TOK dinner guest: Pigliucci on pseudoscience

“Indulging in a bit of pseudoscience in some instances may be relatively innocuous, but the problem is that doing so lowers your defenses against more dangerous delusions that are based on similar confusions and fallacies.”  So write Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry in an article on the dangers of pseudoscience.  This article is a very good compact treatment of “the borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience”, with attention to implications in our lives of what we accept in our minds.

Photo Credit: 27147 via Compfight cc

If you find this short article helpful in preparing yourself for TOK classes on the natural sciences, or for treating the real life implications of what people accept about the world, then you may want to follow Pigliucci’s blog Rationally Speaking  and podcast by the same name. 

Personally, I’m a fan.  But I pale in comparison with my husband and co-blogger Theo, who is given to telling me over dinner what Massimo was saying in the podcast he just listened to on his iShuffle as he was out kayaking or chopping wood.  Little does Massimo realize that on the other side of the continent from New York, where he is a philosopher at the City University, I have sometimes been inclined to set an extra place for him at our west coast dinner table!

References

Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, “The Dangers of Pseudoscience”, October 10, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/the-dangers-of-pseudoscience/?_r=0

Massimo Pigliucci.  Rationally Speaking, homepage. http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.ca/