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Pseudoskepticism |
The term pseudoskepticism (or pseudoscepticism) denotes thinking that appears to be skeptical but is not. The term is most commonly encountered in the form popularised by Marcello Truzzi, where he defined pseudoskeptics as those who take "the negative rather than an agnostic position but still call themselves 'skeptics'".[1][2]
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While a Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University in 1987, Truzzi gave the following description of pseudoskeptics in the journal Zetetic Scholar which he founded:
In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.[3]
Truzzi attributed the following characteristics to pseudoskeptics:
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It is normal scientific practice to posit alternate explanations (or theories) for observed phenomenon, to experiment, and to adopt the theory that best predicts the behaviour. Scientific evidence is often indicative rather than overwhelming, and many theories are based not on any single piece of evidence, but on accumulated weight of evidence, or simply on accumulated lack of evidence to the contrary.
For example, if a test is performed that shows apparent evidence for ESP, most scientists will suspect a flaw in the test. Scientific practice does not require every scientist to fully vet every experiment performed by every other scientist. Rather, scientific reports are reviewed by a number of peers, and where an experiment has produced interesting results, other scientists will try to reproduce it. If their results match, the evidence is accepted. If not, the original result is agreed to be an anomaly and it does not affect the acceptance of the dominant theory.
However, it is common for protoscientists to apply the label pseudoskeptic to anyone who is not prepared to either investigate the test or accept its conclusion. This is a misunderstanding of scientific method. To actually state that ESP does not exist and therefore there must be a flaw in the test is pseudoskepticism; taking a position on the validity on the test requires accepting a burden of proof. Simply choosing to ignore the test is not pseudoskepticism, however frustrating it can be to those who welcome the apparent result of a test.
A Spring 2006 course at the University of Colorado, "Edges of Science", promised to examine "the evidence for paranormal phenomena, [and] reasons for skepticism", including a section which shows "how a healthy skepticism can see through unsupported assertions, and how pathological skepticism can work against honest scientific inquiry."
Pennsylvania State University Folklorist David J. Hufford[15] uses the term "radical skepticism" to describe the unexamined prejudices and preconceptions which he argues are embraced by many — perhaps most — academic scientists. After reading and analysing the works of many skeptics and debunkers, Hufford argues that one can readily find:
appeals to authority, post hoc fallacies, ad hominem arguments and a whole host of other informal errors. Nonetheless, because this inductive dimension of scholarship is often less implicitly presented for scrutiny, and because so much of the work of framing questions and establishing boundaries of scholarly discourse about 'the supernatural' were largely set anywhere from several generations ago … to a number of centuries ago ... the systematic bias of this tradition operates almost invisibly today.
Prior to Truzzi, the term "pseudo-skepticism" has occasionally been used in 19th and early 20th century philosophy.
On 31 August 1869, Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote in his diary:
My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never leaves me, even in my moments of religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maïa; and I look at her, as it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden — a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idyls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer.[16]
In 1908 Henry Louis Mencken wrote on Friedrich Nietzsche's criticism of philosopher David Strauss that:
Strauss had been a preacher but had renounced the cloth and set up shop as a critic of Christianity. He had labored with good intentions, no doubt, but the net result of all his smug agnosticism was that his disciplines were as self-satisfied, bigoted, and prejudiced in the garb of agnostics as they had been before Christians. Nietzsche's eye saw this and in the first of his little pamphlets "David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller" ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer"), he bore down on Strauss's bourgeoise pseudo-skepticism most savagely. This was 1873.[17]
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Frederick L. Will used the term "pseudo-skepticism" in 1942. Alasdair MacIntyre writes:
[Frederick] Will was no exception. He began as an analytical philosopher, distinguishing different uses of language with the aim of showing that certain traditional philosophical problems need no longer trouble us, once we have understood how to make the relevant linguistic distinctions. The enemies were two: the philosophical skeptic who poses these false problems and the philosopher who thinks that the skeptic needs to be answered. So in "Is there a Problem of Induction?" (Journal of Philosophy, 1942) it is two senses of "know" that are to be distinguished: "All the uneasiness, the pseudo-skepticism and the pseudo-problem of induction, would never appear if it were possible to keep clear that 'know' in the statement that we do not know statements about the future is employed in a very special sense, not at all its ordinary one.[18]
Notre Dame Professor of English, John E. Sitter used the term in 1977 in a discussion of Alexander Pope: "Pope's intent, I believe, is to chasten the reader's skepticism — the pseudo-skepticism of the overly confident 'you' ... "[19]
The term pseudoskepticism was popularised and characterised by Truzzi in 1987, in response to the skeptic groups who applied the label of "pseudoscientists" to fields which Truzzi thought might be better described as protoscience.[20]
Science writer C. Eugene Emery, Jr. compared the degrees of skepticism of CD-ROM-based encyclopedias of articles on pseudoscientific subjects. He called such articles "pseudoskeptical" if only suggested or stated that the subject was "controversial, but the author may not have a clue as to why".[21]
Truzzi held that anything that has not been proved to be impossible must be treated as possible. On the strength of this argument, he personally accepted as plausible several phenomena that have been rejected by scientists, such as the existence of UFOscitation needed and communicating with the dead. He was a founding member[22] of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE),[23] an organization that has been criticized by science journalist Michael Lemonick as "fringe" but also as showing a "surprising attitude of skepticism".[24]
One SSE member, L. David Leiter, thinks that organized skepticism might be called pseudo-skepticism or even pathological skepticism. According to Leiter, the label "Skeptic" "labels someone whose mental processes are continually and rigidly out of balance, in the direction of disbelief." He argues that the members of PhACT, "[i]nstead of becoming scientifically minded, they become adherents of scientism, the belief system in which science and only science has all the answers to everything" and that even many pseudoskeptics are unwilling to spend the time to "read significantly into the literature on the subjects about which they are most skeptical"[25]
Groups sometimes accuse each other of pseudoskepticism. Commenting on the labels "dogmatic" and "pathological" that the "Association for Skeptical Investigation"[26] puts on critics of paranormal investigations, Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary[27] argues that that association "is a group of pseudo-skeptical paranormal investigators and supporters who do not appreciate criticism of paranormal studies by truly genuine skeptics and critical thinkers. The only skepticism this group promotes is skepticism of critics and [their] criticisms of paranormal studies."[28]
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