http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pseudo.html

Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience
Rory Coker, Ph.D.
The word "pseudo" means fake. The surest way to spot a fake is to know
as much as possible about the real thing—in this case, about science
itself. Knowing science does not mean simply knowing scientific facts
(such as the distance from earth to sun, the age of the earth, the
distinction between mammal and reptile, etc.) It means understanding
the nature of science—the criteria of evidence, the design of
meaningful experiments, the weighing of possibilities, the testing of
hypotheses, the establishment of theories, the many aspects of
scientific methods that make it possible to draw reliable conclusions
about the physical universe.

Because the media bombard us with nonsense, it is useful to consider
the earmarks of pseudoscience. The presence of even one of these
should arouse great suspicion. On the other hand, material displaying
none of these flaws might still be pseudoscience, because its
adherents invent new ways to fool themselves every day. Most of the
examples in this article are related to my field of physics, but
similar beliefs and behavior are associated with iridology, medical
astrology, meridian therapy, reflexology, subluxation-based
chiropractic, therapeutic touch, and other health-related
pseudosciences.

Pseudoscience displays an indifference to facts.
Instead of bothering to consult reference works or investigating
directly, its advocates simply spout bogus "facts" where needed. These
fictions are often central to the pseudoscientist's argument and
conclusions. Moreover, pseudoscientists rarely revise. The first
edition of a pseudoscience book is almost always the last, even though
the book remains in print for decades or even centuries. Even books
with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page may be
reprinted as is, over and over. Compare this to science textbooks that
see a new edition every few years because of the rapid accumulation of
new facts and insights.

Pseudoscience "research" is invariably sloppy.
Pseudoscientists clip newspaper reports, collect hearsay, cite other
pseudoscience books, and pore over ancient religious or mythological
works. They rarely or never make an independent investigation to check
their sources.

Pseudoscience begins with a hypothesis—usually one which is appealing
emotionally,
and spectacularly implausible—and then looks only for items which
appear to support it.
Conflicting evidence is ignored. Generally speaking, the aim of
pseudoscience is to rationalize strongly held beliefs, rather than to
investigate or to test alternative possibilities. Pseudoscience
specializes in jumping to "congenial conclusions," grinding
ideological axes, appealing to preconceived ideas and to widespread
misunderstandings.

Pseudoscience is indifferent to criteria of valid evidence.
The emphasis is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific
experiments. Instead it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony,
stories and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine
scientific literature is either ignored or misinterpreted.

Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.
Joe Blow puts jello on his head and his headache goes away. To
pseudoscience, this means jello cures headaches. To science this means
nothing, since no experiment was done. Many things were going on when
Joe Blow's headache went away—the moon was full, a bird flew overhead,
the window was open, Joe had on his red shirt, etc.—and his headache
would have gone away eventually in any case, no matter what. A
controlled experiment would put many people suffering from headaches
in identical circumstances, except for the presence or absence of the
remedy it is desired to test, and compare the results which would then
have some chance of being meaningful. Many people think there must be
something to astrology because a newspaper horoscope describes them
perfectly. But close examination would reveal that the description is
general enough to cover virtually everyone. This phenomenon, called
subjective validation, is one of the foundations of popular support
for pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience depends on arbitrary conventions of human
culture, rather than on unchanging regularities of nature.
For instance, the interpretations of astrology depend on the names of
things, which are accidental and vary from culture to culture. If the
ancients had given the name Mars to the planet we call Jupiter, and
vice versa, astronomy could care less but astrology would be totally
different, because it depends solely on the name and has nothing to do
with the physical properties of the planet itself.

Pseudoscience always achieves a reduction to absurdity if pursued far
enough.
Maybe dowsers can somehow sense the presence of water or minerals
under a field, but almost all claim they can dowse equally well from a
map! Maybe Uri Geller is "psychic," but are his powers really beamed
to him on a radio link with a flying saucer from the planet Hoova, as
he has claimed? Maybe plants are "psychic," but why does a bowl of mud
respond in exactly the same way, in the same "experiment?"

Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test.
Pseudoscientists never carry out careful, methodical experiments
themselves—and they also generally ignore results of those carried out
by scientists. Pseudoscientists also never follow up. If one
pseudoscientist claims to have done an experiment (such as the "lost"
biorhythm studies of Hermann Swoboda that are alleged basis of the
modern pseudoscience of biorhythms), no other pseudoscientist ever
tries to duplicate it or to check him, even when the original results
are missing or questionable! Further, where a pseudoscientist claims
to have done an experiment with a remarkable result, he himself never
repeats it to check his results and procedures. This is in extreme
contrast with science, where crucial experiments are repeated by
scientists all over the world with ever-increasing precision.

Pseudoscience often contradicts itself, even in its own terms.
Such logical contradictions are simply ignored or rationalized away.
Thus, we should not be surprised when Chapter 1
of a book on dowsing says that dowsers use newly cut twigs, because
only "live" wood can channel and focus the "earth-radiation" that
makes dowsing possible, whereas Chapter 5 states that nearly all
dowsers use metal or plastic rods.

Pseudoscience deliberately creates mystery where none
exists, by omitting crucial information and important details.
Anything can be made "mysterious" by omitting what is known about it
or presenting completely imaginary details. The "Bermuda Triangle"
books are classic examples of this tactic.

Pseudoscience does not progress.
There are fads, and a pseudoscientist may switch from one fad to
another (from ghosts to ESP research, from flying saucers to psychic
studies, from ESP research to looking for Bigfoot). But within a given
topic, no progress is made. Little or no new information or uncovered.
New theories are seldom proposed, and old concepts are rarely modified
or discarded in light of new "discoveries," since pseudoscience rarely
makes new "discoveries." The older the idea, the more respect it
receives. No natural phenomena or processes previously unknown to
science have ever been discovered by pseudoscientists. Indeed,
pseudoscientists almost invariably deal with phenomena well known to
scientists, but little known to the general public—so that the public
will swallow whatever the pseudoscientist wants to claim. Examples
include firewalking and "Kirlian" photography.

Pseudoscience attempts to persuade with rhetoric, propaganda, and
misrepresentation rather than valid evidence (which presumably does
not exist).
Pseudoscience books offer examples of almost every kind of fallacy of
logic and reason known to scholars and have invented some new ones of
their own. A favorite device is the non sequitur. Pseudoscientists
also love the "Galileo Argument." This consists of the pseudoscientist
comparing himself to Galileo, and saying that just as the
pseudoscientist is believed to be wrong, so Galileo was thought wrong
by his contemporaries therefore the pseudoscientist must be right too,
just as Galileo was. Clearly the conclusion does not follow! Moreover,
Galileo's ideas were tested, verified, and accepted promptly by his
scientific colleagues. The rejection came from the established
religion which favored the pseudoscience that Galileo's findings
contradicted.

Pseudoscience argues from ignorance, an elementary fallacy.
Many pseudoscientists base their claims on incompleteness of
information about nature, rather than on what is known at present. But
no claim can possibly be supported by lack of information. The fact
that people don't recognize what they see in the sky means only that
they don't recognize what they saw. This fact is not evidence that
flying saucers are from outer space. The statement "Science cannot
explain" is common in pseudoscience literature. In many cases, science
has no interest in the supposed phenomena because there is no evidence
it exists; in other cases, the scientific explanation is well known
and well established, but the pseudoscientist doesn't know this or
deliberately ignores it to create mystery.

Pseudoscience argues from alleged exceptions, errors, anomalies,
strange events,
and suspect claims—rather than from well-established regularities of
nature.
The experience of scientists over the past 400 years is that claims
and reports that describe well-understood objects behaving in strange
and incomprehensible ways tend to reduce upon investigation to
deliberate frauds, honest mistakes, garbled accounts,
misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and stupid blunders. It is
not wise to accept such reports at face value, without checking them.
Pseudoscientists always take such reports as literally true, without
independent verification.

Pseudoscience appeals to false authority, to emotion,
sentiment, or distrust of established fact.
A high-school dropout is accepted as an expert on archaeology, though
he has never made any study of it! A psychoanalyst is accepted as an
expert on all of human history, not to mention physics, astronomy, and
mythology, even though his claims are inconsistent with everything
known in all four fields. A movie star swears it's true, so it must
be. A physicist says a "psychic" couldn't possibly have fooled him
with simple magic tricks, although the physicist knows nothing about
magic and sleight of hand. Emotional appeals are common. ("If it makes
you feel good, it must be true." "In your heart you know it's right.")
Pseudoscientists are fond of imaginary conspiracies. ("There's plenty
of evidence for flying saucers, but the government keeps it secret.")
And they argue from irrelevancies: When confronted by inconvenient
facts, they simply reply, "Scientists don't know everything!"

Pseudoscience makes extraordinary claims and advances fantastic
theories that contradict what is known about nature.
They not only provide no evidence that their claims are true. They
also ignore all findings that contradict their conclusions. ("Flying
saucers have to come from somewhere—so the earth is hollow, and they
come from inside." "This electric spark I'm making with this
electrical apparatus is actually not a spark at all, but rather a
supernatural manifestation of psycho-spiritual energy." "Every human
is surrounded by an impalpable aura of electromagnetic energy, the
auric egg of the ancient Hindu seers, which mirrors the human's every
mood and condition.")

Pseudoscientists invent their own vocabulary in which many terms lack
precise or unambiguous definitions, and some have no definition at
all.
Listeners are often forced to interpret the statements according to
their own preconceptions. What, for for example, is "biocosmic
energy?" Or a "psychotronic amplification system?" Pseudoscientists
often attempt to imitate the jargon of scientific and technical fields
by spouting gibberish that sounds scientific and technical. Quack
"healers" would be lost without the term "energy," but their use of
the term has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of energy used
by physicists.

Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific
methodology while simultaneously denying their validity.
Thus, a procedurally invalid experiment which seems to show that
astrology works is advanced as "proof" that astrology is correct,
while thousands of procedurally sound experiments that show it does
not work are ignored. The fact that someone got away with simple magic
tricks in one scientific lab is "proof" that he is a psychic superman,
while the fact that he was caught cheating in several other labs is
ignored.

Pseudoscience claims that the phenomena it studies are "jealous."
The phenomena appear only under certain vaguely specified but vital
conditions (such as when no doubters or skeptics are present; when no
experts are present; when nobody is watching; when the "vibes" are
right; or only once in human history.) Science holds that genuine
phenomena must be capable of study by anyone with the proper equipment
and that all procedurally valid studies must give consistent results.
No genuine phenomenon is "jealous" in this way. There is no way to
construct a TV set or a radio that will function only when no skeptics
are present! A man who claims to be a concert-class violinist, but
does not appear to have ever owned a violin and who refuses to play
when anyone is around who might hear him, is most likely lying about
his ability to play the violin.

Pseudoscientific "explanations" tend to be by scenario.
That is, we are told a story, but nothing else; we have no description
of any possible physical process. For instance, Immanuel Velikovsky
(1895-1979) claimed that another planet passing near the earth caused
the earth's spin axis to flip upside down. This is all he said. He
gave no mechanisms. But the mechanism is all-important, because the
laws of physics rule out the process as impossible. That is, the
approach of another planet cannot cause a planet's spin axis to flip.
If Velikovsky had discovered some way that a planet could flip
another's spin axis, he would presumably have described the mechanism
by which it can happen. The bald statement itself, without the
underlying mechanism, conveys no information at all. Velikovsky said
that Venus was once a comet, and this comet was spewed out of a
volcano on Jupiter. Since planets do not resemble comets (which are
rock/ice snowball-like debris with connection whatsoever to volcanoes)
and since Jupiter is not known to have volcanoes anyway (or even a
solid surface!), no actual physical process could underlie
Velikovsky's assertions. He gave us words, related to one another
within a sentence, but the relationships were alien to the universe we
actually live in, and he gave no explanation for how these could
exist. He provided stories, not genuine theories.

Pseudoscientists often appeal to the ancient human habit of magical
thinking.
Magic, sorcery, witchcraft—these are based on spurious similarity,
false analogy, false cause-and-effect connections, etc. That is,
inexplicable influences and connections between things are assumed
from the beginning—not found by investigation. (If you step on a crack
in the sidewalk without saying a magic word, your mother will crack a
bone in her body; eating heart-shaped leaves is good for heart
ailments; shining red light on the body increases blood production;
rams are aggressive so someone born in the sign of the ram is
aggressive; fish are "brain food" because the meat of the fish
resembles brain tissue, etc.)

Pseudoscience relies heavily on anachronistic thinking.
The older the idea, the more attractive it is to pseudoscience—it's
the wisdom of the ancients!—especially if the idea is transparently
wrong and has long been discarded by science. Many journalists have
trouble in comprehending this point. A typical reporter writing about
astrology may think a thorough job can be done by interviewing six
astrologers and one astronomer. The astronomer says it's all bunk; the
six astrologers say it's great stuff and really works and for $50
they'll be glad to cast anyone's horoscope. (No doubt!) To many
reporters, and apparently to many editors and their readers, this
would confirm astrology six to one!

This table contrasts some of the characteristics of science and
pseudoscience

[TABLE SNIPPED.  WOULD NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY.  SEE:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pseudo.html ]

This table could be greatly expanded, because science and
pseudoscience are precisely opposed ways of viewing nature. Science
relies on—and insists on—self-questioning, testing and analytical
thinking that make it hard to fool yourself or to avoid facing facts.
Pseudoscience, on the other hand, preserves the ancient, natural,
irrational, unobjective modes of thought that are hundreds of
thousands of years older than science—thought processes that have
given rise to superstitions and other fanciful and mistaken ideas
about man and nature—from voodoo to racism; from the flat earth to the
house-shaped universe with God in the attic, Satan in the cellar and
man on the ground floor; from doing rain dances to torturing and
brutalizing the mentally ill to drive out the demons that possess
them. Pseudoscience encourages people to believe anything they want.
It supplies specious "arguments" for fooling yourself into thinking
that any and all beliefs are equally valid. Science begins by saying,
let's forget about what we believe to be so, and try by investigation
to find out what actually is so. These roads don't cross; they lead in
completely opposite directions.

Some confusion on this point is caused by what we might call
"crossover." "Science" is not an honorary badge you wear, it's an
activity you do. Whenever you cease that activity, you cease being a
scientist. A distressing amount of pseudoscience is generated by
scientists who are well trained in one field but plunge into another
field of which they are ignorant. A physicist who claims to have found
a new principle of biology—or a biologist who claims to have found a
new principle of physics—is almost invariably doing pseudoscience. And
so are those who forge data, or suppresses data that clash with their
preconceptions, or refuse to let others see their data for independent
evaluation. Science is like a high peak of intellectual integrity,
fairness, and rationality. The peak is slippery and smooth. It
requires a tremendous effort to remain near it. Slacking of effort
carries one away and into pseudoscience. Some pseudoscience is
generated by individuals with a small amount of specialized scientific
or technical training who are not professional scientists and do not
comprehend the nature of the scientific enterprise—yet think of
themselves as "scientists."

One might wonder if there are not examples of "crossovers" in the
other direction; that is people who have been thought by scientists to
be doing pseudoscience, who eventually were accepted as doing valid
science, and whose ideas were ultimately accepted by scientists. From
what we have just outlined, one would expect this to happen extremely
rarely, if ever. In fact, neither I nor any informed colleague I have
ever asked about this, knows of any single case in which this has
happened during the hundreds of years the full scientific method has
been known to and used by scientists. There are many cases in which a
scientist has been thought wrong by colleagues but later—when new
information comes in—is shown to be correct. Like anyone else,
scientists can get hunches that something is possible without having
enough evidence to convince their associates that they are correct.
Such people do not become pseudoscientists, unless they continue to
maintain that their ideas are correct when contradictory evidence
piles up. Being wrong or mistaken is unavoidable; we are all human,
and we all commit errors and blunders. True scientists, however, are
alert to the possibility of blunder and are quick to correct mistakes.
Pseudoscientists do not. In fact, a short definition of pseudoscience
is "a method for excusing, defending, and preserving errors."

Pseudoscience often strikes educated, rational people as too
nonsensical and preposterous to be dangerous and as a source of
amusement rather than fear. Unfortunately, this is not a wise
attitude. Pseudoscience can be extremely dangerous.

Penetrating political systems, it justifies atrocities in the name of
racial purity
Penetrating the educational system, it can drive out science and
sensibility;
In the field of health, it dooms thousands to unnecessary death or
suffering
Penetrating religion, it generates fanaticism, intolerance, and holy
war
Penetrating the communications media, it can make it difficult for
voters to obtain factual information on important public issues.

Dr. Coker is Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin.