on the problem of demar- tion because they show how we can be caught in a cation between science and pseudoscience (as well web of our own making. By reifying social reality, as more generally nonscience) as early as 1919. we can fail to understand that we have been respon- He was particularly concerned with ’s sible for creating it. famous , the that there does not seem to be a logically independent way to Michael Biggs justify , the basis for the . Popper thought he had arrived at a single See also Feedback Mechanisms and Self-Regulatory Processes in the Social ; Retrodiction and the idea that represented both a solution to Hume’s of Studies problem as well as a clear-cut demarcation crite- rion: falsificationism . He proposed that science is in the business of advancing falsifiable (i.e., refutable Further in principle) about how the world works. This appeared to have bypassed Hume’s issue about Biggs, M. (2009). Self-fulfilling prophecies. In P. Bearman induction because falsificationism can be thought of & P. Hedström (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of analytical (pp. 294–314). Oxford, England: as an application of modus tollens, therefore rely- . ing on deductive, not inductive, reasoning. At the MacKenzie, D. A. (2006). An engine, not a camera: How same time, it seemed to Popper that financial models shape markets. Cambridge: MIT Press. (among which he counted various schools of psy- Merton, R. K. (1968). The self-fulfilling prophecy. In Social choanalysis as well as Marxist theories of ) theory and social structure (2nd ed., pp. 475–490). New made statements that were not falsifiable, and were York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1948) thereby unscientific. Salganik, M. J., & Watts, D. J. (2008). Leading the herd While Popper’s contribution to both issues astray: An experimental approach to self-fulfilling remains a fundamental starting point for any discus- prophecies in an artificial cultural market. Social sion of demarcation and induction, there are good Quarterly, 71, 338–355. to believe that he was a bit too quick in Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Pseudoscience 767 declaring victory on both fronts. This entry directs cases (e.g., “games” actually used to solve practical the reader to two comprehensive articles concern- problems, e.g., the 3-D folding of proteins). Yet it ing the problem of induction and focuses instead on is easy to appreciate how difficult it is to come up falsification as a demarcation criterion. with a small of criteria that sharply define It is easy to show that falsification leaves much what a game is. For each candidate, say, “done good science out and allows a significant amount competitively,” there are both instantiations belong- of pseudoscience in. For instance, the history of sci- ing to the set of interest that fail the criterion (e.g., ence is riddled with examples of scientific hypoth- solitaire) and others that meet it while clearly not eses that—when first proposed—were apparently belonging to the set (e.g., business transactions). So falsified by the data and yet scientists kept them in some sense, it should not really be surprising that alive because they seemed promising enough. The the terms science and pseudoscience are difficult to initial version of the Copernican system, with its cir- define exactly and yet still refer to reasonably coher- cular planetary orbits, was doing no better empiri- ent types of activities that are distinct in important cally than the Ptolemaic system it was supposed to ways from each other. replace, and it was not until Kepler realized that the planets move along elliptical orbits that the theory Laudan and the Alleged Demise of the was vindicated. Copernicus’s book was published in Demarcation Problem 1543, but it was not until 1609 that Kepler put out his fundamentally revised version of the theory. The philosopher Larry Laudan declared the demar- On the other side of the divide, so-called scientific cation problem dead, and the of pseudo- does make perfectly falsifiable predic- science useless and pernicious, in a famous article tions, such as that the earth is only a few 1,000 published in 1983. Laudan pointed to the “failure” years old. These predictions have indeed been amply of philosophers to agree on necessary and jointly falsified by modern geology, , , and sufficient criteria for demarcation as an indication of , and yet there does seem to be a strong sense the futility of the project. Moreover, he asserted that that we should not simply consider creationism a since pseudoscience is an emotionally charged word science, even a failed one (for one thing, because of (clearly always used in dismissive terms), it does not its appeal to , by definition inscrutable, really belong to philosophical discourse. The real forces, which are themselves outside the purview of issue, Laudan maintained, is to assess the epistemic science). warrant behind each individual claim to , What the inadequacy of falsification in establish- regardless of whether it is made from within funda- ing a demarcation criterion hinted at was something mental physics or astrology. that became progressively clearer in the decades fol- While Laudan’s critique has been important in lowing Popper’s pioneering work: Science and pseu- the history of the debate about pseudoscience, there doscience are simply not the sort of that are several counterpoints to consider, which explain admit of being defined by a small set of individually why philosophical discussions of demarcation have necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, the way been on the rise again during the past decade, with classical logicians would want the task to be accom- no sign of abating any time soon. Let us start with plished. However, it is important to understand that Laudan’s last point, that epistemic warrant should be this sort of situation is not limited to the case of the attached to specific claims, not to broad endeavors. science/pseudoscience demarcation. Plenty of other This is much too restrictive and impractical. When complex and interesting concepts are too “fuzzy” (in a field like astrology has repeatedly, and for a long the technical sense of fuzzy ) to admit of sharp time, demonstrated its inability to make — boundaries and clear-cut definitions. Examples due to the incoherence of its theoretical constructs include the idea of “game” (as famously pointed out (e.g., “constellations” are actually optical illusions) by ) as well as the concept of and its failure on empirical grounds—it seems the biological species. time has arrived to archive the whole thing as not Take games, for instance. Clearly, we seem to warranting any more serious investigative efforts. know what sort of activities reasonably fall into that Within a successful and dynamic science, on the category (chess, soccer) and which don’t (war, philos- other hand, the advice to examine each claim on ophizing), and of course, we are aware of borderline its own merits makes sense precisely because that Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

768 Pseudoscience science has established methods and background The Role of in Combating knowledge against which the epistemic warrant of Inferential any new claim can be reasonably assessed. Labeling The current philosophical on pseudosci- something as pseudoscience—if called for—serves ence is exploring some of the alternatives to the the same practical shortcut function of throwing an classical demarcation approach briefly mentioned obviously frivolous lawsuit out of court before one above, such as solutions based on or on invests money and time in something that has no making more precise the notion of Wittgensteinian chance of succeeding. concepts. A significant number As for Laudan’s argument that philosophers have of papers have come out recently vigorously debat- failed at the demarcation task, and that we should ing whether supernatural claims (e.g., Intelligent therefore move on, it seems to be based on a peculiar Design [ID] creationism) belong to a separate cate- of “failure” for a philosopher. It can gory of pseudoscience by virtue of their very invoca- be reasonably argued that it is precisely through the tion of the supernatural or whether they are simply exploration and of possibilities in logical another type of unscientific claim along the lines of space that philosophy makes progress. Popper was astrology, ufology, and so on. wrong about having solved the problem of induc- This particular discussion has, again, very tan- tion, but his attempt based on replacing inductive gible social repercussions, as was clearly on dis- with was a potentially good play during the 2005 trial over the teaching of ID move that had to be properly explored and criti- in public schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. During cized before we could consider more sophisticated the court proceedings there, both Barbara Forrest proposals. The same can be said of other areas of and Pennock had the increasingly less rare philosophical : in ethics, as distinction of being called as witnesses by virtue of originally conceived by and then being philosophers of science, and hence capable of , has not survived unscathed in the providing expert testimony on the scientific modern philosophical literature; but modern utili- (or lack thereof) of ID theory. As a result, Judge tarians like have been able to develop John E. Jones III’s decision in the Kitzmiller versus a much more nuanced view of their approach to Dover Area School District is a nice summary of moral philosophy precisely because they have been the philosophical issues surrounding the demarca- confronted with several rounds of criticism. The tion problem. The judge came down on the side of abandonment of the quest of necessary and jointly philosophers, who were arguing in a prescriptive sufficient criteria to define science and pseudoscience fashion that ID is a pseudoscience, one of the rea- in favor of, for instance, Wittgenstein-type family sons why it should not be taught as science in the resemblance (“fuzzy”) concepts constitutes progress, district’s public schools (another being, as not failure. Judge Jones also noted, that ID is no different in Finally, let us consider Laudan’s point about the substance from classical creationism, which other emotional ladenness of the term pseudoscience . courts have found to be a religious doctrine, the There is no doubt that this is the case, but Laudan teaching of which would violate the establishment himself argues that philosophy should be able to tell clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution us what is reasonable to believe and what is not, of the ). and it is hard to imagine how “unreasonable” is Pseudoscientific notions will likely stay with us the kind of label that would be much more palat- for a long time, as recent literature in psychology able and emotionally neutral than “pseudoscience.” shows that human beings are naturally prone to a Indeed, here, Laudan actually hits the nail on the number of cognitive biases that favor the persistence head in implying that a major role of philosophy of pseudoscience. Interestingly, many of these biases of science is to be prescriptive, particularly when it find their equivalent in the philosophical literature comes to discussions of science in the public sphere, on logical (e.g., the post hoc, ergo propter where the consequences of our views are not merely hoc —by which one confuses correlation with academic but involve and . causation—is a major mechanism that we use to Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.

Psychoanalysis, Philosophical Issues in 769 make preliminary about ). On framed to explain and (2) how far particularly psy- the positive side, psychologists have shown that choanalytic conceptions of unconscious mental states an awareness of cognitive biases diminishes one’s and processes should be regarded as viable. The first proneness to perpetuate the mistake. This in turn of these will be the main topic of this entry, and the would seem to suggest that the teaching of critical second will be briefly considered at the close. thinking skills in philosophy classes is a fundamen- tal component of the of an intelligent Free Association and Freud’s citizenry. Claim About The relevant clinical data arise in the practice of free association, as pursued by patients in analysis over See also Debunking ; Explanation, the course of months and years. To free-associate is Theories of; ; Popper’s Philosophy of to describe the contents of what is sometimes called Science; Scientific Method the stream of —passing , thoughts, feelings, and so forth, as fully as possible Further Readings as they occur and without omitting or censoring anything. This leads rapidly to thoughts and feelings Boudry, M., Blancke, S., & Braeckman, J. (2010). that are unexpected even to those thinking them. Irreducible incoherence and : A look into the conceptual toolbox of a pseudoscience. The data thus generated enabled Quarterly Review of Biology, 85(4), 473–482. and his successors to learn as much about what Hansson, S. O. (2009). Cutting the Gordian knot of went on in the of their patients as the patients demarcation. International Studies in the Philosophy of were able to put into words and, in addition, to Science, 23, 237–243. base further conclusions on patterns that could be Laudan, L. (1983). The demise of the demarcation observed while they were doing so. Thus, there were problem. In R. S. Cohen & L. Laudan (Eds.), Physics, the patterns relating associations to elements of the philosophy and (pp. 111–129) . manifest contents of dreams, described by Freud Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel. in his own case in The Interpretation of Dreams . Okasha, S. (2001). Hume and induction. Philosophical Again, there was the pattern Freud described as Quarterly, 51, 307–327. transference, in which emotions and conflicts felt Pigliucci, M., & Boudry, M. (Eds.). (2012). The philosophy early in toward parents and were revived of pseudoscience: Revisiting the demarcation problem. in patients’ current of the therapist. Since Chicago, IL: Press. free association and the experiences that emerged Popper, K. (1957). : A personal report. in analysis were Freud’s main sources of data, he In C. A. Mace (Ed.), in the mid- maintained that persons who did not have firsthand century (pp. 155–191) . Crows Next, New South Wales, experience of them were not in a position to criticize Australia: Allen & Unwin. his theoretical conclusions. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Dispute About Freud’s Claim: Advocates and a Comparison With Darwin This claim has been at the core of disputes about PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHICAL evidence in psychoanalysis. Advocates characteristi- cally maintain that the claim reflects the fact that ISSUES IN psychoanalysis has a unique and remarkably rich source of data that are otherwise unfamiliar and Philosophical discussions of psychoanalysis have unexpected. Such data cannot be ignored, but they frequently focused on two topics: (1) how well also cannot readily be communicated, except in psychoanalytic theories can be regarded as eviden- small and isolated vignettes. Freud’s of tially supported by the clinical data they are initially the publishable parts of his associations to elements