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    How To Distinguish Science From Pseudoscience: Absence of Testability

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    Hesa Miarta
    Pseudoscience masquerades as science but lacks the basic values and methods of science. Some key marks of pseudoscience are a lack of testability and making claims that are unfalsifiable. For a claim to be scientific, there must be possible observations that could show the claim is true or false. However, pseudoscientists often make claims that are not falsifiable in any possible observation, such as claims about ESP that can never be disproven no matter the experimental results. They use excuses like "ESP works sometimes but not others" to render their claims unfalsifiable.

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    How To Distinguish Science From Pseudoscience: Absence of Testability

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    Hesa Miarta
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    Pseudoscience masquerades as science but lacks the basic values and methods of science. Some key marks of pseudoscience are a lack of testability and making claims that are unfalsifiable. For a claim to be scientific, there must be possible observations that could show the claim is true or false. However, pseudoscientists often make claims that are not falsifiable in any possible observation, such as claims about ESP that can never be disproven no matter the experimental results. They use excuses like "ESP works sometimes but not others" to render their claims unfalsifiable.

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    Agenda Kota 01-04-2019

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    Pseudoscience masquerades as science but lacks the basic values and methods of science. Some key marks of pseudoscience are a lack of testability and making claims that are unfalsifiable. For a claim to be scientific, there must be possible observations that could show the claim is true or false. However, pseudoscientists often make claims that are not falsifiable in any possible observation, such as claims about ESP that can never be disproven no matter the experimental results. They use excuses like "ESP works sometimes but not others" to render their claims unfalsifiable.

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    15 views3 pages

    How To Distinguish Science From Pseudoscience: Absence of Testability

    Uploaded by

    Hesa Miarta
    Pseudoscience masquerades as science but lacks the basic values and methods of science. Some key marks of pseudoscience are a lack of testability and making claims that are unfalsifiable. For a claim to be scientific, there must be possible observations that could show the claim is true or false. However, pseudoscientists often make claims that are not falsifiable in any possible observation, such as claims about ESP that can never be disproven no matter the experimental results. They use excuses like "ESP works sometimes but not others" to render their claims unfalsifiable.

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    How to Distinguish Science from Pseudoscience

    Pseudoscience is false science—that is, unscientific thinking masquerading as


    scientific thinking. It is thinking that appears to be scientific but is, in fact, faithless to
    science’s basic values and methods. Because pseudoscientific thinking often looks and
    sounds like real science, it can be hard for non-scientists to tell them apart. Luckily, there
    are certain marks of pseudoscience that any educated person can use to distinguish it
    from true science.
    Scientists, of course, aren’t perfect. Consequently, even genuine science will
    sometimes display one or two of these marks (though rarely in a serious or systematic
    way). But if an allegedly “scientific” discipline displays several of these marks (or even one
    in a particularly blatant way), that is a strong indication that it is pseudoscience rather than
    science.
    Absence of Testability
    Science seeks to answer questions about the natural world, not through myth,
    intuition, or guesswork, but through careful observation and experiment. Thus, by the very
    nature of the scientific enterprise, all genuinely scientific claims must be testable. A
    scientific claim is testable when we can make observations that would show the claim to
    be true or false. In thinking about this criterion, we must avoid two common mistakes.
    First, scientific claims need not be directly testable. Obviously, we can never go
    back in time to obtain direct observational evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
    However, there is a great deal of indirect evidence that supports this hypothesis, including
    DNA evidence, structural similarities (homologies) between birds and certain species of
    dinosaurs, and transitional fossil forms.The fact that scientists can argue for or against this
    hypothesis by appealing to such indirect evidence is enough to make the hypothesis a
    genuinely scientific one.
    Second, scientific claims need not be immediately testable. For example, when
    Einstein proposed in 1916 that clocks run faster in space than they do on Earth, it wasn’t
    possible to test this hypothesis experimentally with the technology available at the time. It
    wasn’t until many decades later that the invention of jet aircraft and high-precision atomic
    clocks allowed scientists to test Einstein’s hypothesis and prove that it was true.
    Although scientific claims need not be directly or immediately testable, they must at
    least be testable in principle; that is, there must be at least some observations we can
    realistically imagine making that would show the claim to be true or false. If we can’t
    conceive of any observations that would count for or against the claim, it is not a claim
    about empirically observable reality, and hence not a claim that can be studied
    scientifically.
    Here are some examples of claims that are not scientifically testable:
    • There are invisible, completely undetectable gremlins that live deep in the
    interior of the earth.
    • An exact duplicate of you exists in a parallel universe that is completely inacces- sible to
    us.
    • All reality is spiritual; matter is only an illusion.
    • The earth was once visited by superintelligent aliens who left no trace of their visit.
    • Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.
    Each of these claims may, for all we know, be true. But they are not scientific claims
    because there is no possible observation or experiment that would tell us whether they are
    true or false. To be scientific, a claim must be testable in two senses: It must be verifiable
    in principle and falsifiable in principle. A claim is verifiable in principle when we can
    imagine some possible observation that would provide good reason to believe that the
    claim is true. A claim is falsifiable in principle when we can imagine some possible
    observation that would provide good reason to believe that the claim is false.
    Pseudoscientists commonly make claims that violate the second of these two
    conditions. That is, they often make claims that are not falsifiable even in principle. A good
    example of this comes from the field of ESP research. ESP (extrasensory perception) is
    the alleged ability to sense or perceive things without the aid of the five senses. Believers
    in ESP often point to experiments that seem to provide evidence for claims of the form X
    has genuine powers of ESP.
    Unfortunately, every time scientists have sought to repeat such experiments under
    tightly controlled conditions, no evidence of ESP abilities has been found. To explain this
    failure, believers in ESP often offer the following two excuses:
    • ESP works sometimes but not others.
    • ESP doesn’t work when skeptics are present.
    These excuses may sound plausible—until you notice the kind of “heads-I-win, tails-
    you-lose” logic behind them. For those who offer such excuses, there can be evidence for
    ESP but not evidence against it. By resorting to such rationalizations, believers in ESP
    render their claim unfalsifiable and hence unscientific.
    Catch-22 cop-outs like this are commonplace in pseudoscience. For example, when
    researchers in the 1970s failed to confirm poorly controlled experiments suggesting that
    plants were sensitive and aware, die-hard believers in plant consciousness retorted that
    this was because the skeptical researchers weren’t emotionally “in tune” with the plants.
    Similarly, when scientists in the 1960s failed to find evidence supporting James V.
    McConnell’s startling claim that cannibalistic flatworms acquired their fellow worms’
    knowledge, McConnell’s colleague Allan Jacobson defended McConnell’s work by
    charging that the scientists lacked feelings for the worms.

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