Pseudoscience

The prefix pseudo is taken directly from the ancient Greek, and it has been applied to a multitude of terms. While the labeling of various fields as pseudoscience is especially associated with the philosophers of science of the early twentieth century, the term predates them by eighty years or so. The members of the Vienna Circle and their collaborators, often called logical positivists, embarked on a campaign to rid philosophy, and culture in general, of metaphysical and pseudoscientific elements. The logical positivists focused on meaning, claiming that any word or sentence that did not ultimately connect to some possible sensory experience was meaningless. Thus Rudolph Carnap (1891–1970) would object to the use of pseudoconcepts and pseudosentences. Most famously, he attacked Martin Heidegger's obscurantism, which he felt hid the true social and political situation from the reader. In contrast to his attitude toward Heidegger, Carnap accepted Friedrich Nietzsche's works because of their literary, rather than pseudoscientific, form.

The verificationist theory of meaning was criticized within philosophy and was never found to be a successful way to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Carl Hempel's 1950 article summarizing the arguments surrounding the theory is usually taken to be its death knell. The project of ridding philosophy and culture in general of pseudoscientific elements continued, however, within the philosophy of science, but the focus shifted to what Karl Popper (1902–1994) called the demarcation problem—how to define science and pseudoscience so as to make a clear distinction between the two and show that all of the contemporary and historical cases of "good science" meet the standards of the definition. Although Popper claimed not to be very interested in the project of eliminating metaphysics and pseudoscience, he recognized that his project of characterizing science in general terms is equivalent to the project of demarcation. If science can be accurately characterized, it is easy to separate science and pseudoscience. Every mode of inquiry that fits the definition is science, while any mode of inquiry that makes claims about the nature of the world and the processes in it without fitting the definition is pseudoscience.