In
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, ...
and
epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowle ...
, the demarcation problem is the question of how to distinguish between
science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
and
non-science. It also examines the boundaries between science,
pseudoscience and other products of human activity, like
art and
literature
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...
and
belief
A belief is a subjective Attitude (psychology), attitude that something is truth, true or a State of affairs (philosophy), state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some Life stance, stance, take, or opinion ...
s.
[. Alternative source]
/ref> The debate continues after more than two millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and Scientist, scientists in various fields. The debate has consequences for what can be termed "scientific" in topics such as education
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...
and public policy
Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a Group decision-making, decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to Problem solving, solve or address relevant and problematic social issues, guided by a conceptio ...
.
The ancients
An early attempt at demarcation can be seen in the efforts of Greek natural philosophers and medical practitioners to distinguish their methods and their accounts of nature from the mythological or mystical accounts of their predecessors and contemporaries.
G. E. R. Lloyd noted that there was a sense in which the groups engaged in various forms of inquiry into nature attempt to "legitimate their own positions", laying "claim to a new kind of wisdom ... that purported to yield superior enlightenment, even superior practical effectiveness". Medical writers of the Hippocratic tradition maintained that their discussions were based on demonstration of logical necessity, a theme developed by Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
in his '' Posterior Analytics''. One element of this polemic for science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
was an insistence on a clear and unequivocal presentation of arguments, rejecting the imagery, analogy, and myth of the old wisdom. Some of their claimed naturalistic explanations of phenomena have been found to be quite fanciful, with little reliance on actual observations.
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...
's '' De Divinatione'' implicitly used five criteria of scientific demarcation that are also used by modern philosophers of science.
Logical positivism
Logical positivism, formulated during the 1920s, is the idea that only statements about matters of fact or logical relations between concepts are meaningful. All other statements lack sense and are labelled "metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of ...
" (see the verifiability theory of meaning also known as verificationism).
According to A. J. Ayer, metaphysicians make statements which claim to have "knowledge of a reality which ranscendsthe phenomenal world". Ayer, a member of the Vienna Circle and a noted English logical-positivist, argued that making any statements about the world beyond one's immediate sense-perception is impossible. This is because even metaphysicians' first premises will necessarily begin with observations made through sense-perception.
Ayer implied that the demarcation occurs when statements become "factually significant". To be "factually significant", a statement must be verifiable. In order to be verifiable, the statement must be verifiable in the observable world, or facts that can be induced from "derived experience". This is referred to as the "verifiability" criterion.
This distinction between science, which in the opinion of the Vienna Circle possessed empirically verifiable statements, and what they pejoratively termed "metaphysics", which lacked such statements, can be considered as representing another aspect of the demarcation problem. Logical positivism is often discussed in the context of the demarcation between science and non-science or pseudoscience. However, "The verificationist proposals had the aim of solving a distinctly different demarcation problem, namely that between science and metaphysics."
Falsifiability
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...
considered demarcation as a major problem of the philosophy of science. Popper articulates the problem of demarcation as:
Falsifiability
Falsifiability (or refutability) is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the Philosophy of science, philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (1934). ...
is the demarcation criterion proposed by Popper as opposed to verificationism: "statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations."
Against verifiability
Popper rejected solutions to the problem of demarcation that are grounded in inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning refers to a variety of method of reasoning, methods of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is supported not with deductive certainty, but with some degree of probability. Unlike Deductive reasoning, ''deductive'' ...
, and so rejected logical-positivist responses to the problem of demarcation. He argued that logical-positivists want to create a demarcation between the metaphysical and the empirical because they believe that empirical claims are meaningful and metaphysical ones are not. Unlike the Vienna Circle, Popper stated that his proposal was not a criterion of "meaningfulness".
Popper argued that the Humean induction problem shows that there is no way to make meaningful universal statements on the basis of any number of empirical observations. Therefore, empirical statements are no more "verifiable" than metaphysical statements.
This creates a problem for the demarcation the positivists wanted to define between the empirical and the metaphysical. By their very own "verifiability criterion", Popper argued, the empirical is subsumed into the metaphysical, and the demarcation between the two becomes non-existent.
The solution of falsifiability
In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and sufficient criterion for demarcation. He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences", so that a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time. This has been summarized as a statement being falsifiable "if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe".
Kuhnian postpositivism
Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher of science, is often associated with what has been termed postpositivism or postempiricism. In his 1962 book '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', Kuhn divided the process of doing science into two different endeavors, which he termed normal science and extraordinary science (sometimes known as "revolutionary science"), the latter of which introduces a new "paradigm
In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Ancient ...
" that solves new problems while continuing to provide solutions to the problems solved by the preceding paradigm.
Popper criticized Kuhn's demarcation criterion, saying that astrologers are engaged in puzzle solving, and that therefore Kuhn's criterion recognized astrology as a science. He stated that Kuhn's criterion results in a "major disaster ... hereplacement of a rational criterion of science by a sociological one".
Feyerabend and Lakatos
Kuhn's work largely called into question Popper's demarcation, and emphasized the human, subjective quality of scientific change. Paul Feyerabend was concerned that the very question of demarcation was insidious: science itself had no need of a demarcation criterion, but instead some philosophers were seeking to justify a special position of authority from which science could dominate public discourse. Feyerabend argued that science is not in fact special in terms of either its logic or method, and no claim to special authority made by scientists can be sustained. He argued that, within the history of scientific practice, no rule or method can be found that has not been violated or circumvented at some point in order to advance scientific knowledge. Both Imre Lakatos and Feyerabend suggest that science is not an autonomous form of reasoning, but is inseparable from the larger body of human thought and inquiry.
Thagard
Paul R. Thagard proposed another set of principles to try to overcome these difficulties, and argued that it is important for society to find a way of doing so. According to Thagard's method, a theory is not scientific if it satisfies two conditions:
# The theory has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and has many unsolved problems; and...
# The community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.
Thagard specified that sometimes theories will spend some time as merely "unpromising" before they truly deserve the title of pseudoscience. He cited astrology as an example: it was stagnant compared to advances in physics during the 17th century, and only later became "pseudoscience" in the advent of alternative explanations provided by psychology during the 19th century.
Thagard also stated that his criteria should not be interpreted so narrowly as to allow willful ignorance of alternative explanations, or so broadly as to discount our modern science compared to science of the future. His definition is a practical one, which generally seeks to distinguish pseudoscience as areas of inquiry which are stagnant and without active scientific investigation.
Some historians' perspectives
Many historians of science are concerned with the development of science from its primitive origins; consequently they define science in sufficiently broad terms to include early forms of natural knowledge. In the article on science in the eleventh edition of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', the scientist and historian William Cecil Dampier Whetham defined science as "ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them". In his study of Greek science, Marshall Clagett defined science as "first, the orderly and systematic comprehension, description and/or explanation of natural phenomena and, secondly, the athematical and logicaltools necessary for the undertaking". A similar definition appeared more recently in David Pingree's study of early science: "Science is a systematic explanation of perceived or imaginary phenomena, or else is based on such an explanation. Mathematics finds a place in science only as one of the symbolical languages in which scientific explanations may be expressed." These definitions tend to emphasize the subject matter of science rather than its method and from these perspectives, the philosophical concern to establish a demarcation between science and non-science becomes "problematic, if not futile".
Laudan
Larry Laudan concluded, after examining various historical attempts to establish a demarcation criterion, that "philosophy has failed to deliver the goods" in its attempts to distinguish science from non-science—to distinguish science from pseudoscience. None of the past attempts would be accepted by a majority of philosophers nor, in his opinion, should they be accepted by them or by anyone else. He stated that many well-founded beliefs are not scientific and, conversely, many scientific conjectures are not well-founded. He also stated that demarcation criteria were historically used as in polemical disputes between "scientists" and "pseudo-scientists". Advancing a number of examples from everyday practice of football and carpentry and non-scientific scholarship such as literary criticism and philosophy, he considered the question of whether a belief is well-founded or not to be more practically and philosophically significant than whether it is scientific or not. In his judgment, the demarcation between science and non-science was a pseudo-problem that would best be replaced by examining the distinction between reliable and unreliable knowledge, without bothering to ask whether that knowledge is scientific or not. He would consign phrases like "pseudo-science" or "unscientific" to the rhetoric of politicians or sociologists.
After Laudan
Others have disagreed with Laudan. Sebastian Lutz, for example, argued that demarcation does not have to be a single necessary and sufficient condition as Laudan implied. Rather, Laudan's reasoning at most establishes that there has to be one necessary criterion and one possibly different sufficient criterion.
Various typologies or taxonomies of sciences versus nonsciences, and reliable knowledge versus illusory knowledge, have been proposed. Ian Hacking
Ian MacDougall Hacking (February 18, 1936 – May 10, 2023) was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, ...
, Massimo Pigliucci, and others have noted that the sciences generally conform to Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
From 1929 to 1947, Witt ...
's concept of family resemblance
Family resemblance () is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with the best known exposition given in his posthumously published book '' Philosophical Investigations'' (1953). It argues that things which could be thought to b ...
s.
Other critics have argued for multiple demarcation criteria, some suggesting that there should be one set of criteria for the natural sciences, another set of criteria for the social sciences, and claims involving the supernatural could have a set of pseudoscientific criteria. Anthropologist
An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...
Sean M. Rafferty of the University at Albany, SUNY in his text ''Misanthropology: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Study of Humanity'' contrasts science and pseudoscience within his discipline thusly: en for those subfields where there is a significant element of interpretation, those interpretations are still based on and constrained by physical evidence. And interpretations are always provisional, pending possible refutation by contradictory evidence ... Pseudoscience, by comparison, is scornful of evidence. The pseudoscientist reaches a preferred conclusion in advance, then selects evidence, often removed from any relevant context, to lend supposed support for their conclusions. Often the preconceived conclusion is one that justifies some closely held identity or ideology. Contradictory evidence is waved away or ignored, and as a last resort, one can always claim conspiracy to keep pseudoscientific ideas suppressed.
Significance
Concerning science education
Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process (the scientific method), some ...
, Michael D. Gordin wrote:
Discussions of the demarcation problem concern the rhetoric of science and promote critical thinking
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, ...
, which is important for democracy. For example, Gordin stated: "Demarcation remains essential for the enormously high political stakes of climate-change denial and other anti-regulatory fringe doctrines".[
Philosopher noted:
Concern for informed human nutrition resulted in the following note in 1942:
The demarcation problem has been compared to the problem of differentiating fake news from real news, which became prominent during the 2016 United States presidential election.]
See also
* Boundary-work
* Idealism
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical realism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysics, metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, Spirit (vital essence), spirit, or ...
* Relativism
* Scientism
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Demarcation Problem
Philosophy of science
Science studies
Religion and science
Dichotomies
Philosophical problems