Science and Pseudo-science

In a thoughtful column in the NYT this Thursday, Massimo Pigliucci (@mpigliucci) and Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) argue for a clear distinction between science and pseudo-science.

Dear Massimo, Maarten,

While acknowledging that the demarcation problem is not an open and shut case, in your October 10th NYT column, you nonetheless fall prey to some oversimplifications. While I am generally sympathetic to your argument, I'd like to cover here some of the statements that betray an idealized version of the scientific establishment and scientific truth. I believe such should be avoided in content advocating for a naturalistic worldview, for ethical and pragmatic reasons.

I will avoid paraphrasing the mainstream non-controversial arguments and cut straight to the chase. Your argument is in response to a column by Stephen T. Asma about Chinese medicine and its virtues, where he argues that Chinese medicine is not pseudo-science because it works. You say:

The active ingredient of aspirin, for example, is derived from willow bark, which had been known to have beneficial effects since the time of Hippocrates. There is also no mystery about how this happens: people have more or less randomly tried solutions to their health problems for millennia, sometimes stumbling upon something useful. What makes the use of aspirin “scientific,” however, is that we have validated its effectiveness through properly controlled trials, isolated the active ingredient, and understood the biochemical pathways through which it has its effects.

This is where we get into the thorny angle of your column that I'd like to address: the epistemological question.

Before that though, and as an aside, to portray pre-scientific civilizations as incapable of anything more sophisticated than merely randomly stumbling upon useful stuff is also over-positivist in its tone. Theories evolved in these civilizations, involving spirits of nature and such like, fostering a deep understanding that there are things in things that do things, and some form of stable and operative knowledge was built. It's not the kind of knowledge that we recognize today as ontologically sound, but it worked in so far as it kept us alive long enough, and it was as reliable as it could be. We wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise. But obviously we agree that it wasn't science. I'm just pointing out a mindset.

So, what you are saying here is: what makes aspirin scientific is that we can describe how it works. There is a description of the process by which is works, which we understand and can describe in empirical ways.

But then you address the question of the Higgs boson, and there you lose me:

The existence of the Higgs had been predicted on the basis of a very successful physical theory known as the Standard Model. This theory is not only exceedingly mathematically sophisticated, but it has been verified experimentally over and over again.

I find troubling that you say this in this context. You base your entire argument on examples from medicine, which by and large happens at the macroscopic scale and that we can actually describe empirically. You are making an argument for empirics: folk medicine's empirical claims are at best weak and inaccurate, demonstrably so, even where they work. Modern science, by contrast, is accessible to explanation, verification, and has strong predictive powers. If I take aspirin, this is what will happen to my nervous system.

But your choice of the Higgs boson to extend that claim is very hazardous. Has anyone actually seen a Higgs boson, or even the empirical physical trace of a Higgs boson? Clearly, no. The only things that we see there are traces of electromagnetic and other signals, which are pretty remote from actually being the particles. Yet in the case of the Higgs, we only even see traces that we would expect to see of other things provided Higgs existed.

Claiming that the Higgs boson exists on a par with the existence of the chemical processes induced by aspirin consumption is reckless in an argument about science as the necessary empirical foundation of real knowledge. It is also misleading to NYT readers.

We know that many physicists and philosophers (including yourself, I bet) accept that the Standard Model is very likely an intermediary, historically-bound theory. It has not a shred of the explanatory power of knowledge in medicine or chemistry. Any claim that we have actually seen, i.e. empirically verified the existence of, the Higgs boson is not an accurate statement. It is clear Higgs is several degrees of ontological soundness above the spirit-in-the-willow theory of pain-killers. But I think it's hard to demonstrate that, on a scale of ontological soundness, it is much closer to 100% than it is to the spirit theory (it really depends on the shape of the scale function :) ).

Your strong appeal to mathematical sophistication ("not only") even bolsters my argument here. It's obvious that far more resources have been justifiably and successfully applied to ascertaining sufficient ontological correspondence of mathematics than to the spirit theory of things, I am not putting that into question. But we do not have a sound theoretical basis that explains the correspondence of mathematics (we're not even really sure of its consistency everywhere we apply it, and the basis on which we sometimes assert its power is often undermined by quantum physics it seems to me at this stage, but I'm a newbie - a discussion for another time).

If we're going to talk about mysteries, then that's a real mystery, the real mystery. Mathematics is the spirit-theory of our modern-day science. It's more advanced, more effective, more powerful, and more true, but it still comes with a lot of spirits in it.

Yes, I do indulge in my little bit of "mystery-mongering", to paraphrase Alex "bosons-and-fermions" Rosenberg, but it is pretty legitimate here it seems to me. But back to your column.

Then, taking your cue from a legitimate feature of the science advocacy rulebook, you get into the territory of the harm that not following science can bring to the world. I am with you here, for instance:

That is precisely what happens worldwide to people who deny the connection between H.I.V. and AIDS, as superbly documented by the journalist Michael Specter. Indulging in a bit of pseudoscience in some instances may be relatively innocuous, but the problem is that doing so lowers your defenses against more dangerous delusions that are based on similar confusions and fallacies.

I'm a contrarian at heart. I have a strong positive bias for arguments that purport to debunk generally accepted notions. I spent some time reading and watching the arguments against the AIDS industry, science and policies. I was, by bias, sympathetic to them, as I always try to be to people who make the effort of producing or curating a counter-argument. In this case, beyond the details and sociology of the thing, it's fairly tragically clear-cut: the documented litany of such advocates who died of AIDS is impossible to ignore or rationalize away.

[Y]ou may expose yourself and your loved ones to harm because your pseudoscientific proclivities lead you to accept notions that have been scientifically disproved, like the increasingly (and worryingly) popular idea that vaccines cause autism.

Same here: the empirical evidence shows that vaccines, on balance, achieve their aims. In fact, interestingly, the movement against vaccines has helped to reinforce that proof due to the outbreaks of preventable diseases in communities who forwent vaccination. This effect was predicted by scientists, and it happened.

However, debunking pseudo-science simply won't achieve its aims if it's done literally in defense of science. By that I mean by adopting a pro-science bias, without clarifying what meaning of the word "science" we are using, and how it relates to the reality of the practice of science in the real world and how real people are affected by it practically, politically and morally.

Let's not confuse defending a true quest for acquisition of valid knowledge, with a corporatist drive to "defend science", understood as the scientific establishment, against a straw-man of "ignorance/religion".


For instance:

For example, alchemy was a (somewhat) legitimate science in the times of Newton and Boyle, but it is now firmly pseudoscientific (movements in the opposite direction, from full-blown pseudoscience to genuine science, are notably rare).

That statement is really fraught with baggage, I mean the part between parentheses. It's self-serving to the point of bad faith.

When advocacy groups of patients who suffer from a drug (even vaccines) that does more harm than good, or show that there is an abnormal rate of cancer or some other ailment due to some technological apparatus (e.g. nuclear plant, chemical factory), they are invariably at first branded crackpots, obscurantists and pseudo-scientists by scientists, whether they are on the payroll or acting out of blind corporate loyalty. Yet, it cannot by any means be called "notably rare" that these crackpots turn out to have been the rational ones all along, and the science establishment was the lier, the dogmatic ideologue or the idiot. The obscurantist, in other words.

You then summon your ultimate cannonball:

Even the criterion of falsifiability, for example, is still a useful benchmark for distinguishing science and pseudoscience, as a first approximation. Asma’s own counterexample inadvertently shows this: the “cleverness” of astrologers in cherry-picking what counts as a confirmation of their theory, is hardly a problem for the criterion of falsifiability, but rather a nice illustration of Popper’s basic insight: the bad habit of creative fudging and finagling with empirical data ultimately makes a theory impervious to refutation. And all pseudoscientists do it, from parapsychologists to creationists and 9/11 Truthers.

That's a very good point, for two related reasons. I like how you bring up that criterion of falsifiability as a marker of good science with the mitigator "is still a useful benchmark". It's become pretty mainstream, now, to argue that this falsifiability argument is a little old school. It was OK for grandpa's science, but us modern singularity-riders and quantum surfers are cooler and more with it than that. "Best explanation" is what suits our epistemological bent. So even though when we attack pseudo-science, falsifiability is what we claim as the argument for science that puts the final nail in the coffin of pseudo-science, but when we actually do science, it's become OK not to care about that? I find that troubling as an ethical position.

The second reason, which maybe in fact the real subconscious cause for the first reason, is that, in the modern science world, the one where great scientists spend the majority of their time writing grant applications rather than doing science, verifying results is coming to be a thing of the past.

Pamela Ronald (@pcronald), I'm sure you saw that, wrote a very candid piece in her SciAm blog about the problem of replication for verification of results, which, while not sufficient, is surely necessary, or a precursor of falsifiability (falsifiability is not the same as verifying results, I know, but I hope you'll grant me that it's germane to bring up this point here). There she tells us this:

It is virtually impossible to obtain funding to repeat results that have already been published.

This is the real world of science. A world where it's virtually impossible to get funding for ensuring the integrity of scientific knowledge. Publishing results is what matters. Checking that they are actually real results is for losers. Viz the whole current debate about peer-review, which I won't get into here, since at least (thank God!) you have decided not to invoke it here in defense of science - no doubt aware of how weak that argument actually is despite how over-used it is in public debate about science.

You conclude:

The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning.

I couldn't agree more, and I can't thank you enough, for what it's worth, for the very considered and rational views that you bring to these debates. I just wanted here to point out a couple of points in your column that I believe need to be stress-tested for bias.
I think that it's clear, to me at least as someone who gives a lot of my time and indulgence to anti-whatever theories, that pseudo-science doesn't thrive on most people being stupid, or unable to understand a good argument when they see it. Pseudo-science thrives on distrust of the scientific establishment. I think that science advocacy has to start from the premise that there are legitimate reasons to distrust the establishment of science, and stop reflexively presenting scientists as heroes of truth and integrity, with the occasional contrived concession that "scientists are human after all". From that premise of the legitimacy of citizen-driven criticism of science as a corporation holding a biased worldview, a genuine program of advocacy for a culture of knowledge acquisition, validation and curation, as well as the dissemination of the means to that end, can thrive, I believe.

In today's world, maybe, I'm just throwing this out there, we could replace (or associate) the pursuit of happiness by (with) the pursuit of knowledge as a core aim. And that surely doesn't mean handing over the house keys to Pfizer and Monsanto, if you'll allow me a radical and somewhat demagogical shortcut as a conclusion.

Your truly.