Notes by David Spurrett
(Philosophy, University of Natal, Durban) 2003.
The Demarcation Problem
What the problem is
- The ‘demarcation problem’ in the
philosophy of science is, as the name of the problem
suggests, one of drawing, or working out how to draw, a
boundary. In particular, it concerns drawing a boundary
between science, and everything else.
- A particular version of the problem
concerns drawing a boundary between science and
pseudo-science, where pseudo-science is something that
some advocates contend is science, but which isn’t
actually science.
- The standard way of providing a solution
to the problem is to provide a criterion, or set of
criteria, that something has to have to count as
scientific, and then showing how some or other
pseudo-science fails to meet the criteria.
Why it’s important
- Being counted as science is socially
significant. That is to say, being recognised as a
scientist means having preferential access to money,
preferential input to policy, and relatively secure
positions in most educational curricula.
- So being better able to solve the
demarcation problem means being better able to work out
how to handle claims to significant slices of the social
pie.
- It may also enable us to work out
whether the disproportionate allocation of goods to
science is justifiable or not.
What to hope for
- Although some philosophers suggest that we
can provide a list of necessary and sufficient criteria,
had by all sciences and only sciences, this may be too
much to expect.
- Notice something about how
arguments over demarcation typically proceed. Some
‘paradigm cases’ of science are taken as given,
and then the question of what their distinctive features
are is asked. The same is done with paradigm cases of
non-science, or pseudo-science. This is a process of
trying to make hunches we’ve supposedly
already got more clear and explicit. (Perhaps we should
be more suspicious of our hunches?)
- If we’re not merely consolidating our
prejudices, we should expect (or hope) to be surprised
when thinking seriously about the demarcation problem.
- What I mean by being surprised here, is
either being surprised by the criteria that we end up
recognising as important for something’s being, or
not being, science (meaning that we found something we
weren’t expecting when we examined our paradigm
cases), or by what applying the criteria ends up saying
is or is not science (meaning that our criteria led us to
change our minds about one or more real cases).
- We shouldn’t be too
disappointed if we end up not being sure whether some
things are or are not science. It could be that the issue
is irreducibly difficult, or that some cases are truly
indeterminate, or that a single set of criteria
won’t enable us to decide all cases, and that
there’s no simple way of working out what criteria
to use in at least some cases. We’d only be
reasonably disappointed if we had some justification for
thinking, in advance, that one set of criteria (that were
relatively simple to apply) should do the job in all
cases.
- Aristotle said it best: "It is a mark
of the educated man and proof of his culture that in
every subject he looks for only so much precision as its
nature permits." (The Ethics of Aristotle: The
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson,
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955, p27-28.)
‘Scientific’ not the same
as ‘true’
- Bear in mind here that trying to work out
what counts as ‘science’ or
‘scientific’ is not the same thing as figuring
out what is true. There are at least two reasons
for this:
- First, some parts of science are known to
be false, but are not for that reason regarded as
unscientific. Examples includes laws known to be only approximately
true (i.e. strictly false) and theories regarded as
empirically defeated, even though proposed or constructed
in ‘the right sorts of way’ to be counted as
parts of science.
- Second, some proposition could be true and
have nothing to do (either in how it was formulated, or
in what considerations are relevant to its truth) with
science.
- Having said that, we might still think
that science is a truth-seeking activity, and/or that by
being ‘scientific’ we have a better chance of
arriving at true beliefs and so forth. Fair enough, being
‘scientific’ and being ‘true’
aren’t the same thing.
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