GENUINE SCIENCE uses traditional logic,
critical thinking, appropriate evidence, subjects all authority to
scrutiny, and allows the open testing of its claims. Most
anyone can learn these basic ways of scientific thinking.
Unfortunately, the formal "scientific method" is many times
taught as the only way science is done, and makes science
appear dull, agonizing, and tedious. This formalization
of the scientific process makes people fear science, and think
it is beyond them.
However, few scientists actually work that way. Instead,
they get excited, hopeful, interested, intrigued, and puzzled
about various things around them. Their ideas come to them
in the shower, on the freeway, while playing baseball with their
kids, as well as in the laboratory or library. Science is
creative and exciting. While a scientist may finish up his
work using the formal "scientific method", there is initially a
great deal of free-wheeling explo- ration and "lets see what
happens if we.... " experimentation.
There are many things to first observe, and play with, and
understand and organize, before they can be assembled into the
formal "acceptance/rejection of the hypothesis" scientific method
taught in school. And anyone can observe, play, and
finally understand and organize, not just formally-trained
scientists.
Error is a normal part of genuine science, and uncovering flaws in
scientific observations and reasoning is part of the legitimate
work of scientists. Scientists normally verify the work of
other scientists by repeating their original experiments
(replication), by designing complementary experiments, and by
carrying out control experiments. This is just part of the
normal "learning curve" that is characteristic of every human
endeavor, whether those humans are scientists or not.
Genuine scientists are expected to examine and re-examine their
experiments, observations, and conclusions to be sure that they are
free of personal biases and pre-conclusions. They are also
expected to be sufficiently ego-free to acknowledge and accept the
work of their colleagues that might prove their own conclusions
and theories are not valid.
Genuine scientists certainly might be personally disappointed if
their own work was invalidated when subjected to verification by
their fellow-scientists, but a genuine scientist still draws a
deep satisfaction from knowing the truth, even though that truth
was not his own discovery.
"The success and credibility of [genuine] science are anchored in
the willingness of [genuine] scientists to obey two rules:
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Expose new ideas and results to inde- pendent testing and replication
by other scientists. |
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Abandon or modify accepted facts or theories in the light of more complete
or reliable experimental evidence. |
Adherence to these principles provides a mechanism for
self- correction that sets [genuine] science apart from 'other ways
of knowing.... ' "When better information is
available, science textbooks are rewritten with hardly a backward
glance." (1)
For a short, general overview about the practice of science,
click 
;
for a more detailed, in-depth discussion about the structure of science,
click and .
Contrasted with genuine science, PSEUDO SCIENCE
is the use of the language, symbols, and form of genuine
science to deliberately misrepresent dubious and extraordinary
claims as true: a best-selling health guru claims that his
brand of spiritual healing is firmly based in quantum theory;
homeopathic aqueous solutions are claimed to exert their effects
because the mysterious "memory" of the water allows the active
ingredient to exert its effect even though there are no molecules of
that ingredient whatsoever in the medicine; educated people wear expensive, "medical"
magnets for treatment of "magnetic deficiency syndrome" that are
indistinguishable from cheap refrigerator magnets that cost less
than a dollar; breast-implant trial lawyers and their
"expert" witnesses deliberately interfered with trial juries' and
judges' efforts to come to objective, fact-based conclusions by
overwhelming them with misinformation, and the gruesome and
heart-rending anecdotal accounts of suffering women.
Pseudo science in general, exhibits these special characteristics
that differentiate it from genuine science, although these special
characteristics of pseudo science strongly resemble the
charac- teristics of genuine science:
Confirmation Bias:
The conscious and/or unconscious biasing of collected data by
tending to notice and collect only what confirms one's beliefs
and pre-conclusions, and to ignore, and/or under-represent, what
contradicts one's beliefs and pre-conclusions.
Ad Hoc Hypotheses:
The use of weak, reactive, and implausible hypotheses to try to
explain away facts that refute one's theory. Ad hoc is a Latin
phrase meaning "to this". The term refers to something that is
hastily set up solely in response to a particular situation or
problem, without considering the wider issues.
Pseudosymmetry:
The deliberate creation of the false impression that well-qualified
scientists' opinions are about equally divided on claims that
actually have little or no scientific support. This is
effected by quoting two genuine experts from opposing camps, but
hiding the fact that the second opinion is advanced only by a very
few of the entire group.
Pseudo symmetry is also created when the scientific opinion of a
well-qualified, highly experienced scientist that rejects a dubious
or extraordinary claim is juxtaposed with the opinion of a little-
known, barely qualified scientist supporting the claim.
Details about the qualifications and reputations of the two
scientists are withheld, creating the false impression that the two
opinions are equally authoritative and reliable.
Interpreting Noise As Signal
In some pseudoscience claims (extrasensory perception;
psychokinesis, e.g.., mentally affecting the flip of a coin;
biofield healing or touch therapy; etc.), the evidence of the
phenomena always seems to be at the very limit of detectability.
In scientific terminology, the "signal" can barely be discerned above
the "noise". Thus, normal statistical variability present in
any experiment can always be interpreted as the pseudoscientific
phenomena.
No Scaling of Observed Effect
Of the dubious phenomena that seem to exist only at the limit of
detectability, these phenomena also frequently show no change in the
magnitude of the effect with changing experimental conditions. E.g..,
the success rates of J. B. Rhine's extrasensory experiments remained about
the same whether the "sender" and "receiver" were in adjoining rooms or in
different cities altogether. Genuine causes and effects don't behave
this way.
Things Don't Get Better
Another characteristic of pseudoscience is that in the development
of the claims, there never appears to be anything resembling
progress. "The evidence never gets any stronger. Decades pass, and
there is never a clear photograph of a flying saucer or the Loch Ness
monster.... No proof of psychic phenomena ever
found. In spite of all the tests devised.... and
the huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the
results are no more convincing today than when [the experiments were
begun]. No mechanism is ever uncovered. No testable theory
ever emerges." (2)
Testimonials and Personal Anecdotes
The substitution of testimonials and anecdotal accounts for proper,
controlled, experimental evidence is characteristic of pseudoscience.
Of course, many times, this is how hypotheses in genuine science may start
out also. Similar anecdotal accounts about various scientists'
exploratory experiments accumulate in the scientific community, or, a
physician's positive "clinical impressions" about the effectiveness of a
treatment for a certain disease keep reoccurring until an investigator
finally decides to initiate a proper study.
For genuine science, and genuine medicine, personal anecdotes are just
a jumpling off point for designing a proper, fully controlled,
investigation of the phenomena, including in the study both individuals
who did and did not supply personal anecdotes. For pseudoscience,
the collection of personal anecdotes is considered sufficient; of course,
persons with no anecdotes, or even negative anecdotes, are never
included. The substitution of testimonials and personal anecdotes
for controlled, objective studies is an example of the "Texas
Sharpshooter's" fallacy: the sharp-shooter empties his revolver
into the side of a barn. Then he walks over and draws a bull's eye
around the holes.
It is actually quite easy to extract an avalanche of positive anecdotal
accounts for products that actually do not work at all. For bogus
medicines, the powerful "placebo effect" will give a
certain percentage of users the positive relief they were expecting, and
they can be prevailed upon to write positive testimonials. Even
with non-medical bogus products, not involving the placebo effect, enough
users will perceive that the product exhibited its expected benefits, and
can be prevailed upon to supply glowing testimonials, even when objective
testing shows the product to be worthless (Slick-50 oil additive).
For more detailed information and examples of pseudoscientific
claims, click .
For a long time, the roots of ANTI-SCIENCE
were found in religion, e.g.., as in the conflict between Galileo and
the Church. In the 20th Century, the roots of anti-science
might be considered to be in the philosophies of Phenomenology and,
to a lesser extent, Existentialism. Both of these modes of
encountering the world, in general, deny or minimize the concept of
an objective external reality, and make the cognitive and/or
emotional processes of each individual the sole basis for knowing
and acting.
Phenomenology was introduced in 1906 by Edmund Husserl with
his book, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (The Idea of Phenome- nology).
At the time, he held professorships at both Göttingen and Freiburg im
Breisgau.
The primary objective of Phenomenology is the careful investi- gation
and description of phenomena, i.e.., the cognitive/emotional processes
of which the individual is introspectively aware, without making
assumptions about their causal connections to external objects or
experiences in the world.
Existentialism
is actually a number of philosophies dating from the 1930s proposed and
refined by the philosophers Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl
Jaspers, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
Existentialism, in general, is a philosophy that emphasizes the
primacy of individual existence alone (the meaning of Being), and
concomitant individual choices (the modes of Being), over
any presumed, external natural or social order for human beings.
Existentialists generally propose that the fact of
individual existence as a human being entails both unqualified
freedom for each individual to make of themselves whatever they
will, and, at the same time, the responsibility of employing that
freedom appropriately, without being driven by anxiety toward
escaping into the unauthentic or self-deception of any
conventional set of rules for behavior. Existentialism is
thus opposed to any form of objectivism or scientism since these
stress the reality and primacy of external facts, rather than the
primacy of essential existence (the meaning and modes of Being).
Additionally, in the past few decades, a number of academic,
anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationality movements, based at least
in part on the above ideas, have established themselves:
- French deconstructionism maintains
that objective meaning cannot be transmitted by, or extracted from,
any reading of a text, even when informed by the stated intention of
its authors, because unconscious internal conflicts undermine
("decenter") any meaning and render all text fatally ambiguous
("incoherent").
- Postmodernism claims that there are
three global forces which are driving the transition from modernity
to post- modernity (also referred to as the post-colonial or
post- industrial ages). These three forces are:
- the total breakdown of the traditional, Western ways
of belief.
- the emergence of a monolithic "global culture". Not only does
the whole world share jeans, jogging shoes, Microsoft Windows, and
eat Big Macs, KFC, and sushi, but now, "memes" -- the
cultural equivalent of genes -- which replicate mental
patterns, are now so "firmly embedded in the cultural body of the globe
that everyone is singing the same tune, discussing the same ideas,
talking in the same catchphrases, and expressing themselves in the
same fashions." (3)
- knowledge and objectivity are merely "mental con-
structs", part and parcel of the social construction of reality.
Both the assertions about breakdown of belief systems and the birth of
global culture are based on this third, and perhaps the most important,
force of transition to the postmodern age: the understanding
of the social construction of reality. "All we do as humans
is to construct illusions of realities to fit our own mental picture
of the world. Everything 'out there' is a figment of our
imagination. And since we are all equal in this best of all
possible postmodern worlds, all realities are on a par with each
other, all truth is relative, and all objectivity is but a
charade." (3)
"This means that the world has been transformed into a theater
where everything is artificially constructed. Politics is
stage-managed for mass consumption. Television documentaries
are transformed and presented as entertainment. Journalism
blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. Living
individuals become characters in soap operas and fictional
characters assume "real" lives. Everything happens
instantaneously and everybody gets a live feed on everything that
is happening in the global theater." (3)
"This theatricality," writes journalist Walter Anderson, "is a
natural -- and inevitable -- feature of our
time. It is what happens when a lot of people begin to
understand that reality is a social construction." We are
constantly being manipulated -- and, in turn, are
manipulating others; that is, those of us who have the choice to
manipulate. (3)
- Radical Multiculturalism is more
virulent in its views. Radical multiculturalists hold that not
only is reality a social construct, but that these constructs
are created and manipulated by the ruling classes to perpetuate
their own hegemony. There is no such thing as objective
reality, and, because all forms of knowledge are just social
myths, then all forms of knowledge and all ways of knowing are
equivalent and equally valid. A ritualistic voodoo cure is
equal to a pharmaceutical cure validated by a double-blind, fully
controlled, 5-year clinical trial.
Chief among the radicals' claims is that Western culture is particularly
oppressive, and should be suppressed so as to empower
"downtrodden" cultures. Also repudiated are the ideas of the
Enlightenment, and Western democratic government, based as it is on
the knowledge, reasoning, and rational debate of its citizens.
Women and minorities have "distinctive, non-rational ways of knowing
things, not accessible to members of the majority culture; a
privileged knowledge that is expressed in a unique 'voice' of color
and gender." (4) In place of
"illusionary" objectivity and traditional scholarly debate, the
radicals offer a new form of scholarship: narrative and
storytelling.
In the past decade or so, these deconstructionist, postmodern,
and extreme-wing multicultural ideas have come together to
produce an academic anti-science movement that is very vocal and
vociferous, although the actual numbers of adherents seem to be
small and located only at a few academic institutions.
However, their published papers and interviews, are usually
covered by the media well out of proportion to their numbers.
This postmodern anti-science view advocates that there is no such
thing as objective truth. Western science is not real; it is
a "social construct" shaped solely by the power structure and
culture it serves, i.e., white, paternalistic, and capitalist.
There is no "unitary" knowledge, only the different knowledge produced
by different societies. Objective critique of
this knowledge is illusionary; these knowledges are all equally valid.
The "different ways of knowing" that produced these different
knowledges thus are also all equally valid. There are no
scientific "laws" that apply in all places and to all human
communities. Scientific laws would come out differently
in different cultures. To the anti-science postmodernists,
science is just a belief system, no better than any other, and
scientists function within it in a socially-generated mutual
consensus trance.
Fortunately, these postmodernist anti-science views have been
largely confined to a small number of academic writers.
Surveys have shown that the public's attitude, on the other hand,
has remained strongly supportive of academic and
government science, while showing some reserve about only certain
technologies (e.g.., food irradiation, nuclear power generation,
genetically modified foods, etc.).
It must be clearly understood that this radical anti-science
movement stands alongside, and is dwarfed by, a much older,
traditional part of academic sociology that uses the conventional
tools of science to legitimately study our institution of science,
just as it studies all the other institutions of our culture.
This traditional "sociology of science" was pioneered in the 1930s
by the well-known sociologist Robert
K. Merton, now at Columbia University. The sociology
of science examines the structure, make-up, and function of
scientific institutions and organizations, and also studies
the behavior of individual scientists. Actually, these
studies are pretty conventional: they only examine how science
and scientists function in our culture of science, and the in the
wider general culture, using the traditional tools of science and
sociological investigation. Traditional sociology of science
in no way negates the very essence and validity of scientific
inquiry itself.
For example, historian and philosopher of science, Evelyn's Fox
Keller of MIT has examined how (predominantly male) scientists'
choices of topics and theories in cell biology subtly reflected
their cultural stereo-types about "masculine" and "feminine", rather
than more wide-ranging, bias-free ideas, and this led to an inaccurate
characterization of cell function, which persisted for decades.
The controlling and hierarchical role (a "masculine"
trait) of DNA in cell function was unconsciously overemphasized
for some quite some time. Eventually it was realized that
there was no "big boss": DNA and cells interact more or
less equally (a "feminine" trait) in a complex system to express
genetic information.
Although Keller's published papers about this provoked a fusillade
of criticism from some of the more knee-jerk anti-"anti-scientists",
in truth, her claims and study techniques were not only NOT
"anti-science", they were actually pretty conventional. Why would
her conclusions seem provocative? Western science functions in
its culture, and thus would be expected to incorporate at least some of
that culture's biases. Genuine science is glad to get the insight,
bring the unconscious into the conscious, and then move on to do
better science.
Finally, there are two more sources of modern anti-science that are
centered outside our academic institutions:
Political anti-science . . . . .
Events in the political world over the past years have helped make
scientists more aware of anti-science threats coming from politicians.
"One such transformative event was the ascendancy of House Speaker Newt
Gingrich's team in Washington. Gingrich may be a science buff, but his
House leadership included throwbacks to the anti-science attitudes of the
Scopes trial. House Whip Tom DeLay (Texas), for example, denounced
Nobel laureates as radical ideologues, the hole in the ozone layer as a
liberal plot, and global warming as 'junk science'. Finally, when
far-right congressional budget slicers mounted an assault on public support
for basic research, and invited the anti-science wing of the religious right
into their inner councils, many American scientists recognized a new danger
to the integrity of their enterprise." (5)
Industrial anti-science . . . . .
"Another development that threatens the status of science is the increasing
boldness with which industry funds researchers to parrot its views on
topics like global warming and clean air. These Promethean contrarians offer
the promise of profligate energy use and industrial expansion with no negative
consequences, but rarely publish in peer-reviewed scientific literature, and
sometimes show a cavalier disregard for basic scientific norms. The Promethean
view on global warming, for example, is not laid out in scientific journals,
but in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal." (5)
For a more detailed discussion and history of the academic
anti-science movement ("The So-Called Science Wars", by Paul
Gross), click .
For details about Alan Sokal's postmodernist hoax mentioned in "Science Wars",
click .
The PARANORMAL is, literally, beyond the
normal. It is phenomena that cannot be explained by any known
natural cause Traditional examples are clairvoyance (now called
remote viewing), telekinesis, precognition, and apparitions such as
ghosts and spirits. The paranormal is not pseudoscience because
it doesn't masquerade as genuine science; it is not anti-science because
it doesn't attack genuine science in any way; its adherents claim it is
simply beyond science.
For more detailed information about the paranormal, click
.
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(1)
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Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness To
Fraud. Robert Park, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2000, p. 39. |
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(2)
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Ibid., pp. 199, 200.
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(3)
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"Hollywood Postmodernism: The New Imperialism", New Perspectives
Quarterly, Ziauddin Sardar, Fall, 1998.
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(4)
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"Radical Moderation", New Criterion Magazine,
Marc M. Arkin, May, 1998.
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(5)
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"Science at War With Itself ", Sierra Magazine, Carl Pope,
April, 1998.
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