HKUST Philosophy of Science Lecture Series - On the Values of Pseudoscience

If philosophers of science approach the fringe and the pseudosciences, they mainly do it from the perspective of the demarcation problem. It was first and explicitly defined by Karl Popper in Logik der Forschung, initially as an issue to distinguish empirical science from mathematics, logic on the one hand, and from metaphysics on the other hand, but later to mark the boundaries of science against pseudoscience. There exists a significant and long tradition (ranging from Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, spanning to the recent Philosophy of Pseudoscience volume, edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry) that analyzed single and multiple criteria as well. It has been rarely discussed, however, why one shall investigate pseudosciences in the first place (beyond a certain existential threat they often pose, or our cognitive hygiene), or what might be their value both for people whom they attract and for the community of scholars. In this talk, I will reconstruct and analyze several attempts that aim to identify certain values of pseudosciences. These include Popper’s own positive take on metaphysics/pseudoscience, Terence Hines’ list of why study pseudoscience, and Michael Gordin’s narrative that pseudosciences organically grow with the fame of the sciences.