Pseudo-Xology

by Massimo Pigliucci

A few days ago I walked from my apartment down to the Guggenheim museum, to see an exhibit by artist-philosopher Lee Ufan. Frankly, I wasn’t too impressed with the art (a bit too minimalist for my taste), but even less so by the “philosophy.” I wish I had written down some of the irritating quotes that accompanied the exhibit, but here is a taste of what I read: “If a bell is struck, the sound reverberates into the distance. Similarly, if a point filled with mental energy is painted on a canvas, it sends vibrations into the surrounding unpainted space.” I have no idea what, if anything, this means. Charitably, one can think of it as a (very) loose metaphor, but for what? There is no such thing as “mental energy,” it doesn’t “send vibrations” into unpainted space, and most certainly whatever happens to canvas and paint has nothing to do with striking a bell.

Then I went home and resumed editing a forthcoming book on the philosophy of pseudoscience, a work that I’m putting together with Maarten Boudry and which will be published by Chicago Press next year. The idea is to revisit the (in)famous “demarcation problem,” the term used by Karl Popper for the endeavor of figuring out what the differences are between science and non-science, and particularly between science and pseudoscience. (At last count we have 24 contributors to the book, including luminaries such as James Ladyman and Michael Ruse.)

That got me thinking about the parallels (and differences) between pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy. The paragon of pseudophilosophy, of course, is represented by some strands of postmodernism, and as Alan Sokal (he of the Sokal hoax) famously put it, “When one analyzes [postmodern] writings [on science], one often finds radical-sounding assertions whose meaning is ambiguous and that can be given two alternative readings: one as interesting, radical, and grossly false; the other as boring and trivially true.” (If you have time on your hands and want to have some pseudophilosophical fun, make sure you check the random postmodern generator.)

Indeed, when a postmodernist insists that, for instance, science is a social construction, he can be taken as simply stating the truism that science is a social activity engaged in by human beings (and affected, to a point, by human social foibles); or he can be understood as making the much stronger claim that scientific truth is made up by the people who play the game of science, irrespective of any objective reality. If you are willing to buy into the latter meaning, I suggest you take Sokal’s challenge: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

Postmodernist pseudophilosophy is embarrassing to philosophers because philosophy — at its best — “is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” as Wittgenstein (himself not exactly a shining example of a clear language user) aptly put it.

Of course, pseudoscience can be embarrassing to scientists as well. Just think of the sway that eugenics had for decades at the beginning of the 20th century; or consider the Pitldown man hoax (just as bad for science as the Sokal one was bad for philosophy); or cold fusion; or the phlogiston; or phrenology; or the Lysenko affair, to mention but a few. (A delightful, if a bit old, compendium of scientific blunders can be found here.)

Still, it seems obvious that there is a difference between pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy: it is far easier to find credentialed academics who buy into the latter than into the former. Of course, here too one needs to be careful, as there are plenty of counterexamples of scientists who believe voodoo science: biologists who buy into Intelligent Design; physicists who wax poetic about the anthropic principle and the fine tuning of the universe; PhD holders who deny global warming or that HIV causes AIDS, and even that fossil fuels are of organic origins. And of course let’s not forget that if you count psychology among the sciences, there are still plenty of Freudians walking about free and well paid. Nonetheless, on purely statistical bases it is more likely to walk the halls of the academy and encounter a pseudophilosopher than a pseudoscientist. Why?

I suspect one major reason for it is that doing philosophy is less constrained than doing science. What I mean is that philosophy is about arguing on the basis of logic and coherence, whereas in science those conditions are necessary but not sufficient: the scientist also has to deal with the world as it actually is. (Granted, good philosophy is informed by empirical evidence too — witness Sokal’s invitation above — but a lot of it deals with how else things could be.) This, I hasten to say, doesn’t make science “better” than philosophy, as any such comparison is somewhat sophomoric, considering that the two disciplines work by (partially) distinct methods and are interested in (largely) distinct things.

My point can perhaps be made more clear by looking outside of the philosophy-science pair, to disciplines that are even more and even less constrained than these two. Take logic and math, for instance. You hardly hear of pseudomathematicians, and the reason for that is that one just can’t bluff at math, one is discovered immediately. While a good rhetorician can obfuscate things in philosophy enough to be taken seriously for decades (e.g., Heidegger), and someone can fake data in science and get away with it for years (e.g., the recent Hauser debacle), I doubt that someone faking the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem could have lasted more than a few minutes in the halls of a mathematical meeting.

Near the opposite end of the constraint spectrum is art criticism. Take, for instance, literary criticism (which, interestingly, was the original house of postmodernism!). It is constrained by the necessity to make an argument of some sort (for instance, about a new interpretation of a Shakespearean play), and by some kind of “data” (say, the text of Hamlet), but those constraints are significantly weaker than in philosophy because the field works by different standards of argumentation, where formal logic, for instance, doesn’t really play a role, and the writing is more akin to an essay (again, the similarity with postmodern — but not analytic — philosophy is uncanny).

Once more, none of the above should be construed as a ranking of disciplines from worst (literary criticism) to best (math and logic). Each endeavor has its own methods and goals, and each works well when it is done well — and the only people really qualified to assess what “well” means are those (academic or not) working seriously within each field. But the nature of these four beasts (and of course the list could be made longer) is such that some fields are more prone to “pseudo-Xology” than others. It is up to said practitioners to clean up their own intellectual playing field, both for the sake of their own efforts and if they wish to be taken seriously by the outside world.