The boundary between science and pseudoscience

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Article source: WIKIPEDIA

The boundary lines between the science and pseudoscience are disputed and difficult to determine analytically, even after more than a century of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in varied fields, and despite some basic agreements on the fundamentals of scientific methodology.

The concept of pseudoscience rests on an understanding that scientific methodology has been misrepresented or misapplied with respect to a given theory, but many philosophers of science maintain that different kinds of methods are held as appropriate across different fields and different eras of human history. Paul Feyerabend, for example, disputes whether any meaningful boundaries can be drawn between pseudoscience, "real" science, and what he calls "protoscience", especially where there is a significant cultural or historical distance.

There are well-known cases of fields that were originally considered pseudoscientific but which are now accepted scientific effects or valid hypotheses, for example, continental drift, cosmology, ball lightning, and radiation hormesis. As another example, osteopathy has, according to Kimball Atwood, "for the most part, repudiated its pseudoscientific beginnings and joined the world of rational healthcare" for lower back pain although it is not particularly effective. Others, such as phrenology[citation needed] or alchemy were originally considered scientific, but now are taken as pseudoscience.

Further, there are protosciences such as cultural, traditional, or ancient practices such as acupuncture practice and traditional Chinese medicine which do not conform to modern scientific principles, but which are not pseudoscience because their proponents do not claim the practices to be scientific according to today's standards of scientific method.

Larry Laudan (a philosopher of science) has suggested that pseudoscience has no scientific meaning and is mostly used to describe our emotions: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science' and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us".

Likewise, Richard McNally (The Skeptic magazine) states that "The term 'pseudoscience' has become little more than an inflammatory buzzword for quickly dismissing one’s opponents in media sound-bites" and that "When therapeutic entrepreneurs make claims on behalf of their interventions, we should not waste our time trying to determine whether their interventions qualify as pseudoscientific. Rather, we should ask them: How do you know that your intervention works? What is your evidence?"

Source: Wikipedia "Pseudoscience"