A historian of science at Princeton University specializing in modern physics, Michael D. Gordin is also the author of The Pseudoscience Wars (2012), a book devoted to—in the words of its subtitle—Immanuel Velikovsky and the birth of the modern fringe. (David Morrison reviewed The Pseudoscience Wars in the March/April 2013 SI.) But, as the title of his Velikovsky book suggests, Gordin is particularly interested in the concept of pseudoscience. In the introduction to The Pseudoscience Wars, he argued, in outline, that because there are no features possessed by all and only pseudosciences, the concept of pseudoscience is “without real content” and “lacks a core.” Instead, he suggested, pseudoscience is simply a term of abuse applied to views that scientists regard as threatening. Yet, as a result, examining historical controversies over pseudosciences illuminates the workings of science itself: “what scientists thought about their standards, their position in society, and their future.” In essence, On the Fringe reiterates the argument for a general readership, with the addition of a wide, if shallow, sampling of examples of pseudoscience.

In chapter 1, Gordin reviews the history of what philosophers call the “demarcation problem”—finding a principled way to distinguish science from pseudoscience—and concludes that the problem is intractable. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 then provide a whistle-stop tour of four “families” of pseudoscience: vestigial sciences (astrology and alchemy), hyperpoliticized sciences (Aryan physics, Lysenkoism, and eugenics), counter-establishment sciences (phrenology, creationism, cryptozoology, Velikovskianism, UFOlogy and ancient astronauts, and flat-earthery), and parapsychology (Mesmerism, spiritualism, and academic parapsychology). The tour continues in chapter 6 (N-rays, polywater, water memory, and cold fusion) but with a different agenda in mind. Here Gordin argues that “The boundaries between fringe, fraud, and mistaken science are blurry” (82). Chapter 7 concludes by addressing what Gordin calls “the Russian questions,” after the titles of two nineteenth-century Russian novels, Who Is to Blame? and What Is to Be Done? Appreciating the heterogeneity of the pseudosciences, he suggests, will dispel the temptation to identify a single culprit and enable a targeted response to the most dangerous forms.

Gordin’s descriptions of the various pseudosciences are concise and elegant, and his description of up-to-date work in the history of science is particularly useful, especially regarding the vestigial sciences of astrology and alchemy. It is remarkable that, examining seventeenth-century illustrations purported to encode alchemical secrets, historians “have been able to decode the symbols so that when they have tried the associated experiment in a modern laboratory with the right chemicals, they have replicated the results the seventeenth-century alchemists claimed” (26)—though not, presumably, the transmutation of lead to gold! Yet there are a few errors of fact that are plausibly owing to carelessness. For example, the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover was issued by a trial, not an appellate, court (11); William Jennings Bryan was on the prosecution, not the defense, team in Tennessee v. Scopes (48); the flat-earther Wilbur Voliva’s middle name was, regrettably, Glenn, not Glen, and his earliest profession of flat-earthery seems to have been in 1915, not 1914 (57); and CSICOP was the Committee, not the Commission, for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (72). 

These are trivial errors, but it is not so easy to explain, or excuse, a handful of passages in which Gordin offers substantive claims that are at best dubious. Observing that falsifiability was invoked to discredit creationism in McLean v. Arkansas (1982), Gordin asserts, “The result was that [Karl] Popper’s falsifiability was incorporated as a demarcation criterion in a slew of high school biology texts” (11). But in the body of education research on the treatment of the nature of science in modern American textbooks, neither falsifiability nor demarcation seems even to be mentioned, suggesting the absence of these concepts. After noting the involvement of Carl Sagan and B.F. Skinner with CSICOP, Gordin comments, “The willingness of high-profile scientists to engage in efforts like CSICOP has also diminished over the years” (73). But is it plausible to think that Neil deGrasse Tyson and Steven Pinker (to name two fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry with specialties similar to Sagan’s and Skinner’s) are any lower-profile or any less supportive of efforts to combat pseudoscience than their predecessors? 

Although Gordin contends that the concept of pseudoscience lacks a core, he occasionally comes close to defining it: for example, he observes that “those things that look an awful lot like science but for some reason do not quite make it … are frequently designated ‘pseudosciences’” (2). Indeed. Why not define pseudoscience as a view misrepresented as having contemporary scientific credibility, as philosopher Sven Ove Hansson (among others) suggests? There are several different requirements that a view must satisfy to have scientific credibility, of course, meaning that there are several different ways for pseudosciences to fail to do so. In light of Gordin’s fondness for nineteenth-century Russian novels, such a definition might be regarded as in the spirit of the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878): in Constance Garnett’s translation, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Importantly, because a Hanssonian definition of pseudoscience presupposes the concept of scientific credibility, it cannot be used in the project of formulating a global demarcation criterion between science and pseudoscience. But it is none the worse for that.

Among the virtues of a Hanssonian definition is that it enables a principled taxonomy of pseudosciences based on the ways in which they fail to attain scientific credibility. (There would still be overlap, as with Gordin’s categories, because a pseudoscience may fail to be scientifically credible in multiple ways.) In such a taxonomy, Gordin’s category of hyperpoliticized sciences might be retained, because these share the fault of privileging political ideology over scientific evidence, but generalized to include creationism and flat-earthery, which similarly privilege religious ideology over scientific evidence. The categories of counter-establishment sciences and parapsychology, however, would dissolve, perhaps to be replaced by magical thinking (astrology, Mesmerism, and spiritualism) and uncritical acceptance of liminal phenomena (cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and academic parapsychology). The category of vestigial sciences (at least as a category of pseudoscience) might be abandoned, insofar as there was never a time when alchemy was widely misrepresented as scientifically credible by contemporary standards. A full discussion would also add further objects of appraisal, because pseudoscientific attitudes, behaviors, and claims can appear even in the absence of any overarching pseudoscientific doctrine. In the last few pages of On the Fringe, addressing the Russian question of what is to be done, Gordin expresses pessimism about the idea of improving science education to combat the seemingly constant onslaught of pseudoscience. “Science education is a wonderful thing, and I am entirely in favor of it,” he writes, adding, “It seems unlikely, however, that improvements in science literacy would stamp out the fringe,” adducing the prevalence of flat-earthers, all of whom presumably were taught that Earth is spherical (100). Here he seems to be assuming that improvements in science literacy would consist merely of increases in the amount of scientific information provided to students. In fact, science education in the United States is in the slow process of pivoting to inquiry-based learning, in which students are guided to investigate phenomena and test hypotheses in the ways that scientists do. And research on ways of inoculating students specifically against pseudoscientific challenges to socially controversial topics in science, such as evolution and climate change, is ongoing. Imparting understanding of pseudoscience is hopefully going to be a part of science education in the future.