It’s all bullsh*t! On the relationship between pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy
I’ve read a large number of technical papers in both science and philosophy during my career, and I’ve written a decent quantity myself (so far, 89 in science and 92 in philosophy). It’s rare that a new paper grabs my attention to the point of thinking, “I really need to write about this, more people ought to be aware of it.” And yet, one such paper came across my iPad recently: Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy, by Victor Moberger, at Stockholm University in Sweden (published in Theoria, October 2020).
I have been interested in pseudoscience for a long time, and specifically in the so-called demarcation problem, i.e., what separates pseudoscience from legitimate science. More recently, I have also started writing about what I think of as the philosophical equivalent of pseudoscience, i.e., pseudophilosophy, and about the corresponding (more difficult, in my mind) demarcation problem. Moberger has found a neat way to describe the profound similarity between pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy: it’s all bullshit!
He means “bullshit” in the technical, not colloquial, sense of the term. Specifically, Moberger takes his inspiration from the famous essay by Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit. As Frankfurt puts it:
“One of the most salient features…
