Laudan's Rejection of the Demarcation Problem

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 noted that many well-founded beliefs are not scientific and, conversely, many scientific conjectures are not well-founded. He also found 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 hollow phrases like "pseudo-science" or "unscientific" to the rhetoric of politicians or sociologists.

Demarcation in Contemporary Scientific Method

The criteria for a system of assumptions, methods, and theories to qualify as science today vary in their details from application to application, and vary significantly among the natural and social sciences. The criteria typically include (a) the formulation of hypotheses that meet the logical criterion of contingency, defeasibility, or falsifiability and the closely related empirical and practical criterion of testability, (b) a grounding in empirical evidence, and (c) the use of scientific method.