Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today? Massimo, today, our special guest is Dr.

Martin Baudry. I think I think I know the guy.

Yeah, you know, it's the funny coincidence that sounds strangely familiar. Martin is a philosopher and doctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, where his research concentrates on philosophy of pseudoscience, evolutionary theory, epistemology, rationality and skepticism. Martin, welcome.

Thank you. And thanks for having me.

Martin just recently coedited a book called The Philosophy of Pseudoscience Reconsidering the Demarkation Problem.

I think I know the co-author. Wait, let me think. Hold on.

Now it's suddenly that's how we got to know each other, right? DiMassimo period. She was the co-author. Why couldn't we have been right here?

Actually, co-editor because the book is actually a collection of co-editor of the book.

Just fell off my shelves, was really spooky to see it happen. So it's actually it's just I hadn't seen the book yet.

So this is a well to bring it that now I don't know.

But have you seen the book already because the book is beautiful and so automatically on my on my Kindle a couple of days ago. Yeah. All right.

It's already published. It is available on Amazon. We'll link to it on the on the podcast website. But so, Martin, would you be willing to just summarize what the issue that the contributors to your book are talking about is about what is the philosophy of pseudoscience and the demarkation problem?

Well, there are not there are not a lot of philosophers of pseudoscience around, actually. I mean, I maximum when I did a count recently and we seem to be well, we started out as the only ones that planet probably read.

But the vantage at creating a whole one own field, you know, it's like you're the best in the field.

Exactly. And the runner up on the second best.

So I guess I can live with that note so that we we are we have one of our main interests is what we call the philosophy of pseudo science that we have. We have collected this or compiled this following where we have solicited chapters from from philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, people who are interested in pseudoscience and in what philosophers call the demarcation problem. That is the dividing line between science on the one hand and Pseudo-Science on the other hand. So this is really a multidisciplinary book that brings together researchers from different fields to think about this this question about what is science, what constitutes good science, and how can you distinguish science from pseudoscience.

This isn't a project that has been out of fashion, you know, to the extent that philosophy is trafficking in fashions. Yeah, I think it does, too. And certain certainly has been out of fashion for decades because most philosophers, if you ask them and the ones that are not aware of this book with which I would say that the demarcation problem has been put to rest decades ago, and a name that often comes up in this regard is Larry Lobban.

He was a he's a philosopher of science. And he he claimed to have demonstrated or shown that we should really not only abandon this whole idea of demarcation ism, so finding the difference between science and pseudo science, but we should also get rid of the very term pseudo science. He thinks that it's it's derogatory, it's negative, and it suggests a naive conception of what a science about. And of course, we disagree. We think so wrong.

I don't want to bang out about about London because I'll just put it up because it's a standard reference in the in the field. And it's it's like a local classic. It's something that many papers on pseudoscience begin with as a as a reference. So the idea is that we actually want to resuscitate or we want to bring this demarkation project back to life. And we want to show that Ludden's obituary of the demarkation problem, you know, was was a bit too too quick, a bit too premature that we have a lot of people that agree with us and they have contributed to this problem.

So we're all in the same boat, so to speak.

Yeah, although we'll get into a little later on, I think some of the controversies and even disagreements among several authors of contributors to the book. It's not like just because we agree that there is such a thing as a. And probably will agree about how to answer it or deal with it. But before we go on, I think I mean, it's following up on what Martin just said. It was an interesting experience for Martin and for myself to put together the proposal for this book, because we were, of course, very aware of Loudon's classic paper and of its effect long lasting.

In fact, this is one of the most influential papers in this area. And so when we started thinking about, well, maybe it's time to sort of resuscitate this issue and think about it, after all, the demarcation problem has a very long history and philosophy of science. At the very least, it started out with Karl Popper, who actually coined the term demarkation to begin with. So we're talking early 20th century and actually, arguably, you can find traces of it further back.

So when we put together the proposal, two interesting things happened from from from my perspective as as sort of the co-editor of the book.

The first one was that we asked a bunch of people if they wanted to contribute. And, you know, I've done edited books before. And typically the rate of positive responses is anywhere between 50 and 70 percent or something like that, because you pick authors, of course, that, you know, are likely to want to contribute. But then people have stuff to do or maybe they have other priorities or whatever. And, you know, so you have a certain amount of lower amount of response.

And you'd like in this case, essentially 100 percent of the people we contacted answered positively and enthusiastically wished that, you know, that was a little bit surprising. And then Chicago Press, which is the publisher for the book, sent out the proposal for peer review, because this is a book that it's going to be published, but it's published by an academic race. So it goes out for peer review. And the reviewers unanimously say, yeah, it was about time that somebody brought up this.

So apparently we didn't get on the right sort of moment, historical moment. People were sort of getting a little wary of these constant citation of Lodin Eighty-seven as the death knell for demarkation. And they wanted to say something about the other advantage.

Other thing that is very nice about as an experience about editing a book, although it's as a as a process, it's usually a big pain because, you know, you have to deal, of course, with authors who are late or they go beyond the limit of what they're supposed to be writing in terms of length and then with the reviewers and know there's a lot of stuff going on.

But one of the things that it's great about doing this sort of exercise is that it suddenly puts you one or two years ahead of everybody else in the field, because all of a sudden, you know what the best people, the best practitioners in that particular area of investigation are actually thinking about. They're about to publish. And so this was a great learning experience as far as I'm concerned.

It was just a lot of fun. But maybe maybe we should get into some of the controversies.

What are some of the stuff that struck you as disagreement among even the contributors to the book? Yeah.

Can you imagine we actually have something to discuss? No. Know, actually, it's quite right for you to mention. This is of course, we we we still have I mean, in general, the I would say almost all of the people who have contributed to the book, they think that it's a worthy cause or worthy endeavor to think at least think about these issues. And they don't dismiss the whole problem of science versus pseudoscience about demarcation isn't out of hand.

But of course, that's I mean, just by merely agreeing on that doesn't doesn't mean that you agree on all the details. And as it happens, there are a lot of controversies that that that are still raging among those people who agree that we should we should pay more interest to this difference, the distinction between between science and pseudo science. So this is this book is not the definitive statement on the issue.

But I think you're right that we have we have contributions from I think that the leading proponents, leading investigators of the field. And and I hope that it will spark further debate and that that will be a reference or a major reference for people who want to write about these these issues from now on.

So so you want to talk about the controversies among the people. Well, actually, just very briefly, let me just make sure I understand what demarkation consists of. Are you just looking for sort of features like does this field actually test predictions? Does this field, you know, change its mind over time? And you're looking for criteria like those that would allow us to, you know, to describe which fields are actually doing science and which aren't?

Yeah, that is I mean, I think you you described the part of the demarcation problem that that that is of most interest to me. So that's what we call the normative problem. That just means that you're interested in the good versus the bad, that the good science, the genuine science versus the bad science and pseudo science. Pseudoscience isn't inherently a derogatory term. Nobody is proud to be to be pseudosciences. So but but I think there are other distinctions to be made with regard to science.

For example, you can you can also ask, well, what is the boundary between science and philosophy or between science and everyday reasoning? And traditionally, this has also been considered as part of the demarcation project. Actually, I think that one of the confusing things about the demarcation project is that it has a it's like an umbrella term for four different projects. I think that the normative problem, the one you just mentioned, which which theory is good in the sense that they make predictions, they are falsifiable, they are progressive versus the ones that are bad, that don't have all these these features.

That is the most important problem that philosophers should be interested in and should be paying attention to. But I know, for example, because you were you were trying to get at get at these controversies, Masimo pays a lot more attention to the distinction between science, for example, on the one hand, and philosophy on the other hand. That is also a form of demarcation ism. And and that happens to be a domain where we. Well, do we do we do.

We disagree that Masimo I don't want to do shall we agree to disagree or very cautiously? I don't know.

Actually, that's that's a good question, because so my position about science and philosophy and your listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog, I think not this pretty well at this point, but my position about the difference between science and philosophy is that they are distinct fields as as practiced in terms of what they aim at. And to me, this is evident simply by reading next to each other a random sample of science papers in a random sample of philosophy papers.

They're clearly very different. They're about different topics and they work, you know, the structurally very, very differently.

That does not mean, of course, that there are no interesting interactions or borderline areas between science and philosophy. Clearly, for instance, philosophy of mind is better, have interactions with neurobiology and neuroscience. Our philosophy of science better have interactions with science as it is practiced. Philosophy and mathematics better have interactions with mathematics and so on and so forth. But there are. But that doesn't mean the philosophy of science is reduced to work on just just studying science.

It doesn't mean the philosophy mathematics is mathematics and or that mathematicians can solve philosophical problems even in their own fields. That sort of. So that's what I see the the differences between the two. Right.

Right. Well, and in a way, I agree. I can I can follow much of what you said. Maybe my main concern would be that if you take discussions in what is called a philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, then it's the philosophical parts of the research and the empirical parts.

The scientific path can be so intertwined that it's often difficult to to pull them apart. Yeah, I would agree.

And one of the things and one of the things that that that that I would regard to the demarcation problem, I think that it is not so important. But let's say it is less important to distinguish science and philosophy in a field such as philosophy, biology, because both of them are working together on similar problems in a similar project.

And it's often hard to tell from from reading a paper whether it was a philosopher or a biologist or a psychologist, so that this precise distinction between science and philosophy, I think is not something that we should worry too much to. Too much about I mean, it's not something that that that carries much weight, if you compare it to the difference between science and pseudo science, that has a a big major impact on on society. It can cause a lot of harm.

There's a lot of there are a lot of things that hinge on this distinction because it's a normative distinction is a distinction between the good versus the bad. Whereas if you want to pull apart the philosophical and the scientific elements and in a field such as philosophy of biology, it's it's not that you want to distinguish the good from the bad, because presumably both of the both the philosophical and the and the scientific parts of that research are are valuable.

You're just deciding what to call it and you just deciding what to call it. And to some extent, you would say that this paper is more more into the philosophical tradition. But I think if it's pure philosophy completely a priori, it doesn't involve any empirical input, then I think it's pretty sterile. You know, did this I think good philosophers, especially nowadays today as philosophy of mind, philosophy, biology, at least they should they should make use of the bad state of the art in respect to scientific fields and also also applies the other way around.

So scientists have to take into account the best philosophical arguments that have been made and other relevant to their to their research. I think Daniel Dennett once said that there's no such thing as as philosophy, free science, that there's only science that has taken on board its philosophical baggage, so to speak, so to speak, without examination. So some scientist pretense or they they or they believe that they can do without philosophy, but they cannot. And some philosophers maybe think that they can do pure philosophy and they don't have to.

They there even it's part of their professional pride that they just that they're just not interested in the empirical issues. I think that is their philosophy. So I agree.

Actually, we do. Yeah, we do agree on that one. And there is a joke actually at the Akunin graduate centers. You know what I teach, which is if you want to put an end to a discussion after a departmental seminar, just say something along the lines of, well, but that's an empirical question and that stops everybody.

So as you mentioned, the distinction between science and pseudo science at least has serious consequences for, you know what? We should be spending our time on, what we should be taking seriously, paying attention to acting on the basis of. So I want to return to that question. And I'd ask you earlier about to talk about controversies about the issue of demarcating science from pseudoscience, in particular between the contributors of your book. Are there any that particularly stand out to you?

Well, for example, one thing that is explicitly discussed in our book is the question whether or not science can can can has any bearing on supernatural claims. So this there's some people, for example, they say that that that part of the solution to the demarkation problem is that science is restricted to the natural domain. Anything that falls outside of the natural domain can never be science to that. That's part of the solution to the demarkation problem. Other people, to other people who have contributed to the book, they would argue that there's nothing wrong with supernatural claims per say.

It's just that all the ones that have been put forward now haven't been substantiated. And there's not really I mean, there isn't any good prospect that they will be substantiated in the future. So that is one thing. Mean we can go. I mean, we can go go on about this. I can give you another example or it depends on what I mean.

What is interesting for the listeners, I'd be interested to hear if Massimo and you disagree about that.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

Masimo, where do you fall between those two positions, as Martin outlined about the supernatural?

Yeah, and whether it's a problem with the supernatural is, you know, just that so far, no claims have been or no theories have been confirmed or whether it's just sort of inherently, you know, meaningless or nonsensical.

Well, first of all, the way I look at at what science can say about the supernatural is the way I look at most of these demarkation problems, which is there isn't going to be a sharp line dividing things or saying, OK, here is exactly where science can get in and beyond. That is exactly what it cannot get. It's going to be a continuum. It's going to be, you know, whatever. We draw a line. There's going to be a line in the sand, what I'm interested in is more, you know, what kind of claims we can make and what is the what philosophers call the epistemic warrant of that of those claims.

That is what we base them on. So specifically about supernatural, for instance, it's pretty clear to me that certain specific claims made by let's call him supernatural lists, believers in the supernatural are obviously within the confines of science.

If a younger creationist says, you know, the Earth is 6000 years old, that it's false on scientific grounds, it's an empirical claim and it's false. End of story as far as I'm concerned. So that's definitely within the purview of science. However, if somebody says a God of unspecified characteristic characteristics created the universe and and that's it. That's all he said. Essentially ideas position.

Well, there I don't really think that there's anything at all that is empirically actionable and therefore there is anything at all that science can can say about it. And then there is a bunch of stuff in between and the stuff in between.

I think it's where the usually where demarcation problems become interesting.

So, for instance, what about a young Earth creationist who says, well, yes, I made a specific claim about the Earth being 6000 years old. And you think it's it's been debunked by by science. But in fact, this is a God testing our faith because, you know, you really created the universe from scratch six thousand years ago, but just made it look like, you know, it was billions of years old to test our faith.

And by the way, I'm not making this up. Some creationist actually do take that position.

It actually happens. It actually happens. Now, it seems to me that one that is an interesting move because that move is sort of acknowledges the appearance of an empirical contradiction between the claim of the supernatural and the way things are.

But it immediately explains, and I'm using the word explaining here in a very loose and general sense that contradiction by saying, yeah, but, you know, I have an explanation for this.

This is this is what happened. God thinks this way and that way, of course, you can you could ask the guy, how do you know that God thinks this way or that way? But that's a different question.

So what that does to me is it points out that the basic idea that supernatural positions, what Dawkins famously called the God hypothesis, are too amorphous.

They are too flexible. They are too sometimes even incoherent to really qualify as anything close to a scientific hypothesis.

So when I say that science cannot, you know, reject certain supernatural positions or doesn't have anything to say about supernatural positions, I don't mean to imply that that's the limit of science. I think that's because of the incoherence or or incredible degree of flexibility of the supernatural position.

Now, often one of the answers to sort of the rebuttals on the other side of this debate is, but what about claims that of the paranormal, for instance? Right. So our paranormal claim also supernatural. So does that mean does that imply that science there also cannot say anything? Or are they, as most skeptics would agree, within the purview of science? And that's why we call it we talk about scientific skepticism. And I said that the answer there is also well, it depends if let's say the let's talk about, I don't know, dowsing, which I've actually had have tested in the field, you know, several years ago, and particularly in a particular instance.

Well, if we're talking about the actual empirical claims of a dowser, you know, I can find water with much more accuracy than randomness just by holding up a stick of of of mostly wood.

Yeah, usually it's wood.

Then it's like, well, we can test that. And sure enough, we did test that. And no, it wasn't able to do that sort of stuff.

Now, if, however, the supernatural sorry, the paranormal claim, then then changes to well, the reason you cannot do that the test fails is because the supernatural, the paranormal power is inversely proportional to the presence of septics, which again, I'm not making up this.

People actually say that sort of stuff.

Now you're sort of going into something that begins to smell a lot like supernatural to me and not just paranormal. I mean, the basic idea of paranormal or let's say UFOs is that these are natural phenomena that that are simply unknown to science now.

But by natural phenomena, you mean phenomena know, by natural phenomena, I mean not miracles that are natural. That's right. But not breaking the laws of. I saw a UFO flying saucer that is actually a machine made by intelligent beings that that travels the universe and comes here, that's a natural phenomenon that is obviously within the confines of science. But if you think of UFOs as angels, as pretty natural beings that come in from a different mystical dimension.

Well, now we're talking about something completely different.

And what's the difference between something that's supernatural and something that is just beyond what we previously thought of as natural, but, you know, then gets like vaulted into our understanding of what's natural?

Well, that's a good question. And it's also a question that change the answers to which changes over time, clearly. Right. So we have instances from the history of science and even from the history of pseudoscience. I mean, there were people thinking that there were things like witches, for instance, clearly a supernatural thing. And then we figure out now actually these are people who are mentally distressed. I mean, for one reason or another, we brought it back into the natural.

So clearly there are examples like that, but certainly it is conceivable. I don't think there is any example or there will ever be an example, but it's certainly conceivable that there are actual supernatural phenomena there, meaning there is a God or gods who can act, will change or suspend the laws of nature.

And those are the ones that I think one can say very little about because they violate one of the fundamental assumptions of science, which is the continuity of nature. This I didn't invent this. This goes back to David Hume. So that's that's what I'm saying. I don't think there is any actual case of that sort, just like you didn't think there was an actual case of miracles. But it certainly is conceivable. And and therefore, it does make sense to say, well, if something like that actually did happen, what will we be able to say about it?

And my answer, I think, is not much.

Well, I think one of the interesting things about these discussions about demarcation isn't, is that if you ask the philosopher or scientist to to evaluate the specific case, for example, creationism, parapsychology, ufology, then they they will mostly agree where that specific instance belongs. So is it a case of science is the case of science, and that suggests that we're making use of the same criteria, but they're not explicit. So if then you go to the next step, well, the thing that the philosopher is interested in and you ask, well, what exactly in virtue of, what is something a pseudoscience and and why doesn't it deserve to be called the science?

Then you see that the that the diagnosis will will differ with respect to parapsychology, for example. I agree with Massimo. I mean, the thing that he said about the copouts that they often use when an experiment fails us. Oh, yeah. Well, but the strength of this force is inversely proportional to the presence of inquisitive, inquisitive observers. That is, there's something fishy about this. I mean, we all feel that, you know, this will not do.

But then as a philosopher, you have to you have to get clear about. Yeah, but where exactly does it go wrong? I mean, what exactly is the problem with this strategy? And for me, terms such as supernatural or the paranormal or so fuzzy and vague and elusive and I agree with me on that accounts so that I mean this what can we do with those? And there's no incoherence, but precisely because they're so incoherent, I don't think it's a good idea to refer to them as as part of a solution to the demarkation problem precisely because, I mean, they're so unstable that we shouldn't we shouldn't direct any any kind of, let's say, you know, philosophical argument on its on its shoulders.

So what I'm interested in is that like. Yeah, but let's let's delve a little deeper. And instead of focusing on these terms, supernatural, paranormal, what is the underlying problem with these movies? And I would say the more general problem is that ad hoc, their ad hoc, their ad hoc in the sense that the sole reason why people use them is because they want to they want to protect their theory against an apparent falsification. And it's a very convenient way to do so.

I agree, although it seems like it would be hard to to define when someone's being ad hoc and when they're not like that's a legitimate test.

Could be a legitimate thing. You can do that all.

I could just up the top of my head, I can come up with a definition that suits my purposes and it would be ad hoc on a meta level. But let's just just drop that for for a second.

So the idea is I agree that a. The. The phenomenon, let's say, or the moves in parapsychology or in creationism that raise our suspicions and say, hey, wait a minute, this is very what is happening here is very strange.

But if you think about this this issue in terms of the difference between natural and supernatural, I don't think that that clarifies a lot. I mean, for one thing, because even in a perfectly natural context, for example, in the conspiracy theory, you also have these so-called ad hoc groups. I prefer the term immunizing strategy because there are ways of immunizing, protecting against reputation. So let's let's take some sort of matrix like scenario where the whole world is, you know, it is some sort of computer simulation.

So we live in in a kind of global conspiracy.

Well, that's true. But that's that's what that is. Right. I was taking a realistic example just not to get into philosophical. So let's let's take the Matrix, because we all know that we live in The Matrix. Right. So exactly. Even in that context, if you if you I mean, it's a science fiction movie. So it's most people wouldn't call the Matrix hypothesis supernatural, but it doesn't really matter simply because intrinsically it's the same idea.

It's you have a theory that is completely impervious to any kind of reputation because you have to find out you have you have discovered some way of making it completely immune to any kind of empirical to any kind of reputation. So whether or not you want to call this supernatural doesn't really matter to me, especially in light of the fact that, well, what we consider natural and supernatural has changed over time. I can give you a ballpark definition, like a definition of supernatural that captures some of the stuff that we usually call supernatural.

I could say, for example, well, if something has has like like a mental intrinsically mental, so it cannot be reduced to due to inanimate matter. It's not it's not physics. If something is, it's outside of the universe, transcends the universe that we know that may be might want to call it supernatural and some people might agree on that. And I mean, it would be good definition, for example, to to think about traditional miracle stories in in religions.

But I don't think that a lot depends on that definition. So it's not something I think it's something that philosophers should stay clear of because it doesn't really help, because the dermis is so slippery. And, for example, with respect to parapsychology. Well, I think I think that I disagree on with most movies that my film set that for parapsychologist, the idea of sci psychic force is is is a natural hypothesis. They think that, you know, it's some sort of particle that we haven't discovered yet and that that for some reason we you know, that is not integrated in our current understanding of physics.

And I agree that some there is a strand in parapsychology that goes along these lines. You know, they think that finally physicists will will discover what is the underlying mechanism of Ossi of psychic force, and it will be integrated in the framework of physics. But there are other strands in psychology that go into a different direction and take it to be some sort of mystical for something spiritual, something almost supernatural. And then, of course, from both parapsychologist, it's not clear at all.

So they're just they make stuff up. They and they remain ambiguous about this because it allows them just to go on about their business and and to keep the very notion of psychic forces a slippery. Now, if we want to say that parapsychology is a pseudo science and I think Mossimo and I both agree on that, I mean, it is a pseudo science for the reason that mathematics and I say, well, it doesn't really matter. We don't have to decide first.

Is it supernatural, paranormal or not? Because the real issues, the things that really matter for philosophical purposes, what we call epistemic purposes, are things that really relate to knowledge, go deeper than those labels that we attach to them, such as supernatural and paranormal. So that's why I think that that in a way, the very term supernatural in the context of demarcation problem is a red herring because it doesn't really solve anything.

So this is getting into my confusion about the demarkation problem. There are some parapsychological studies like most famously or notoriously the Daraban study, which claimed to show evidence of precognition, statistically significant evidence of precognition and was published in a top psychology journal. And the critiques of that, there were many legitimate critiques of that study, but they were about the methodology and they were things like, well, you know, the hypotheses were sort of like cherry picked or like switched around on the fly during the experiments, the effect sizes declined as the sample size got larger, which is sort of a sign of data mining.

And these are all good reasons to to dismiss the study, not to mention that their attempts have repeated repeating the study failed.

That's true. That's true. But but the problem I'm having is that you could apply those same criticisms to many, many studies in psychology or other sciences, especially other, you know, softer sciences. It's often the case that that people data mining is often the case that people sort of, you know, change their hypothesis as they're getting data. It's often the case that studies don't replicate, but we don't call all of psychology a pseudo science. Right.

So it's just about the fact, the sort of topic that Taliban was studying and the fact that we should have very small Pryors on impact.

In part, I think it is. I actually I'm curious to see to hear what Martin has to say about this, but my immediate response to them study to that kind of question about the Bems is twofold. First of all, you're right, there are a lot of studies, although I don't know what the actual number nor frequency, honestly, but there is a number of studies published in the psychological literature, social science, literature, and frankly, even in medical research, literature there that do have very low standards.

And they failed for the same reasons. And OK, so just bite the bullet.

Those are best just as bad studies and we should just reject them on at least on background.

But I think your question, the your second question is more interesting, which is why it seems like we're sort of sending up some people, including me, are setting up a sort of double standard when it comes to claims of the paranormal. And I think that's correct. It's not a double standard. It's a higher standard. And it really goes back to David Hume once once more. Or if you prefer to call Siggins Popularisation of Hume's famous dictum, which is, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You know, if you're if you're doing a run of the mill boring average study in, you know, ecology, psychology, social science, whatever, and you come up with conclusions that are just as boring and predictable and very much inconsequential. You know, frankly, I don't even care if if the study isn't done particularly well, it's not going to make much of a difference. But if you're claiming the discovery of a major, entirely new natural phenomenon that could potentially overturn everything we know about biology, physics and chemistry, I'm sorry, I'm going to raise the standards.

And so I think that's fair.

Oh, it seems clearly fair. And that seems like. Clearly, it's bad science if the evidence you're giving is not, you know, anywhere near as strong as it should be to overcome very low priors on that, you know, the phenomenon you're claiming or hypothesizing is the case. But does that make it bad science or why does that make it pseudoscience?

I think Martha has simply feel I think there's an interesting take on this.

I hope so. I don't know, let's say. But I think what makes it pseudoscience is not so much the fact that it's sloppy research, because, as you say, there's probably a lot of sloppy research in psychology. The fact that it's pseudo science is that people like Darold, them and other psychologists have touted this research and other experiments as if it was conclusive demonstration of psychic phenomena. So if you want to talk about a pseudoscience that you need to have a particular doctrine, it's a doctrine.

It's a theory that pretends to be science, but it isn't. Why do we know that it isn't? Because in spite of all the attempts to do to find solid evidence for that theory, all those attempts have failed. So if parapsychology was a new research program, as it was, for example, in the beginning of the century, then I think we should we should at least I think that that's also what happened. We should give it more credence because it was still an open question whether or not there was something like psychic phenomena.

But we're not in the end in the early days of BARASAT psychological research anymore. What we see is that we see a recurring pattern. I mean, there's every every once in a while after every you know, not every decade, let's say every year, there is an experiment that allegedly finally demonstrates psychic phenomena. And then you see, if you get a closer look at the methodology, if you try to replicate the experiments, all those attempts have failed.

So the results that psychologists have been have come up with have not withstood scrutiny. If you then take yet another of these studies, such as the one that Darryl had has conducted, which is really particularly outrageous even to psychological studies, because it is involved backwards causation, which is something that's so weird. I mean, it's not just psychic phenomena, things that are travelling back in time. This is such a weird claim.

And if you say that that gives you a final or demonstration or that it proves that that psychic phenomena do exist, then I think that you're being, what, basically stubborn? Because after all those failed attempts, it's really, really premature to to to consider this at as conclusive proof of of parapsychology.

So you're right that there is a lot of sloppy research in psychology. But if you want to if if you're dealing with a pseudoscience, then you need, I think, a more or less well defined doctrine that people maintain and that the advocates maintain and and they claim it to be scientific. So they think, you know, we really have a lot of evidence on our side. And this is what psychologists believe. They say it's not just Daraban. I mean, they if you if you discuss these issues with them, then they're going to come up with a huge list of, you know, so-called demonstrations of the paranormal.

So they pretend that it's science, but it isn't because all those studies for various reasons, have been debunked or have been invalidated. If you continue to pretend that you have a have a solid case, then I think you a pseudo scientist, because the word pseudo scientist means false, pretending some something that that is claimed to be scientific but is not really scientific by by any reasonable standard. And there's I think that that's what makes it so bizarre. Yeah.

I think that what Martin is getting at is actually one of the things that that emerged from the book, you know, the philosophers of the science very clearly, and which was kind of interesting to see, because when I asked that when we asked when the two of us asked several contributors to send us their chapters and we agreed on general topics and all that, you never know what people are actually going to write. And, you know, we sent obviously the chapters for peer review and all that.

And but what was interesting to see was that in several areas there was quite a bit of convergence about the thinking of different people for a specific problem in one of these areas of convergence was basically what Martin was getting at, which is that contrary to the classical way of looking at demarcation problem, the demarcation problem has always been sort of considered implicitly, at least as a static issue.

Something is either science or student science, and it's not going to change, many of our country contributors have actually suggested this idea that Martin was getting it, which is actually no, this this is that demarcation area. And it's not really a line of demarcation sort of border actually changes over time. And we have very interesting examples even within the recent history of science. The most obvious one in my mind is cold fusion. You know, cold fusion started out as pretty much science, surprising science, you know, novel science, if it had turned out to be true.

But science nonetheless. This was done by legitimate scientists that a legitimate university was published in a legitimate peer review journal and there were legitimate attempts at replicating the phenomenon. So it started out as science, but, of course, quickly became clear that the phenomenon cannot be repeated.

There were probably there were issues with with the basic theory of of it and clearly with the empirical empirical evidence. And so very quickly within, I think a matter of months or a year in the scientific community, the relevant scientific community that is the community of physicists and chemists have pretty much agreed that, no, there is no such thing as cold fusion. It's just not going to work.

But that hasn't stopped some of these, you know, vocal minority of people from from insisting up to up to this point that cold fusion is real. They now I have started having their own conferences, their own Juno, where they publish their so-called results and they insist, you know, that and they have begun acquiring traits typical of pseudoscience. That is, they think that there is a conspiracy, among them the standard academic environment to suppress the truth and blah, blah, blah and all that stuff.

So they moved very quickly. This is a real time example that has happened over the last few years. They moved very quickly from science to pseudoscience, precisely along the lines that Martin was discussing before. So it is a temporal issue here that that it's important to keep in mind. I completely agree to something. I mean, it's and it goes the other way around, of course, I mean, something that is now considered pseudo science can in principle develop into science later on.

I mean, if if suppose that we that the attempts to replicate Ben's research had really been borne out, then it would have attracted even more attention by biology research. And at some point, I think there's no reason why we like why the gates should remain closed forever and ever. I mean, it's I mean, I wouldn't bet any money on it because not precisely for the reason I mentioned, because there have been so many failed attempts that it's it's it's really very unlikely that that that suddenly we going to begin to realize that we have overlooked some evidence that has staring at us for decades.

And we just didn't notice. I mean, it's not because of lack of a timestep that people haven't found evidence for the psychic phenomenon, but that's just the contingence matter. I mean, in principle, I think that we could we could have scientific evidence for for psychic psychic force. And as Mossimo said, something a theory like phrenology at some point was taught at major European universities and at least was a promising research program. But it you know, after a while, they encountered so many empirical and conceptual problems that to most reasonable people, it was it was that.

And if if people had abandoned it's done, then that would be it. That would just have been a failed hypothesis. It only degenerates into a pseudoscience when after after a while after, it is clear to most reasonable people that the research company was closed, that people continue to pursue it, not only pursue it, but they and they're going to insist that they actually have found good scientific evidence. And then mostly it's the next step is indeed, as Massimo said, to to invoke some sort of conspiracy by the scientific establishment to explain why, you know, that theory hasn't hasn't been accepted yet.

That's the point where it's devolved into into pseudo science. But as you say, to decide on both sides and pseudo science or historical notions, they are not written in stone for for all eternity.

Jonathan Martin, we're just about out of time. But before we wrap up, I wanted to make sure to ask you about. So I'm a big fan of what many of our listeners might know of as the so-called hoax in which Alan Sokal submitted a sham paper to a postmodernists journal that sort of sounded vaguely profound and sophisticated and used lots of physics and math jargon in completely meaningless ways. And the paper was accepted and it was sort of a notorious exposé of the, you know, low epistemological standards of post-modernist disciplines.

And as it turns out, as I have learned, you have perpetrated your own so-called style hoax on a theology journal. You want to tell us a little bit about your paper titled The Paradoxes of Darwinian Disorder towards an Ontological Reaffirmation of Order and Transcendence.

Write poetry, Martin.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. What my humble attempt at a hoax and took to my own surprise when it was immediately accepted up to a theology conference, which was a 100 percent success rate because those were the only conferences that I submitted. So, yes, it I mean, for me, it was an exercise in in grammatically correct, you know, pseudo profundities and, you know, word salad as long as you want to, as long as they're grammatically correct.

They were. Oh, yes, I hope so. My English is not perfect, but it has not been a proof read by a native speaker that it would not work basically. But the way I wrote it actually was to start. I wrote it backwards because I wanted to make sure that there were no meaningful connections between the census. So as soon as it starts to make sense, you know, I drop a sentence or I start from scratch again because literally every single sentence is just completely, completely meaningless.

But if you read it superficially, it suggests all kinds of, you know, meaningful connections and reverberations. But it's sort of you start to think of that like skimming through a paragraph or two now.

And I can like. Feel the sort of, yeah, meaning shimmering just on the edge of my comprehension. Right. That's interesting. That's the way our brains work. Exactly. You read it and you connect them to the facts. Yeah. And you see the dialectic and this supposed to that and then but not in as much as this. And but it's it's completely it's completely meaningless. So this is actually an interesting example, because for me, it's an example of what I would call pseudo philosophy.

And one of the this goes back to the issue that we discussed in the beginning of this podcast.

I think that the distinction between philosophy and science as such is not that important. And one of the reasons why it's why I think so is that in a way, there's a similar distinction within philosophy between, well, let's say, good philosophy on the one hand and pseudo philosophy on the one hand and and and which is very similar to the more traditional demarcation problem between science on the one hand and pseudo science on the other hand. So there are a lot of commonalities between strategies that are used by pseudo scientists, ambiguity, for example, equivocation, you know, the stuff that we discussed with regard to the supernatural.

And so, on the other hand, that philosophy, the reason why it's so, so difficult to do attacks so abstract that I wrote for this theology conference, is that precisely because it's so slippery, it doesn't make any specific claims. It's so vague that you don't know what to make of it.

And and which I mean, if you read astrology, for example, if you read astrology, reading your brain will will will try to find all kinds of underlying meaning. And that is what makes astrology psychologically appealing. And the way that these readings or these jobs are constructed is to exploit these ambiguities because it has been shown I mean, successful astrologers, astrology, astrologer knows, quote unquote, that it is a good way to convince a client just to put out that many ambiguous statements as you can, and you see that that something will stick and people will find their own meaning.

That's exactly that's not exactly the same way. But that's the thing that I try to do with is abstract. So just put out something that that is explicitly meaningless and you'll see that even then, people people will swallow it because they as you said, they will see hidden layers of deeper meaning shimmering through the text then. But they're not there. And well, for me, it was an interesting experiment because I thought it had I mean, it was too, too ridiculous to me to stand a chance at those conferences.

But to my own surprise, I didn't have any problem at all to try to get them accepted.

And Will, we'll link to this beautiful gem of a paper on on the podcast website so that our listeners can can enjoy that shimmering almost meaning the same way. I just have a word. We're just over time now for this part of the podcast, but hopefully you will have something almost as delightful to recommend to our listeners in the next segment, the rationally speaking PEX. Welcome back, everybody. Every episode we pick a suggestion from our listeners that has tickled our rational fancy.

This time we ask our guest, Martha Madrie, for a suggestion Martin.

Well, one of the things that I've read lately with Daniel Dennett's book, Intuition Pumps, I forgot the subtitle, actually, but you'll find that it's in a way, it's it's an overview of his work and the people who are deeply familiar with Dennis work that will will maybe not find much, much that is novel in his book. But I think it's it's it's refreshing to me to read to read that when this kind of this kind of book, because he's a very interesting philosopher.

I think he's one of my favorites. And he's particularly he has become famous over the years for what he likes to call these intuition puns that they have been scattered through his to his works. And this is really a book that develops this idea of intuition plus and tries to apply it to a whole range of different problems. So what did an intuition bump? It is a way to to get clear or to to to make explicit intuitions that we have moral intuitions, intuition about knowledge, intuition about reality by means of thought experiments.

So then it compares to some sort of machine that you use to pump up your intuition. So you, you know, start out with a thought experiment, see what what you're intuitive answerers, and then you can try to modify it by turning on the, you know, on the knobs and and the levers and see whether or not your intuition changes and if you have a good intuition. But it really allows you to get clear about what your intuition was in the first place, what it's what it's underlying your intuition.

Because the thing about intuition is that they just pop into your head. You don't you don't really know what are coming from. So they're inchoate, they say. So it's a very wide ranging book. It's but it's highly accessible. It's broad, is very, very lucid. I think it's it's original because of all the interesting illustrations and thought experiments.

So for somebody who is both for people who are not familiar yet with their work, I think it's a great introduction. And for, you know, for professional philosophers, it's it's a great overview of his work. And and it may be, you know, also a stepping stone for further reading because it's full of references to to all the stuff that he that he wrote. So I think that it will be interesting for many listeners of this podcast who are interested in and in science, philosophy and reasoning.

I mean, Dennis is someone who is a staunch defender of science on the one hand. But on the other hand, he also thinks that is as much of a value in philosophy. You know, contrary to what some scientists have suggested, you know, sometimes tend to be pretty dismissive of philosophy. I think that it's a waste of time. I think Bennett is a prime example that you can you can be a good philosopher and be well versed in in science.

But at the same time and and as I said, I mean, in the first half of this podcast where exactly you want to draw the line is not there's not really that important. It's just that these are stimulating ideas. These are stimulating thought experiments and and illustrations to to solve important questions about freewill, morality, knowledge, about consciousness and all the things that Dennett has written about.

Yeah, I've heard excellent things about intuition pumps as well. So we'll we'll link to that also on the podcast website.

Martin, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. Yeah.

Thanks for being the president. Likewise.

And everyone can now download the philosophy of Pseudo-Science Cornelison on Amazon, and I encourage you to do so. I had no idea that it was released yet, so I have to it is everyone, including you, Martin. I'm sorry. We have to buy it. You probably do. All right.

Well, this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.