(3089/898) Science and pseudoscience

1558) Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it is consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency.

Michael Faraday
laboratory diary,
entry #10,040 (3/19/1849)
published in Faraday's Diary
T. Martin, ed. (1932-1936)
quoted by Philip Morrison in
"Wonders: On Neutrino Astronomy" in
Scientific American (11/1995)

1559) Heuristic methods are the rules of thumb or procedures used to search for solutions or answers. If we believe that these "rules for knowing" allow one to establish truth, how might we conceptualize a measurement of these rules? We propose that the members of one subculture within American society might be termed cultural traditionalists. Specifically, we suggest that until recently most U.S. citizens (and probably most other humans) believes a thing to be true because of faith, tradition, revelation or authority. Such an attitude might be summed up in bumper sticker declarations such as "God said it, I believe it, that settles it."

A second subculture, a thread in Western society since the late 1700s at least, derives from some of the epistemological principles of Enlightenment. Specifically, truth is to be sought by the putting forth of hypotheses that are evaluated and accepted or rejected by empirical testing. Those who use an approach or have a worldview that stresses empiricism and scientific inquiry we term cultural modernists.

We suggest a third, and emerging, subculture (or better, collection of subcultures) within U.S. society opposes a return to traditionalism as defined in the first subculture, and views the modernism in the second subculture as having led to rampant militarism, consumerism, pollution, and global warming. We will term the members of the third subculture post modernists. As yet very loosely organized and multi-nucleated, this subculture spans orientations as diverse as New Age followers, holistic health practitioners, and even the far left of academe (including certain subsets of rhetoreticians, philosophers, and feminists.) These are strange bedfellows indeed. They can only be lumped together as an entity in the postmodernists subculture because of their common rejection of the validity of cultural traditionalism and cultural modernism.

John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold
"Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs:
Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)

1560) [C]ontrary to the intuition of many (including many scientists), pseudoscientific beliefs are not restricted to the domain of the ignorant, stupid, or disordered.

John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold
"Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs:
Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)

1561) At least two major categories of pseudoscientific belief exist, each being almost casually separate phenomena. The first of these [... is] identified with a religious belief in creationism [... T]he second [... is] a set of beliefs we have termed fantastic science [... which is] highly correlated with the rejection of traditional religion and science as valid methods for establishing the truth.

John H Taylor, Raymond A. Eve, and Francis B. Harrold
"Why Creationists Don't Go to Psychic Fairs:
Differential Sources of Pseudoscientific Beliefs" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec 1995)