Disciplines, Doctrines, and Deviant Science

ABSTRACT

This is a reply to a comment by Kåre Letrud [Letrud, Kåre. 2019. “The Gordian Knot of Demarcation: Tying Up Some Loose Ends.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (1): 3–11. doi:10.1080/02698595.2019.1618031] on the author's definition of pseudoscience. Pseudosciences are doctrines. An epistemic discipline that is defined solely by its area of study cannot be a pseudoscience, but if a discipline is bound to a doctrine, then it will be pseudoscientific if that doctrine is a pseudoscience. Contrary to most other types of shortcomings in science, pseudoscience involves the sustained promotion of teachings that block or impede the self-correcting and self-improving mechanisms in science. What makes pseudoscience more dangerous than other types of bad science is its doctrinal resistance to correction.

1. Background

I would like to thank Kåre Letrud for his recent article (Letrud 2019), in which he questioned the definition of pseudoscience that I proposed in Hansson (2013). He pointed out some omissions and needs for clarification. For that I am grateful, although my proposals for solutions do not coincide with his.

In the construction of definitions, we often have to deal with a whole cluster of closely related words and phrases. In this case, the cluster includes the term ‘pseudoscience’, as well as ‘pseudoscientist’, ‘pseudoscientific’, and ‘pseudoscientific statement’. It is advisable in such cases to study the relationships among the members of the cluster in order to find out whether and how they can be defined in terms of each other. If possible, one of them should be chosen as a primary definiendum to which the main definitional work is devoted. The other members of the cluster can then be defined in terms of it. In many cases, alternative choices of a primary definiendum are possible. The choice among them can then be a matter of convention or convenience (Hansson 2006, 12–15).

In the cluster of pseudoscience-related concepts, the two best candidates for a primary definiendum appear to be ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘pseudoscientific statement’. They both have some claim for conceptual primacy. ‘Pseudoscience’ appears to be a good choice, since everything that is pseudoscientific seems to be so owing to its relation to some particular pseudoscience such as astrology or homeopathy. For instance, it would seem possible to define a pseudoscientist as someone who endorses or promotes some pseudoscience, and a pseudoscientific statement as a statement that is characteristic of some particular pseudoscience. On the other hand, pseudoscientific statements can be seen as the smallest building-blocks of pseudosciences. It is often a good strategy to get the components right before proceeding to define more complex structures. If we choose ‘pseudoscientific statement’ as the primary definiendum, then we should be able to define a pseudoscience as a doctrine that has such statements as essential constituent parts. Thus, at least on the face of it, we can choose either ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘pseudoscientific statement’ as our primary definiendum.

One relevant factor in the choice between these two definition strategies is continuity and comparability with previous research. Much of the previous discussion on the demarcation between science and pseudoscience has focused on scientific and pseudoscientific statements. Verification and falsification refer to hypotheses, which are statements rather than whole doctrines. For instance, according to the hypothetico-deductive method, in order to assess a theory one has to identify predictive statements (hypotheses) that follow from it and test these statements empirically.

In Hansson (2013) I followed this tradition of focusing on pseudoscientific statements. I proposed the following definition:

A statement is pseudoscientific if and only if it satisfies the following three criteria:

1. It pertains to an issue within the domains of science in the broad sense (the criterion of scientific domain).

2. It suffers from such a severe lack of reliability that it cannot at all be trusted (the criterion of unreliability).

3. It is part of a doctrine whose major proponents try to create the impression that it represents the most reliable knowledge on its subject matter (the criterion of deviant doctrine). (Hansson 2013, 70–71) ¹

This definition is an improvement over previous proposals (Hansson 1996; 2009). Its most important distinguishing characteristic is that it refers to a general lack of reliability, rather than specifying some philosophical criterion of quality (such as falsifiability, puzzle-solving or progression). This is because such criteria can only have limited applicability. Science is self-improving, and its changes over time go deep enough to also involve ‘general methodological approaches, such as methods of hypothesis testing, experimental principles like randomization and blinding, and basic assumptions about what types of explanations can be used in science (such as action over distance)’ (Hansson 2013, 74). In consequence, this definition dethrones armchair philosophers of the task to determine which particular statements (and doctrines) are pseudoscientific, and hands over that responsibility to the community of experts in the respective scientific fields.

Kåre Letrud (2019, 4) criticises this definition for being devoted to the wrong definiendum. He maintains that a definition of ‘pseudoscientific statement’ provides only ‘a fragmentary and inefficient approach to the practical problem of demarcation’, since it requires that we perform ‘the tedious task of assessing numerous individual statements one by one’. In contrast, he says, a definition of ‘pseudoscience’ will allow us to ‘in one fell swoop disrobe a wide range of statements from an ill-gotten scientific status’. He proposes the following alternative definition:

A pseudoscience is an epistemic discipline that contains a sufficient number of statements that satisfy all of the following three criteria:

1. It pertains to an issue within the domains of science in the broad sense (the criterion of scientific domain).

2. It suffers from such a severe lack of reliability that it cannot at all be trusted (the criterion of unreliability).

3. It is a core statement of its discipline (the criterion of significance). (Letrud 2019, 9)

I do not agree with Letrud that there is no practical need to critically assess non-core pseudoscientific statements. (More about that in Section 3.) However, I agree that we (also) need a definition of ‘pseudoscience’. The lack of such a definition is an omission in my previous publications, which I will take this opportunity to rectify.

2. Disciplines, Subject Areas, and Doctrines

Definitions often start out with a more general concept, which the definition further specifies. Letrud’s definition of a pseudoscience exemplifies this, since it defines a pseudoscience as an ‘epistemic discipline’ that satisfies certain criteria. In his article, he mentions educational studies, homeopathy, and astrology as examples of epistemic disciplines (8–9).

There are different ways to define an epistemic discipline. This can be seen from how we delineate the common academic disciplines. Some disciplines are defined solely in terms of their subject area. For instance, musicology is the study of music and its social contexts, and biology is the study of living organisms. Neither of these terms implies any particular methodology or standpoint on the respective subject area. If biologists make erroneous claims, then this does not make their discipline pseudoscientific, for the simple reason that these claims are not part of what biology means. Someone else can do biology without making these claims. We can call such a discipline (purely) area-defined.

In contrast, psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology are defined by a combination of their study areas and certain characteristic methods and/or standpoints. Psychoanalysis involves a therapeutic technique as well as theories about unconscious mental processes. If someone purges psychoanalysis of its therapeutic method and its characteristic ideas about an unconscious mind, then what remains is not psychoanalysis anymore. If, on the other hand, someone shows convincingly that the therapeutic technique of psychoanalysis cannot do what it is claimed to do, or that its ideas about the unconscious are severely flawed, then a case can be made that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. (Such claims have indeed been made, see Grünbaum et al. 1986 and Misra 2018.) We can call such a discipline doctrinal.

Educational studies, one of Letrud’s examples, is an area-defined discipline, just like musicology and biology. I agree with Letrud (6) that educational studies is not a pseudoscience, but for a quite different reason than his: The term ‘educational studies’ only designates an area of study, and an area of study cannot be a pseudoscience.

In some cases, it is not immediately clear whether a discipline is area-defined or doctrinal. Biblical archaeology is a case in point. It can be defined as archaeological studies of the regions described in the Bible, in the time period that these descriptions are supposed to refer to. Under that description, it is an area-defined discipline, and as such it cannot be a pseudoscience. But by tradition, Biblical archaeology is strongly associated with the assumption that the biblical narratives are historically true and serve as a framework into which the interpretation of archaeological finds in that region have to be fitted. With this approach, Biblical archaeology is a doctrinal discipline, which makes it susceptible to criticism of being pseudoscientific (Davis 2004).

Two other interesting examples are astrology and parapsychology. Both are devoted to the study of alleged phenomena that we have no valid reason to believe to exist. Astrology is usually conceived as the study of connections between events in human lives and the relative positions of celestial objects (the study area), with additional assumptions implying that such connections exist. Such assumptions make the discipline doctrinal. It will then also have to be classified as a pseudoscience, since its doctrine is incorrect (Komath 2009). If we remove the doctrine and define astrology just as an area of study, then it is not a pseudoscience. Instead, it is what we can call a vacu-science (from the Latin vacuus, empty), a science with an empty set of study objects. Parapsychology, if defined in a way that does not imply the existence of its study objects, belongs to the same category. Of course, vacu-sciences are too uninteresting to have any following. It is the pseudoscientific, not the vacu-scientific, form of these disciplines that attracts adherents.

In addition to the pseudoscientific disciplines, such as astrology, parapsychology, and cryptozoology, there are also pseudosciences that do not constitute disciplines of their own. One example is Lysenkoism, which has the same study area as legitimate genetics, but differs from the latter in including claims about inheritance of acquired characteristics that are contradicted by mainstream science. Lysenkoism is not a discipline, but a doctrine referring to the subject area of genetics. Other pseudoscientific doctrines characterised by false claims within the subject area of a legitimate discipline are holocaust denialism and ancient astronaut theory, both of which make false claims about history, and a host of doctrines pertaining to medical subject matter, such as vaccine denialism, iridology, chromotherapy, crystal healing, etc. There are also pseudoscientific doctrines that make claims pertaining to several disciplines. Examples of such wide-ranging pseudoscientific doctrines are scientology, Velikovskyism, flat earth theory, anthroposophy, and climate change denialism.

In summary: A subject area cannot be pseudoscientific. A pseudoscience is a doctrine. It can either be the doctrine of a doctrinal discipline (such as parapsychology), or it can be a stand-alone doctrine (such as vaccine denialism and anthroposophy). This is the reason why I used the term ‘doctrine’, rather than ‘discipline’, in the definition of pseudoscience quoted in Section 1.

3. Core and Non-Core Statements

Letrud introduces the highly useful concept of the ‘core statements’ of an epistemic discipline, which he defines as the statements that are ‘pivotal for the identity of their epistemic disciplines, in that one cannot reject them and still be regarded as a supporter of the discipline, at least not in its present form’ (8).² Based on the discussion in Section 2, I propose that core statements should be identified in relation to doctrines rather than disciplines. An area-defined discipline, such as biology, does not have any core statements, in the sense of defining statements that are crucial for the demarcation of the discipline. Claims about living organisms that go contrary to modern biology are still biological claims.³ For instance, a text about mushrooms that denies that they have been subject to evolution is a biological text (although a misguided one). This is because biology is defined solely in terms of its subject area. In contrast, doctrinal disciplines have core statements. A text about pain-relieving drugs that denies the therapeutic efficacy of drugs in homeopathic dilutions is not a homeopathic text. This is because homeopathy is a doctrinal discipline, and – just as Letrud says (8) – the claim that repeated dilution and ‘succussion’ (a type of shaking) makes a drug more potent is a core statement of homeopathy. On the other hand, homeopathic claims about the efficacy of particular diluted and succussed concoctions are usually non-core statements. One of many examples of this is the claim that the homeopathic drug Berlin Wall is helpful against conditions such as deep grief, depression, and panic (Dam 2006; cf. Scholten 2006). This drug is made from a small piece of the Berlin Wall, which has been mixed into lactose and then diluted in lactose in the proportion 1:100 two hundred times. This dilution is much more than sufficient to ensure that no single molecule from the Berlin Wall is left in the drug. There are different opinions among homeopaths about the efficacy of Berlin Wall. The same applies to other modern additions to the homeopathic pharmacopoeia, such as ‘Mobile-phone’, which is obtained with a similar dilution process, applied to material from a mobile phone. It is apparently prescribed against headaches and stress caused by the need to always be reachable on the phone (Cf. Wirtz 2007).

Letrud maintains that it is sufficient to criticise the core statements of pseudosciences, and ‘by limiting the relevant statements to those that are core statements of the discipline, there will be fewer statements to criticize’. (9) Such a strategy may seem to be efficient from an intellectual point of view, but unfortunately, it does not work from a communicative point of view. For instance, homeopaths usually do not approach the public with claims about the efficacy of extreme dilutions. To the contrary, they tend to omit information about the production process, and instead claim that the efficacy of specific homeopathic drugs is proven by practical experience (Holt and Gilbey 2009). In other words, they recruit customers with non-core statements. In order to counter the threat to public health posed by these and other peddlers of unproven treatments, it is necessary to counter their specific claims. Similarly, the most important core statement of climate science denialism is that the overall climatic conditions on our planet are not threatened by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. In order to convince potential followers, the denialists put forward a large collection of false claims and misinterpretations, and it is with the help of these non-core statements that they attempt to prove their case. Science education cannot just ignore these arguments, many of which may appear convincing at first sight. The public should have access to careful and correct explanations of why these arguments are wrong. Climate scientists have indeed provided extensive such counterarguments.⁴ It would be neither efficient nor respectful to the public to refrain from refuting the denialists’ non-core falsehoods.

4. Pseudoscience in Academia

The vast majority of professional researchers and academic teachers steer clear of pseudoscience, and in their teaching they provide students with intellectual tools useful for disclosing pseudoscientific doctrines and ideas. One might therefore believe that academia are free of such doctrines, and consequently that pseudoscience is almost exclusively found outside of universities. Unfortunately, that is far from the truth. Although only a small fraction of university teachers and researchers engage in pseudoscience, their legitimising roles in pseudoscience is often crucial.

In 1998–1999, a research project identified cases of pseudoscience at Swedish universities, and performed case studies of the more prominent examples from the preceding two decades. Our most remarkable findings were, in brief summary (Hansson and Sandin 2000):

• An adjunct professor in physics was one of the most frequent contributors to the major creationist journal in Sweden. A university teacher in biochemistry and two PhD students were also among its contributors.

• A geologist gave university courses in dowsing, in which he taught the usual pseudoscientific conceptions about this practice. A researcher at another university reported severely deficient experiments, claiming to have shown that water can be located with dowsing-rods. At a third university, a researcher published unsubstantiated speculations that dowsing operates through piezoelectric effects on the skeleton.

• A Swedish research council commissioned a report claiming that the fictional Curry lines exist on the earth’s surface. Similar claims were made in an approved master’s thesis in archaeology from a major university.

• One PhD thesis in archaeology made spurious claims about ley lines between megalithic graves. Another PhD thesis in the same discipline, from another university, made similar claims about ley lines between medieval churches.

• A university teacher in sociology published a book in support of the mythical so-called Maharishi effect in Transcendental Meditation (TM). Using their university’s letterhead, researchers at another university tried to make municipality administrations fund TM activities.

• Two students wrote a joint master's thesis in psychology, in which they supported astrological claims. The thesis was approved by a major university. After the exam, both authors both took up astrology for a living.

• Researchers at three different universities claimed in mass media that various forms of paranormal phenomena actually exist.

• Pseudoscientific mental training courses were taught at several Swedish universities.

Internationally, some of the most harmful pseudosciences have benefitted immensely from academic legitimisation. Tobacco denialism has largely been driven by academics publishing distorted science in exchange for lavish remuneration from tobacco companies (Bero 2005; Grüning, Gilmore, and McKee 2006; Schick and Glantz 2007). Denial of environmental dangers has often had the same type of academic support (Rudén and Hansson 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010). The disastrous governmental AIDS denialism under a previous South African government, which cost the lives of more than 300,000 people (Nattrass 2008), was driven by American and European academic pseudoscientists (Kalichman 2009). Climate science denial is fuelled by a small group of academics in other fields than climatology, who consistently promote falsehoods and misrepresentations of climate science (Lahsen 2008).

Against this background it is essential not to exempt academics from criticism, or treat them more leniently than others who indulge in pseudoscience. Claims that AIDS is not caused by an HIV infection, or that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have at most negligible effects on the climate, are pseudoscientific, regardless of the academic titles of the persons who make these claims.

Unfortunately, Kåre Letrud can be interpreted as somewhat soft on this point. He identifies some unsupported claims in educational studies, which he considers to be doctrinal in nature (6). However, he considers it ‘unfitting’ (6) to classify these statements as pseudoscientific, a standpoint that seems to be connected with his view that these deviations are an ‘internal problem’ (7). The reason for this may be that he only considers the option of classifying educational studies as a whole as a pseudoscience (cf. 9). According to his definition, a pseudoscience has to be ‘an epistemic discipline’. He seems to exclude the possibility of a stand-alone pseudoscience that refers to topics within the subject area of educational studies. This is unfortunate. Educational studies as a whole is not a pseudoscience (for the reason explained in Section 2), but claims pertaining to its subject area can nevertheless be pseudoscientific if they are parts of some pseudoscientific doctrine.

5. Defining pseudoscience and bad science

Letrud claims that my definition of a pseudoscientific statement has two major limitations: (1) the notion of a pseudoscience is not defined, and (2) it ‘subsumes [as pseudoscientific] several statements and associated practices that are instances of bad science’ (4). In conclusion, I will address these two issues.

Beginning with the definition of (a) pseudoscience, I have already accepted Letrud’s criticism that I should have dealt with it on earlier occasions (Section 1), and I have also explained why pseudoscience should be defined as a specification of the general concept of a doctrine, rather than that of a discipline (Section 2). With a doctrine I mean a set of interconnected statements that is ‘taught or laid down as true concerning a particular subject or department of knowledge’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The subject or department of knowledge covered by a doctrine can coincide with an epistemic discipline, but it can also refer only to a part of some discipline, or it can refer to subject-matter in several disciplines. A doctrine should be distinguished from an hypothesis, which is held forth to be tested, not to be fully believed without further testing.

We can now define a pseudoscience in the following way, closely following the definition of a pseudoscientific statement quoted in Section 1:

A doctrine is a pseudoscience if and only if it satisfies the following two conditions:

1. It includes at least one statement which (A1) pertains to an issue within the domains of science in the broad sense (the criterion of scientific domain), and (A2) suffers from such a severe lack of reliability that it cannot at all be trusted (the criterion of unreliability).

2. Its major proponents try to create the impression that it represents the most reliable knowledge on its subject matter (the criterion of pretence).

The two definitions are interconnected in the sense that every pseudoscientific sentence is part of some pseudoscience, and furthermore, every pseudoscience contains at least one pseudoscientific statement. It should also be noted that in addition to pseudoscientific statements, a pseudoscience can contain statements on scientific subject matter that are not pseudoscientific (as Letrud rightly points out on pp. 8-9). Furthermore, a pseudoscience can contain statements that do not fall within the domains of science in the broad sense (for instance, various types of religious and spiritual statements).

Concerning the distinction between pseudoscience and bad science, I have already emphasised that this distinction should be based on assessments of the actual claims, and not be influenced by the academic status of the proponents. As I see it, there are two major differences between the demarcation of pseudoscience and the general assessment of quality in science.

First, scientific quality should be assessed according to several independent criteria. The most fundamental of these is reliability. A scientific statement that is considerably less reliable than what would have been possible (given the status of science at the time) has low quality. If it is utterly unreliable, then the quality is nil. But we also have other quality criteria for science. In particular, we expect science to be either scientifically fruitful or practically useful (or both). A piece of science that scores very low on both these counts can be classified as having low quality even if it is highly reliable, but that does not make it pseudoscience (Hansson 2013, 66–67; Hansson 2018, 72–75). For instance, it may be bad environmental science to collect and analyze a large number of water samples from a single lake in which no important variations can be expected, instead of using one’s resources to cover several lakes, among which scientifically interesting and/or practically relevant variations can be expected. This can be classified as bad science even if the reported measurements are reliable. However it should not be classified as pseudoscience. For the demarcation of pseudoscience, the only important quality criterion is that of reliability.

Secondly, even very low reliability is not sufficient for classifying a piece of science as pseudoscience. Suppose that a scientist publishes a series of measurements that are severely flawed, either because of an instrument failure or a human mistake. This can be called bad science, but if it is just a mistake, we would not call it pseudoscience. Pseudoscience, as it is commonly conceived, involves the sustained promotion of teachings that lack scientific legitimacy (Hansson 1996, 173; Hansson 2013, 69). This is important, since the most important strength of science is its capacity for self-improvement (Hansson 2018, 64). What makes pseudoscience a much more ominous threat to epistemic and social progress than other types of bad science is its doctrinal resistance to correction. Therefore, the doctrinal component should have an essential role in an adequate characterisation of pseudoscience.

Notes

1 In later work, the definition was supplemented with a clarification that the doctrinal deviation described in its third clause can take two major forms: science denialism and pseudotheory promotion. Science denialism is driven by enmity towards some part of science, and typically does not have much of a positive doctrine of its own. (Hansson 2017)

2 Alternatively, they can be called ‘defining statements’.

3 Obviously, biology has core statements in another sense, namely claims that are generally accepted among specialists, and are considered crucial for understanding modern biology.

4 See for instance https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php. Last accessed May 7, 2020.