history of science

Look here: A physicist who seems to understand the demarcation problem proceeds to demarcate “pseudoscience” on his own authority. Alex Wellerstein reviewed a book on pseudoscience that explicitly warns about the challenge of differentiating between science and pseudoscience. Wellerstein, of the Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics in Maryland, wrote in the Oct. 12 issue of Science this summary of what Michael D. Gordin said about the “demarcation problem” in his new book, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Velikovsky’s cosmic catastrophism is, for Gordin, also a case study on the famously intractable demarcation problem, the difficulty of coming up with firm criteria for what separates science from nonscience, or Read More ›