The Characteristics And Harm Of Pseudoscience From The View Of Science

Pseudoscience is an issue interweaved with several subjects, such as the natural science, the philosophy of science, the history of science, the sociology of science, the psychology even the gramarye, the religion, the folk-custom, the politics and the criminology. This paper just catches such a complex issue as the object to discuss the essential and the harm of pseudoscience from the view of philosophy, history and sociology of science, by analyzing the characteristics and the mechanism.Pseudoscience is not a kind of science, but it pretends to be. It uses the concepts and the terms of science to spread the things of fallacious, deleterious, superstitious and fatuous.In fact, pseudoscience belongs to non-science; it only holds the flag of science. Pretence is the point. So pseudoscience is the subset of non-science. The mother of science and pseudoscience—prescience stands in the prophase of science—a stage that the hypothesis hasn't been perfected, the hypothesis, at this time, hasn't been verified. That is to say, pseudoscience is not prescience or hypothesis. Hypothesis is an important method to make a point, its scientific properties are: 1) the content changes with the evolvement of the experiment. 2) the object is the subsistent entity. 3) the testing process is existent for sure.The error means the incorrectness caused by the warps in the experiments. Although it is falseness, it comes from the practice, so maybe something valuable exists in its object, process or the methods. They may lead science to the unbeknown. The character of pseudoscience is deceit. Obviously, it differs from prescience, hypothesis and error. This paper just tries to enrich the definition of pseudoscience by comparing pseudoscience with the prescience, the hypothesis and the error.Pseudoscience is unscientific. The character lies in: the theories lack of scientific background, factual basis, rigorous statement and experimental test, therefore, the theories themselves are unscientific. But the exponentials seem to be madcap and unreasonable abnormally. They refuse any advice and criticism, even the most kindly oppugn. They believe their theories to be absolutely right, and don't accept any test. They consider the criticisms as the malicious attack from the impenitent, the ill-disposed, the jealous and the ignorant. What's more, some of them settle the problems with bet alike, duel, etc. Such ways are not scientific, either. However, pseudo-scientists deprecate science to achieve some special aims; Pseudoscience is provided with deceit, arrogance, narcissism, obturation, exclusion, puff and being deliberately mystifying, it runs counter to scientific spirit.Pseudoscience do harm to the society, so the determined resistance is needed. However, two things are worth adverting to. One is that pseudoscience is a phenomenon with a long history, and there is some certain basis, so it is impossible to cut its throat instantly. The other is that it is unadvisable to rank everything that can't be explained into pseudoscience. We'd better use the golden mean as the method to deal with pseudoscience, besides insisting the basic wariness; we also need the comprehension, the opening and the eye of history and development to understand something unexplained, such as herbalist medicine and Qi-gong.On the basis of above, and philosophy, history, characteristics, mechanism, the paper systemically analyses the difference and the relation between pseudoscience and prescience, hypothesis and error. Combining the history of pseudoscience in China, especially the Twenty Years, the paper discusses the harm and the prevention of pseudoscience. Meanwhile, the paper gives some thinking and advice about abolishing pseudoscience, and herbalist medicine, that is, holding the Chinese special feature. Definitely, some certain tension is absolutely needed. The writer hopes this paper will be helpful!...