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The term pseudoskepticism (or pseudo-skepticism) denotes thinking that appears to be skeptical, but is not. The term is most commonly encountered in the form popularised by Marcello Truzzi, through his 'Journal of Scientific Exploration', where he defined psuedoskeptics as those who take "the negative rather than an agnostic position but still call themselves 'skeptics'" .

Characteristics of pseudoskeptics

While a Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University in 1987, Truzzi gave the following description of pseudoskeptics:

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.

Truzzi attributed the following characteristics to pseudoskeptics:

Pseudo-skepticism and scientific method

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 psuedoskeptic 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.

Academic studies

A Spring 2006 course at the University of Colorado, "Edges of Science" which "Examines the evidence for paranormal phenomena, reasons for skepticism", includes a section which shows "how a healthy skepticism can see through unsupported assertions, and how pathological skepticism can work against honest scientific inquiry."

The Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona, run by Professor Gary Schwartz, claims to provide "a responsible forum in which to conduct systematic research on pathological skepticism, illusory correlates, and self-deception in science, society, and human relationships." The lab's research into "the role of conscious intention in energy medicine and healing, and the possibility of survival of consciousness after physical death" has been criticized in The Skeptical Inquirer because it did not consider non-paranormal explanations for the observations recorded..

Pennsylvania State University Folklorist David J. Hufford 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.

History

Prior to Truzzi, the term "pseudo-skepticism" has occasionally been used in 19th and early 20th century philosophy.

On 31 Aug 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.

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.

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Frederick L. Will used the term "pseudo-skepticism" in 1942. Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

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.

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' ... "

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.

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".

Controversy surrounding the concept

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 such things as the existence of UFOs and communicating with the dead. He was a founding member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), an organization that has been criticized by science journalist Michael Lemonick as "fringe" but also as showing a "surprising attitude of skepticism".

One SSE member, L. David Leiter, thinks that organized skepticism might be called psuedo-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, "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"

Groups sometimes accuse each other of pseudoskepticism. Commenting on the labels "dogmatic" and "pathological" that the "Association for Skeptical Investigation" puts on critics of paranormal investigations, Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary 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 criticisms of paranormal studies."

See also

• Anomalistics The study of Anomalous phenomena
• Debunkers
• Environmental skepticism
• Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal, Robert Anton Wilson's parody on CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) which is intended to ridicule CSICOP's perceived intense hostility to any claims which fall outside of their definition of 'normal'
• Intellectual dishonesty is the creation of false impressions or advocacy of false ideas and concepts using rhetoric, logical fallacies, or insufficient or falsified evidence.
• Nihilism
• Scientific skepticism
• Scientism
• Kary Mullis-Skeptic of HIV causing AIDS, global warming, and CFC causing ozone depletion
• Michael Shermer was once criticized in an article by the CSICOP for being too harshly critical of speculative ideas.(Specifically life extension, but also SETI by some skeptics)
• The Skeptical Environmentalist is a controversial book by political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, arguing claims over various environmental issues are exaggerations and unsupported by a proper analysis of the relevant data.
• Global warming controversy is a decades-old dispute about the effects of humans on the global climate.
• Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis
• Creation-Evolution controversy
• Skepticism

Notes and references

1. "Marcello Truzzi, On Pseudo-Skepticism" Zetetic Scholar (1987) No. 12/13, 3-4.
2. LD Leiter (2002). "The Pathology of Organized Skepticism" (PDF). Journal of Scientific Exploration. scientificexploration.org.
3. "Marcello Truzzi, On Pseudo-Skepticism" Zetetic Scholar (1987) No. 12/13, 3-4.
4. "Marcello Truzzi, On Pseudo-Skepticism" Zetetic Scholar (1987) No. 12/13, 3-4. "Though many in this category who dismiss and ridicule anomaly claims call themselves 'skeptics,' they often are really 'pseudo-skeptics' because they deny rather than doubt anomaly claims"
5. Truzzi, ibid, ".. they seem less inclined to take the same critical stance towards orthodox theories. For example, they may attack alternative methods in medicine (e.g., for a lack of double-blind studies) while ignoring that similar criticisms can be levelled against much conventional medicine"
6. Truzzi, ibid, "those I term scoffers often make judgments without full inquiry"
7. Hyman, Ray, 1980. "Pathological Science: Towards a Proper Diagnosis and Remedy," Zetetic Scholar, No. 6, 31-43. Truzzi wrote: ".. they may be more interested in discrediting an anomaly claim than in dispassionately investigating it"
8. Truzzi, ibid, "scoffers sometimes manage to discredit anomaly claims (e.g., through ridicule or ad hominem attacks) "
9. Truzzi, ibid, "A characteristic of many scoffers is their pejorative characterization of proponents as "promoters" and sometimes even the most protoscientific anomaly claimants are labeled as 'pseudoscientists' or practitioners of 'pathological science.' "
10. Truzzi, ibid, "scoffers sometimes manage to discredit anomaly claims .. without presenting any solid disproof
11. Marcello Truzzi, "On Pseudo-Skepticism", Zetetic Scholar, #12-13, 1987. "Critics who assert negative claims, but who mistakenly call themselves 'skeptics,' often act as though they have no burden of proof placed on them at all, though such a stance would be appropriate only for the agnostic or true skeptic"
12. Truzzi, ibid, ".. 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."
13. Truzzi, ibid, ".. many critics seem to feel it is only necessary to present a case for their counter-claims based upon plausibility rather than empirical evidence"
14. Truzzi, ibid, "Showing evidence is unconvincing is not grounds for completely dismissing it."
15. ECEN 3070 - "Edges of Science", Spring Semester Spring 2006
16. Human Energy Systems Laboratory, University of Arizona
17. http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-01/medium.html "How Not to Test Mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments"
18. "Reason, Rhetoric, and Religion: Academic Ideology versus Folk Belief", from New York Folklore, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-4, 1985 40th Anniversary Issue" quoted in part in Clark, Jerome, Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena; Detroit, Visible Ink Press; 1993, ISBN 0810394367; page 117
19. Charles Dudley Warner, Editor, Library Of The World's Best Literature Ancient And Modern, Vol. II, 1896. Online at Project Gutenberg (eg. here)
20. H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908) publ. T.F. Unwin. Reprinted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Originally published: Boston : Luce and Co., 1913. p.30.
21. Alasdair MacIntyre "Foreword" to the book Pragmatism and Realism by Frederick L. Will (1997) quoting his earlier paper "Is There a Problem of Induction?" Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 39, No. 19 (Sep. 10, 1942), pp. 505-513
22. John E. Sitter, "The Argument of Pope's Epistle to Cobham" Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 17, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1977), pp. 435-449
23. Truzzi, ibid, "A characteristic of many scoffers is their pejorative characterization of proponents as 'promoters' and sometimes even the most protoscientific anomaly claimants are labelled as "pseudoscientists" or practitioners of 'pathological science.' "
24. C. Eugene Emery, Jr., "CD-ROM encyclopedias: how does their coverage of pseudoscience topics rate?", Skeptical Inquirer, Nov-Dec, 1996
25. Truzzi a founding member of SSE
26. scientificexploration.org
27. Science on the Fringe. Time
28. L. David Leiter, "The Pathology of Organized Skepticism" (PDF), in Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 125–128, 2002.
29. Association for Skeptical Investigation website
30. Skepdic article on positive pseudo-skeptics
31. Robert Todd Carroll "Internet Bunk: Skeptical Investigations." Skeptic's Dictionary

• Truzzi, Marcello, "On Pseudo-Skepticism". Anomalist. (Commentary)
• Truzzi, Marcello, "On Some Unfair Practices towards Claims of the Paranormal". Oxymoron, 1998
• Drasin, Daniel, "Zen and the Art of Debunkery". aol.com, 1997.
• Milton, Richard, "Scientific skepticism".
• Mooney, Chris, "Abuses of Skepticism : Doubting is a powerful tool, but it can definitely be taken too far". CSICOP, December, 2003.
• Haack, Susan, "Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism". CSICOP, December 1997.
• Hall, Stephanie A. "Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics" Paper presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Folkore Society
• Sofka, Michael D., "Myths of Skepticism". ISUNY, March, 2002.
• Beaty, William J., "Symptoms of Pathological Sketicism". 1996.
• Hyman, Ray, "Proper Criticism". (csicop.org)
• Martin, Brian, "Strategies for dissenting scientists". Society for Scientific Exploration. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 12 No 4. 1998. (PDF)
• Baez, John, "The crackpot index : Method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.".
• Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Department of Psychology, Cornell University.
• Debunking Pseudo-Skeptical Arguments against Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena by Winston Wu
• Wilson, Robert Anton, interview in which he discusses CSICOP and pseudoskeptism, what he calls "irrational rationalists" and "fundamentalist materialism"
• Sarma, Amardeo, Misguided Stigmatization of "Organized Skepticism"

External links

• Skeptic's pages - Quotes and links to articles about skepticism and pseudoskepticism.

• Philosophy of science
• Pseudoscience
• Skepticism
• Scientific method
• Types of scientific fallacy
• Epistemology