The standards for determining whether a body of knowledge, methodology, or practice is scientific can vary from field to field, but involve agreed principles including reproducibility and intersubjective verifiability. Such principles aim to ensure that relevant evidence can be reproduced and/or measured given the same conditions, which allows further investigation to determine whether a hypothesis or theory related to given phenomena is both valid and reliable for use by others, including other scientists and researchers. It is expected that the scientific method will be applied throughout, and that bias will be controlled or eliminated, by double-blind studies, or statistically through fair sampling procedures. All gathered data, including experimental/environmental conditions, are expected to be documented for scrutiny and made available for peer review, thereby allowing further experiments or studies to be conducted to confirm or falsify results, as well as to determine other important factors such as statistical significance, confidence intervals, and margins of error. Fulfillment of these requirements allows others a reasonable opportunity to assess whether to rely upon the reported results in their own scientific work or in a particular field of applied science, technology, therapy, or other form of practice.

In the mid-20th Century Karl Popper suggested the criterion of falsifiability to distinguish science from non-science. Statements such as “God created the universe” may be true or false, but they are not falsifiable, so they are not scientific; they lie outside the scope of science. Popper subdivided non-science into philosophical, mathematical, mythological, religious and/or metaphysical formulations on the one hand, and pseudoscientific formulations on the other—though without providing clear criteria for the differences. He gave astrology and psychoanalysis as examples of pseudoscience, and Einstein’s theory of relativity as an example of science. More recently, Paul Thagard (1978) proposed that pseudoscience is primarily distinguishable from science when it is less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and the selective and or lack of attempts by proponents to solve problems with the theory. Mario Bunge (1984) has suggested the categories of “belief fields” and “research fields” to help distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend has argued, from a sociology of knowledge perspective, that a distinction between science and non-science is neither possible nor desirable. Among the issues which can make the distinction difficult are that both the theories and methodologies of science evolve at differing rates in response to new data. In addition, the specific standards applicable to one field of science may not be those employed in other fields. Thagard (1978) also writes from a sociological perspective and states that “elucidation of how science differs from pseudoscience is the philosophical side of an attempt to overcome public neglect of genuine science.”

Both the skeptics and the brights movement, most prominently represented by Richard Dawkins, Mario Bunge, Carl Sagan and James Randi, consider all forms of pseudoscience to be harmful, whether or not they result in immediate harm to their adherents. These critics generally consider that the practice of pseudoscience may occur for a number of reasons, ranging from simple naïveté about the nature of science and the scientific method, to deliberate deception for financial or political gain. At the extreme, issues of personal health and safety may be very directly involved, for example in the case of physical or mental therapy or treatment, or in assessing safety risks. In such instances the potential for direct harm to patients, clients, the general public, or the environment may be an issue in assessing pseudoscience. (See also Junk science.)

The concept of pseudoscience as antagonistic to bona fide science appears to have emerged in the mid-19th century. Among the first recorded uses of the word “pseudo-science” was in 1844 in the Northern Journal of Medicine, I 387: “That opposite kind of innovation which pronounces what has been recognized as a branch of science, to have been a pseudo-science, composed merely of so-called facts, connected together by misapprehensions under the disguise of principles”.

(Source: Wikipedia)

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