Steven Raaijmakers

Deliberate Vagueness Source: Wikipedia.org Obscurantism: a new defense mechanism? Usually pseudoscience is criticized because of its blatant falsehoods and absurd claims. But some of these ideas have peculiar properties that make them harder to criticize. In this blog post I will examine one of those properties that I think is the worst (i.e. has the biggest impact). That property is the vagueness of the idea that is proposed (or simply obscurantism). I will pose that (I) this is a very smart adaptation for ideas to have and (II) it makes it harder to oppose. What is obscurantism? To illustrate what obscurantism is, I will use two examples of pseudoscience: one with very precise claims and one that obscures its claims by using, among other techniques, vague language and sciencey-sounding words. Creationism is the most used exemplar of pseudoscience. It is the idea that the earth is created in six 24-hour days and that it is about 6,000 years old (this ...

The Galileo Fallacy What is the Galileo Fallacy? People defending an extraordinary claim often refer to their heroes as modern-day Galileos. The argument comes in different forms and sounds a bit like this: "He is being persecuted by the establishment, just as Galileo found himself opposed by the establishment ".  Most of the instances of this argument are actually fallacies, as I will attempt to show. High dilutions I will first show that defenders of the following case  invoke the Galileo Fallacy and then I will show how it is not comparable to the case of Galileo (using a bit of a Bayesian perspective).  The case is that of Jacques Benveniste and his claim to fame within the homeopathy community. As you perhaps know, homeopathic 'remedies' are so diluted that they physically do not contain any element of the diluted substance. So there is actually nothing in it (pun intended). Jacques Benveniste published an article in Nature in 1988 cl...

'Supernatural Sexy Time'* Ke$ha (source: Wikimedia Commons) A spiritual search for inspiration    Singer Ke$ha has released a new album called "Warrior". Not that big of a deal, you would say, were it not for the bizarre content of the album. Kesha tells Ryan Seacrest in an interview that she has had 'sexy time' with a ghost or an entity. The song 'Supernatural' is based on this erotic experience with the paranormal. Besides this erotic encounter with a ghost, the album has more occult content, Kesha explains.  During a spiritual quest around the world, Kesha has saved little lion cubs, she has dived with great white sharks, and has transgressed into past lives through hypnosis. In the media a few 'paranormal investigators' explain  Kesha's experiences, but they fail to give any natural explanations. One 'researchers' claims that it is unlikely that Kesha has had a hot experience with a ghost, because whenever...