Abstract
Philosophers and scientists often dismiss complementary and alternative medicine as “pseudoscience.” In applying the pseudoscience moniker they often intend to suggest that the beliefs and practices of complementary and alternative medicine are as irrational as a fear of flying, as effective as a rabbit’s foot, and as pretentiously deceptive as a mongrel in a dog show. Many people in western society have come to think of science as the deity of reason and pseudoscience is its doppelganger. In this paper I wish to offer a less bipolar view of science and pseudoscience wherein one sees science and pseudoscience as sometimes overlapping partitions on a continuum between utopic rational inquiry and chaotic irrationality. My thesis does not represent a diminution of science, nor an exultation of pseudoscience. Rather, I portray pseudoscientific beliefs and practices as resulting from human, but nevertheless unacceptable, hypotheses, evidence standards, and innate judgment mechanisms. Likewise, science while striving towards laudable intellectual standards should not be thought of as an epistemic authority before which one must unthinkingly genuflect.
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Wallis, C.S. (2004). Scientific Thinking: Its History, Methods, and Advantages. In: Cooper, E.L., Yamaguchi, N. (eds) Complementary and Alternative Approaches to Biomedicine. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 546. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4820-8_28
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