Month: March 2013

Colin Berry somewhat clarifies his now work-in-progress letter to the Royal Society when he writes:

Thus my resort to the RS – to suggest new technology for addressing the blood-first claim, hopefully that would not require snipping bits off the Shroud, i.e. could be applied in situ, custodians permitting. If they don’t permit, then folk can be left to draw their own conclusions (and the RS asked to state which existing evidence it considers science, which pseudo-science). . . .

There is in this an implied threat. But that makes me wonder. What if, instead, the custodians of the shroud invited the Royal Society to design and conduct tests to see if the bloodstains were formed before the image and that prestigious organization declined to do so. Should folks be left to draw there own conclusions? Colin’s suggestion sounds more like bluffing in poker than doing science. In fact, I wonder, is this a form of pseudoscience? Maybe.

Why the Royal Society? Why not the National Academy of Science in Washington? Why not the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences? And why is it any of Royal Society’s business to consider “which existing evidence it considers science, which pseudo-science”?

The title of Colin’s blog includes this phrase: “Separating the science from the pseudo-science…” (ellipses his). Which is fine if that is what is happening in his blog. Is it?

And in this blog, many of us, including me, have labeled the work of others pseudoscience. That’s fine if it’s true. But is it?

The problem in answering all of these questions lies in the definition of pseudoscience. I imagine that if you ask Sir Paul Nurse (PRS), a prominent geneticist and the President of the Royal Society and Sir John Polkinghorne (FRS), a theoretical physicist, Anglican priest and also a Fellow of the Royal Society to define pseudoscience, you might get two very different definitions. If you ask Francis Collins, a convert from Atheism to Christianity who, like Nurse, is a prominent geneticist who directed the Human Genome Project and now heads up NIH in Bethesda and is a Fellow of Pontifical Academy of Sciences you might get a third answer. And if you ask Colin Berry you might get a fourth answer. And if you ask John Jackson . . . 

Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine, and a vocal skeptic of the shroud’s possible authenticity, explains the problem. In an article in Scientific American, he writes:

Climate deniers are accused of practicing pseudoscience, as are intelligent design creationists, astrologers, UFOlogists, parapsychologists, practitioners of alternative medicine, and often anyone who strays far from the scientific mainstream. The boundary problem between science and pseudoscience, in fact, is notoriously fraught with definitional disagreements because the categories are too broad and fuzzy on the edges, and the term “pseudoscience” is subject to adjectival abuse against any claim one happens to dislike for any reason. In his 2010 book Nonsense on Stilts (University of Chicago Press), philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci concedes that there is “no litmus test,” because “the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than Popper (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe.”

It was Karl Popper who first identified what he called “the demarcation problem” of finding a criterion to distinguish between empirical science, such as the successful 1919 test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and pseudoscience, such as Freud’s theories, whose adherents sought only confirming evidence while ignoring disconfirming cases. Einstein’s theory might have been falsified had solar-eclipse data not shown the requisite deflection of starlight bent by the sun’s gravitational field. Freud’s theories, however, could never be disproved, because there was no testable hypothesis open to refutability. Thus, Popper famously declared “falsifiability” as the ultimate criterion of demarcation.

The problem is that many sciences are nonfalsifiable, such as string theory, the neuroscience surrounding consciousness, grand economic models and the extraterrestrial hypothesis. On the last, short of searching every planet around every star in every galaxy in the cosmos, can we ever say with certainty that E.T.s do not exist?

And why not perfectly natural phenomena perhaps kicked off or energized by a miracle? Can we ever say with certainty that miracles do not exist?

Princeton University historian of science Michael D. Gordin adds in his forthcoming book The Pseudoscience Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2012), “No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist. There is no person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself, ‘I’ll just head into my pseudolaboratory and perform some pseudoexperiments to try to confirm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts.’” As Gordin documents with detailed examples, “individual scientists (as distinct from the monolithic ‘scientific community’) designate a doctrine a ‘pseudoscience’ only when they perceive themselves to be threatened—not necessarily by the new ideas themselves, but by what those ideas represent about the authority of science, science’s access to resources, or some other broader social trend. . . .

Like religion? Like the resurrection of Christ?

The illustration by Alex Robbins appears in Scientific American.