Some Notes on Pseudoscience

Over the past weekend, I read Michael D. Gordin’s Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction. This is part of long and somewhat quixotic project to rehabilitate (or perhaps even colonize) the notion of pseudoarchaeology. I figured reading about how scientists approach pseudoscience might be a good way to understand the entire “pseudo-“ movement. This was motivated in part because Gordin’s work was referenced in M. Aldenderfer’s recent piece in Scientific Advances: “Challenging “counterestablishment” archaeology: What really matters.“

To begin, this is a really nice short book that offers a perspective view on pseudoscience. I’ll highlight three things that got me thinking, but with a book this short, it’s worth just going and reading the durned book.

First, Gordin sees most developments of what scientists see as pseudoscience as counterestablishment. This means that the goals of pseudoscience were, at very least, to challenge (and perhaps even subvert) the approaches and knowledge produced by establishment science. Thus, the establishment assigned the term pseudoscience to practitioners who fall outside the institutional apparatus of conventional science. In other words, the very term originated as a method for excluding certain ways of thinking (and groups).

That groups found themselves excluded from establishment science (their journals, their communities, and their social and political institutions) often prompted some counterestablishment groups to develop their own institutions (and presumably defining outgroups and either science or pseudopseudoscience). While none of this is particularly revelatory, one thing that Gordin does bring to the fore is that pseudoscience (much like pseudoarchaeology) involves not just intellectual heterodoxy but also institutional exclusion. 

For certain strands of pseudoarchaeology, particularly in the US, we might even suggest that its “pseudo-“ status reflects practices and arguments that develop outside of institutional traditions. Among some groups, such as African Americans, such exclusion reflects historical practices which severely limited their access to higher education and disciplines such as archaeology. Whether these practices, in turn, created the space necessary for pseudoarchaeological innovation or whether pseudoarchaeological innovation emerged only once establishment archaeology “discovered” counter-discourses that they found threatening is interesting to consider. 

Second, Gordin proposes a basic typology of pseudoscience which includes categories for vestigial science (such as alchemy or phrenology) that continued to have followings long after establishment science rejected their claims and hyperpoliticized pseudosciences such as those that wracked the scientific establishing in the former Soviet Union. These pseudosciences often developed the kind of  counterestablishment institutions that supported their development.

Among archaeologists, there is a growing appreciation that not all pseudoarchaeology is the same. In fact, there’s a growing effort to define varieties of pseudoarchaeology and to understand how this variation reflects a range of motives, goals, and beliefs (e.g. here and here). In this way, the study of pseudoarchaeology follows the study of archaeology which increasingly considered archaeologies —with a wide range of agenda, methods, and goals — in the plural, as a more useful lens for understanding the discipline. 

Finally, one might imagine a book like this to be a clarion call for practitioners and the public to be vigilant against pseudoscience. Indeed, we regularly hear about how challenges to the science has comprised our ability to address global climate change and staunch the spread of the COVID virus.

Instead, Gordin took a more casual and positive attitude toward pseudoscience suggesting that its apparent growth reflects the growing prestige of science in our society. Moreover, he cautions those of us inclined to seem monsters in every shadow cast by the status of science. Without diminishing the presence of pseudoscience in our everyday lives or the value in studying it, he notes that most pseudoscience is harmless (except in cases when its not).