Demarcation problem

In the philosophy of science and epistemology, the demarcation problem is the question of how to
distinguish between science, and non-science.[1] It examines the lines between science, pseudoscience, and
other products of human activity, like art and literature, and beliefs.[2][3] The debate continues after over two
millennia of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields, despite a broad agreement
on the basics of the scientific method.[4][5] The debate has consequences for what can be called "scientific" in
fields such as education and public policy.[6]:26,35

Contents
The ancient world
Logical positivism
Falsifiability
Against verifiability
The solution of falsifiability
Kuhnian postpositivism
Feyerabend and Lakatos
Thagard
Some historians' perspectives
Laudan
After Laudan
Significance
See also
References

The ancient world

An early attempt at demarcation can be seen in the efforts of Greek natural philosophers and medical
practitioners to distinguish their methods and their accounts of nature from the mythological or mystical
accounts of their predecessors and contemporaries.[7]

Aristotle described at length what was involved in having scientific knowledge of something. To
be scientific, he said, one must deal with causes, one must use logical demonstration, and one
must identify the universals which 'inhere' in the particulars of sense. But above all, to have
science one must have apodictic certainty. It is the last feature which, for Aristotle, most clearly
distinguished the scientific way of knowing.[2]

— Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem" (1983)

G. E. R. Lloyd noted that there was a sense in which the groups engaged in various forms of inquiry into
nature set out to "legitimate their own positions",[8] laying "claim to a new kind of wisdom ... that purported to
yield superior enlightenment, even superior practical effectiveness".[9] Medical writers in the Hippocratic
tradition maintained that their discussions were based on necessary demonstrations, a theme developed by
Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics.[10] One element of this polemic for science was an insistence on a clear
and unequivocal presentation of arguments, rejecting the imagery, analogy, and myth of the old wisdom.[11]
Some of their claimed naturalistic explanations of phenomena have been found to be quite fanciful, with little
reliance on actual observations.[12]

Cicero's De Divinatione implicitly used five criteria of scientific demarcation that are also used by modern
philosophers of science.[13]

Logical positivism
Logical positivism, formulated in the 1920s, held that only statements about matters of fact or logical relations
between concepts are meaningful. All other statements lack sense and are labelled "metaphysics" (see the
verifiability theory of meaning also known as verificationism).

According to A. J. Ayer, metaphysicians make statements which claim to have "knowledge of a reality which
[transcends] the phenomenal world".[14] Ayer, a member of the Vienna Circle and a noted English logical-
positivist, argued that making any statements about the world beyond one's immediate sense-perception is
impossible.[15] This is because even metaphysician's first premises will necessarily begin with observations
made through sense-perception.[15]

Ayer implied that the line of demarcation is characterized as the place at which statements become "factually
significant".[15] To be "factually significant", a statement must be verifiable.[15] In order to be verifiable, the
statement must be verifiable in the observable world, or facts that can be induced from "derived
experience".[15] This is referred to as the "verifiability" criterion.[15]

This distinction between science, which in the view of the Vienna Circle possessed empirically verifiable
statements, and what they pejoratively called "metaphysics", which lacked such statements, can be seen as
representing another aspect of the demarcation problem.[16] Logical positivism is often discussed in the context
of the demarcation between science and non-science or pseudoscience. However, "The verificationist
proposals had the aim of solving a distinctly different demarcation problem, namely that between science and
metaphysics."[17]

Falsifiability
Karl Popper saw demarcation as a central problem in the philosophy of science. Popper articulates the problem
of demarcation as:

The problem of finding a criterion which would enable us to distinguish between the empirical
sciences on the one hand, and mathematics and logic as well as 'metaphysical' systems on the
other, I call the problem of demarcation."[18]

Falsifiability is the demarcation criterion proposed by Karl Popper as opposed to verificationism: "statements
or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or
conceivable observations".[19]
Against verifiability

Popper rejected solutions to the problem of demarcation that are grounded in inductive reasoning, and so
rejected logical-positivist responses to the problem of demarcation.[18] He argued that logical-positivists want
to create a demarcation between the metaphysical and the empirical because they believe that empirical claims
are meaningful and metaphysical ones are not. Unlike the Vienna Circle, Popper stated that his proposal was
not a criterion of "meaningfulness".

Popper's demarcation criterion has been criticized both for excluding legitimate science ... and for
giving some pseudosciences the status of being scientific ... According to Larry Laudan (1983,
121), it "has the untoward consequence of countenancing as 'scientific' every crank claim which
makes ascertainably false assertions". Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear
example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted ... Similarly, the major
threats to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, another of his major targets, do not come from
claims that it is untestable but from claims that it has been tested and failed the tests.[19]

— Sven Ove Hansson, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Science and Pseudo-
Science"

Popper argued that the Humean induction problem shows that there is no way to make meaningful universal
statements on the basis of any number of empirical observations.[20] Therefore, empirical statements are no
more "verifiable" than metaphysical statements.

This creates a problem for the line of demarcation the positivists wanted to cleave between the empirical and
the metaphysical. By their very own "verifiability criterion", Popper argued, the empirical is subsumed into the
metaphysical, and the line of demarcation between the two becomes non-existent.

The solution of falsifiability

In Popper's later work, he stated that falsifiability is both a necessary and a sufficient criterion for demarcation.
He described falsifiability as a property of "the logical structure of sentences and classes of sentences", so that
a statement's scientific or non-scientific status does not change over time. This has been summarized as a
statement being falsifiable "if and only if it logically contradicts some (empirical) sentence that describes a
logically possible event that it would be logically possible to observe".[19]

Kuhnian postpositivism
Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher of science, is often connected with what has been
called postpositivism or postempiricism. In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn
divided the process of doing science into two different endeavors, which he called normal science and
extraordinary science (which he sometimes also called "revolutionary science"), and he said that "we must not,
I think, seek a sharp or decisive" demarcation criterion. In Kuhn's view, "it is normal science, in which Sir
Karl's sort of testing does not occur, rather than extraordinary science which most nearly distinguishes science
from other enterprises".[19] That is, the utility of a scientific paradigm for puzzle-solving lies in its suggesting
solutions to new problems while continuing to satisfy all of the problems solved by the paradigm that it
replaces.[19]
 Finally, and this is for now my main point, a careful look at the scientific enterprise suggests that
it is normal science, in which Sir Karl's sort of testing does not occur, rather than extraordinary
science which most nearly distinguishes science from other enterprises. If a demarcation criterion
exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part of science
which Sir Karl ignores.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, "Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", in Criticism and the

Growth of Knowledge (1970), edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave

Kuhn's view of demarcation is most clearly expressed in his comparison of astronomy with
astrology. Since antiquity, astronomy has been a puzzle-solving activity and therefore a science. If
an astronomer's prediction failed, then this was a puzzle that he could hope to solve for instance
with more measurements or with adjustments of the theory. In contrast, the astrologer had no such
puzzles since in that discipline "particular failures did not give rise to research puzzles, for no
man, however skilled, could make use of them in a constructive attempt to revise the astrological
tradition" ... Therefore, according to Kuhn, astrology has never been a science.[19]

— Sven Ove Hansson, "Science and Pseudo-Science", in the Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy

Popper criticized Kuhn's demarcation criterion, saying that astrologers are engaged in puzzle solving, and that
therefore Kuhn's criterion recognized astrology as a science. He stated that Kuhn's criterion leads to a "major
disaster ... [the] replacement of a rational criterion of science by a sociological one".[19]

Feyerabend and Lakatos

Kuhn's work largely called into question Popper's demarcation, and emphasized the human, subjective quality
of scientific change. Paul Feyerabend was concerned that the very question of demarcation was insidious:
science itself had no need of a demarcation criterion, but instead some philosophers were seeking to justify a
special position of authority from which science could dominate public discourse.[21] Feyerabend argued that
science does not in fact occupy a special place in terms of either its logic or method, and no claim to special
authority made by scientists can be upheld. He argued that, within the history of scientific practice, no rule or
method can be found that has not been violated or circumvented at some point in order to advance scientific
knowledge. Both Imre Lakatos and Feyerabend suggest that science is not an autonomous form of reasoning,
but is inseparable from the larger body of human thought and inquiry.

Thagard
Paul R. Thagard proposed another set of principles to try to overcome these difficulties, and argued that it is
important for society to find a way of doing so. According to Thagard's method, a theory is not scientific if it
satisfies two conditions:[22]

1. The theory has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and
faces many unsolved problems; and...
2. The community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of
the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is
selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.
Thagard specified that sometimes theories will spend some time as merely "unpromising" before they truly
deserve the title of pseudoscience. He cited astrology as an example: it was stagnant compared to advances in
physics during the 17th century, and only later became "pseudoscience" in the advent of alternative
explanations provided by psychology during the 19th century.

Thagard also stated that his criteria should not be interpreted so narrowly as to allow willful ignorance of
alternative explanations, or so broadly as to discount our modern science compared to science of the future.
His definition is a practical one, which generally seeks to distinguish pseudoscience as areas of inquiry which
are stagnant and without active scientific investigation.

Some historians' perspectives

Many historians of science are concerned with the development of science from its primitive origins;
consequently they define science in sufficiently broad terms to include early forms of natural knowledge. In
the article on science in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the scientist and historian
William Cecil Dampier Whetham defined science as "ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the
relations between them". [23] In his study of Greek science, Marshall Clagett defined science as "first, the
orderly and systematic comprehension, description and/or explanation of natural phenomena and, secondly, the
[mathematical and logical] tools necessary for the undertaking".[24] A similar definition appeared more
recently in David Pingree's study of early science: "Science is a systematic explanation of perceived or
imaginary phenomena, or else is based on such an explanation. Mathematics finds a place in science only as
one of the symbolical languages in which scientific explanations may be expressed."[25] These definitions tend
to focus more on the subject matter of science than on its method and from these perspectives, the
philosophical concern to establish a line of demarcation between science and non-science becomes
"problematic, if not futile".[26]

Laudan
Larry Laudan concluded, after examining various historical attempts to establish a demarcation criterion, that
"philosophy has failed to deliver the goods" in its attempts to distinguish science from non-science—to
distinguish science from pseudoscience. None of the past attempts would be accepted by a majority of
philosophers nor, in his view, should they be accepted by them or by anyone else. He stated that many well-
founded beliefs are not scientific and, conversely, many scientific conjectures are not well-founded. He also
stated that demarcation criteria were historically used as machines de guerre in polemical disputes between
"scientists" and "pseudo-scientists". Advancing a number of examples from everyday practice of football and
carpentry and non-scientific scholarship such as literary criticism and philosophy, he saw the question of
whether a belief is well-founded or not to be more practically and philosophically significant than whether it is
scientific or not. In his judgment, the demarcation between science and non-science was a pseudo-problem that
would best be replaced by focusing on the distinction between reliable and unreliable knowledge, without
bothering to ask whether that knowledge is scientific or not. He would consign phrases like "pseudo-science"
or "unscientific" to the rhetoric of politicians or sociologists.[2]

After Laudan
Others have disagreed with Laudan. Sebastian Lutz, for example, argued that demarcation does not have to be
a single necessary and sufficient condition as Laudan implied.[2] Rather, Laudan's reasoning at the most
establishes that there has to be one necessary criterion and one possibly different sufficient criterion.[27]
Various typologies or taxonomies of sciences versus nonsciences, and reliable knowledge versus illusory
knowledge, have been proposed.[28] Ian Hacking, Massimo Pigliucci, and others have noted that the sciences
generally conform to Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances.[29][30]

Other critics have argued for multiple demarcation criteria suggesting that there should be one set of criteria for
the natural sciences, another set of criteria for the social sciences, and claims involving the supernatural could
have a set of pseudoscientific criteria.[6]

Significance
Discussions of the demarcation problem highlight the rhetoric of science and promote critical thinking.
Citizens thinking critically, and expressing themselves with reasoned argument in policy discussion, contribute
to enlightened democracy.[6]:35

Philosopher Herbert Keuth noted:

Perhaps the most important function of the demarcation between science and nonscience is to
refuse political and religious authorities the right to pass binding judgments on the truth of certain
statements of fact.[31]

Concern for informed human nutrition sparked the following note in 1942:

If our boys and girls are to be exposed to the superficial and frequently ill-informed statements
about science and medicine made over the radio and in the daily press, it is desirable, if not
necessary, that some corrective in the form of accurate factual information be provided in the
schools. Although this is not a plea that chemistry teachers should at once introduce the study of
proteins into their curricula, it is a suggestion that they should at least inform themselves and
become prepared to answer questions and counteract the effects of misinformation.[32]

The demarcation problem has been compared to the problem of differentiating fake news from real news,
which rose to prominence in the 2016 United States presidential election.[33]

See also
Boundary-work
Idealism
Relativism

References
1. Resnik, David B. (2000). "A pragmatic approach to the demarcation problem". Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science Part A. 31 (2): 249–267. doi:10.1016/S0039-
3681(00)00004-2 (https://doi.org/10.1016%2FS0039-3681%2800%2900004-2).
2. Laudan, Larry (1983), "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem" (https://books.google.com/bo
oks?id=AEvprSJzv2MC&pg=PA111), in Cohen, R.S.; Laudan, L. (eds.), Physics, Philosophy
and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, 76, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 111–127, ISBN 90-277-1533-5
 3. Lakatos, I.; Feyerabend, P.; Motterlini, M. (1999). For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's
Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence (https://books.goo
gle.com/books?id=osMnuvLZvPoC&pg=PA20). University of Chicago Press. p. 20.
ISBN 9780226467740. LCCN 99013581 (https://lccn.loc.gov/99013581). "The demarcation
problem may be formulated in the following terms: what distinguishes science from
pseudoscience? This is an extreme way of putting it, since the more general problem, called
the Generalized Demarcation Problem, is really the problem of the appraisal of scientific
theories, and attempts to answer the question: when is one theory better than another?"
4. Gauch, Hugh G., Jr. (2003). Scientific Method in Practice. pp. 3–7. ISBN 978-0-521-81689-2.
5. Cover, J. A.; Curd, Martin, eds. (1998). Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. pp. 1–82.
ISBN 978-0-393-97175-0.
6. Pigliucci, Massimo; Boudry, Maarten, eds. (2013). Philosophy of Pseudoscience:
Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226051826.001.0001 (https://doi.org/10.7208%2Fchicago%2F97802
26051826.001.0001). ISBN 9780226051796. OCLC 824088394 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/
824088394).
7. Lloyd, G. E. R. (1983), Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient
Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79–80, ISBN 0-521-27307-2, "Faced
with ... competition from a variety of more or less exploitative rival healers, the doctors
responsible for many or most of the Hippocratic treatises unite, at least, in their desire to turn
the practice of healing into a τἐχνη. ... [N]ot only do they reject interference in most cases from
priests and prophets, they also criticise many current practices and assumptions."
8. Lloyd, G. E. R. (1983), Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient
Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 215, ISBN 0-521-27307-2
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Ancient Greek Science, Sather Classical Lectures, 52, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
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10. Lloyd, G.E.R. (1986), The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of
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12. Lloyd, G.E.R. (1979), Magic Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of
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page/15), ISBN 0-521-29641-2
13. Fernandez-Beanato, Damian (2020). "Cicero's demarcation of science: a report of shared
criteria". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2020.04.002
(https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.shpsa.2020.04.002).
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(McGraw-Hill. 1965. Pp. 413. Price £2 12s.)". Philosophy. 42 (159): 95.
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16. Grayling, AC., Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (https://books.google.com/books?id=kYU
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l%20positivism%22&f=false), Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 67–68.
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all2008/entries/pseudo-science#LogPos). In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford
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18. Popper, Karl (4 November 2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd ed.). London:
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19. Hansson, Sven Ove (2008). "Science and Pseudo-Science" (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/f
all2008/entries/pseudo-science#KarPop). In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Fall 2008 ed.). 4.2 Falsificationism.
20. Hume, David (4 September 2018). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
ISBN 9788027246601. OCLC 1055285629 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1055285629).
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oks?id=NdkDiqh5ySYC&pg=PA41). Rhetoric of the Human Sciences Series. University of
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22. Thagard, Paul R. (1978), "Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience", PSA: Proceedings of the
Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1978: 223–234,
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1978.1.192639)
23. "Science" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Science).
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27. Lutz, Sebastian (2011), "On an Allegedly Essential Feature of Criteria for the Demarcation of
Science" (https://web.archive.org/web/20121109143743/http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/
jw/TheReasoner/vol5/TheReasoner-5%288%29.pdf) (PDF), The Reasoner, 5 (8): 125–126,
archived from the original (http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/TheReasoner/vol5/TheRea
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28. For example: Mahner, Martin (2007). "Demarcating science from non-science". In Kuipers,
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Science. Amsterdam: North-Holland. pp. 515–575. doi:10.1016/B978-044451548-3/50011-2 (ht
tps://doi.org/10.1016%2FB978-044451548-3%2F50011-2). ISBN 0444515488.
OCLC 123374590 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123374590). See Figures 2, 3, and 4, which
show various relationships of science, nonscience, illusory knowledge (parascience), ordinary
knowledge, and reliable knowledge.
29. Irzik, Gürol; Nola, Robert (July 2011). "A family resemblance approach to the nature of science
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1-010-9293-4).
30. Pigliucci, Massimo (2013). "The demarcation problem: a (belated) response to Laudan" (https://
philpapers.org/archive/PIGTDP). In Pigliucci, Massimo; Boudry, Maarten (eds.). Philosophy of
Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. pp. 9–28. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226051826.003.0002 (https://doi.org/10.7208%2Fch
icago%2F9780226051826.003.0002). ISBN 9780226051796. OCLC 824088394 (https://www.
worldcat.org/oclc/824088394). See Figures 1.2 and 1.3.
31. Keuth, Herbert (2004) [Published in German 2000]. "What is demarcation for?". The Philosophy
of Karl Popper (1st English ed.). Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
pp. 50 (https://books.google.com/books?id=wxzoBfQYhYAC&pg=PA50).
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32. Hubert Bradford Vickery (1942) "Liebig and the Proteins", Journal of Chemical Education,
quotation from page 79, doi:10.1021/ed019p73 (https://doi.org/10.1021%2Fed019p73)
33. LeVine, Michael V (2016), "Science has experience fighting fake news — and Facebook
should take note" (https://mic.com/articles/161376/science-has-experience-fighting-fake-news-
and-facebook-should-take-note), Mic

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