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Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) was Martin Gardner's second book[0], and has become a classic in the literature of entertaining skepticism. 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Martin Gardner (born October 21, 1914) is an American recreational mathematician, skeptic, and author of the long-running but now discontinued Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. ...
Occams razor non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem or plurality should not be posited without necessity is a central tenet of skeptical thought. ...
The book debunks pseudoscientific ideas, and examines how they arose. It is currently in its 31st printing. It was expanded from an article first published in the Antioch Review in 1950[1], which became the first chapter of the book; chapter one explains the attraction of science to "cranks" and "pseudo scientists", who he describes as having five invariable characteristics: Phrenology is seen today as a classic example of pseudoscience. ...
1950 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ...
- The pseudo-scientist has a profound intellectual superiority complex.
- The pseudo-scientist regards other researchers as idiotic, and always operates outside the peer review system (hence the title of the original Antioch Review article: The Hermit Scientist).
- The pseudo-scientist believes there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur.
- Instead of side-stepping the mainstream the pseudo-scientist attacks it head-on: The most revered scientist is Einstein so Gardner writes that Einstein is the most likely establishment figure to be attacked. He writes: "A perpetual motion machine cannot be built. He builds one".
- He coins neologisms.
These pyschological traits are amply demonstrated throughout the remaining chapters of the book, in which he examines particular "fads" he labels pseudo-scientific. Most of the book's targets have since passed into obscurity, but a few of the ideas labelled "modern pseudoscience"[2] by Gardner are still extant nearly a half century after the book was first published: A superiority complex is an exaggerated feeling of being superior to others. ...
Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ...
Galileo can refer to: Galileo Galilei, astronomer, philosopher, and physicist (1564 - 1642) the Galileo spacecraft, a NASA space probe that visited Jupiter and its moons the Galileo positioning system Life of Galileo, a play by Bertolt Brecht Galileo (1975) - screen adaptation of the play Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht...
Louis Pasteur (December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French microbiologist and chemist who demonstrated the germ theory of disease and developed techniques of inoculation, most notably the first vaccine against rabies. ...
For other topics related to Einstein see Einstein (disambiguation). ...
A neologism is word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (coined) —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form. ...
Phrenology is seen today as a classic example of pseudoscience. ...
- Charles Fort's magazine is still popular, and still even more skeptical than Gardner himself. (Gardner sees some value in Fort's "doubt everything" Hegelian philosophy, but finds the unwillingness to accept varying degrees of confidence "blind".[3])
- Creationism.
- Organic farming, whose leader is dismissed in the "Food Fadists" chapter as a self-publisher who is "even more extreme than the vegetarians"[4]
- Rudolf Steiner's philosophy (described as an "anthroposophical cult" on page 224) and his belief in Gaia have both become more popular since the book's first publication.
- Dianetics.
Charles Fort, 1920 Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 - May 3, 1932), writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. ...
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ...
This article is about the Abrahamic belief; creationism can also refer to origin beliefs in general or, centuries earlier, to an alternative to traducianism. ...
Organic farming is a way of agriculture that relies on ecosystem management rather than external agricultural inputs. ...
Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861, Murakirály, Hungary [today Donji Kraljevec, Croatia] – March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker, who is best known as the founder of Anthroposophy and its practical applications, including Waldorf School, Biodynamic agriculture, the Camphill Movement...
Based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiners spiritual science, Anthroposophy (based on Greek words meaning man-wisdom) is a philosophy (or, as some opponents claim, a religion) that was born within the setting of Helena Blavatskys Theosophy movement. ...
Gaia, also spelled as Gaea, Gaïa, or Ge, can refer to any one of the following. ...
Waldorf Schools (also known as Steiner schools) state as their mission educating the whole child, with a strong emphasis on balancing the childs natural stages of development with creativity and academic excellence. ...
In Scientology, Dianetics is put forward as a methodology to alleviate unwanted sensations and emotions, irrational fears and psychosomatic illnesses. ...
Criticism
Modern skeptics (and supporters of the paranormal) have accused the book of lapsing into ad hominem reportage. Critics of the scientific hegemony charge the work with being closed-minded. A recent critique of Gardner, "In the Name of Skepticism: Martin Gardner's Misrepresentations of General Semantics," by Bruce I. Kodish, appeared in General Semantics Bulletin, Number 71, 2004. Anomalous phenomena are phenomena which are observed and for which there are no suitable explanations in the context of a specific body of scientific knowledge, e. ...
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin, literally argument to the man), is a logical fallacy that involves replying to an argument or assertion by addressing the person presenting the argument or assertion rather than the argument itself. ...
For the scientific journal named Science, see Science (journal). ...
Cultural hegemony is the concept that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination. ...
This article is on dogma in religion. ...
General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction. ...
See also Survivorship bias is the tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies due to the fact that they no longer exist. ...
Notes 0. ^ Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957; Dover; ISBN 0486203948. Dover had published a collection of mathematical puzzles the year before, and Gardner had already written many articles throughout the 1950s. 1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
// Events and trends The 1950s in Western society was marked with a sharp rise in the economy for the first time in almost 30 years and return to the 1920s-type consumer society built on credit and boom-times, as well as the height of the baby-boom from returning...
1. ^ In the preface to the first edition the Author thanks the Review for allowing him to develop the article as the starting point of his book.
2. ^ In the introduction, Gardner says that he will be discussing modern pseudo scientists, on which few books had then been written. His writing became the source book from which many later studies of pseudo-science were taken (e.g. Encyclopedia of Pseudo-science). All of the case-studies were contemporary fads, but some had a long history, which the book traces (for example on homeopathy in the "Medical Cults" chapter). Homeopathy (also spelled homœopathy or homoeopathy) from the Greek words όμοιος, hómoios (similar) and πάθος, páthos (suffering), is a system of alternative medicine, notable for its controversial practice of prescribing water-based solutions that in many cases do not contain chemically active ingredients. ...
3. ^ On Page 49, Gardner writes: "...scientifc theories can be given high or low degrees of confirmation. Fort was blind to this elementary fact..."
4. ^ Page 224 describes Jerome Rodale as "also the leader in this country of a movement known as 'organic farming'". (Garder says that the book will only cover U.S. pseudo-scientists, and that is where the contempory case-studies are located.) This section of the book probably contains the ideas which would now be considered the most mainstream (widely accepted in public discourse, in not scientific journals). He writes that "Soil and nutrition experts tell us that if plants grow at all, their composition tends to remain essentially the same, with respect to mineral and vitamin content..." which is used as evidence against the organic farming position that "food also loses in health value if it is grown in soil that has been devitalized by chemical fertilizers". For other uses, see United States (disambiguation) and US (disambiguation). ...
A Vitamin is an organic molecule required by a living organism in minute amounts for normal health. ...
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