What I wanted this thread to be about.
Anyone who has engaged someone who posits a pseudo-scientific viewpoint should find this interesting.
I don’t mind threads going off a single topic, it’s the free exchange ideas, right? But sometimes, I want to discuss a thing, so I start a thread. This one is the “demarcation problem”, as the article says, this goes back to the 5th century BC with Socrates. It affects every day, I think part of it is abuse of the gray area. We can’t all be experts in everything, so how do we evaluate scientific data from the experts?
Some solutions: Kuhn says we exist in the current paradigm, anything outside of that is not science. This sets aside the bothersome problems of the paradigms by declaring it the best we know so far. Popper says a scientific claim has to be falsifiable, even if the experiment hasn’t been done yet. But does it open up too much? Moberg states a scientific notion needs to be concerned about being true. This is more character based, on the claimer, not the claim.
This is my summary of the link, and the link itself is an intro something much longer.
Pseudoscience and the Demarcation Problem | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (utm.edu)
It includes many more interesting thoughts, like how the debate about demarcation is philosophical and science can go on as it is without resolving that debate, “Arguably, philosophy does not make progress by resolving debates, but by discovering and exploring alternative positions in the conceptual spaces defined by a particular philosophical question (Pigliucci 2017).”
Section 3 gets interesting, discussing how pseudoscience has a philosophy, an illogical one, but still. There are differences between creationism and vaccine denial, but they share some assumptions.
It’s quite lengthy, and so is this post, so I’ll leave it there for now.