People argue bad science, psuedoscience and nonsense for a variety of reasons, some religiously motivated, some politically motivated, some out of ignorance, some out of arrogance, some out emotional needs, some due to psychological problems.
When they encroach onto the scinetific turf and argue nonsense within a scientific domain, they use a limited set of rhetorical tools. The exact choice of tools depends on the motivation, as well as the forum where they advocate the nonsense. Some, the generals in the army in War On Science, have big soapboxes, e.g., TV, radio and newspapers. Some teach and preach in schools and churches. Some run blogs, and some – the footsoldiers of The War – troll on other people’s blogs.
So, when the motivation is political, when they are pushing for debunked conservative ideas, from femiphobic stances on anti-abortion and anti-stem-cell-research, through thinly-veiled racism of the War On Terror, to failed economic policies (“trickle-down”) and global-warming denial, they mainly use one set of rhetorical strategies.
When the motivation is religious, as in Creationism, the strategies are similar, but not exactly the same. Loony fringe pseudoscience, from the Left or the Right (and sometimes it is difficult to figure out if they come from the Left or the Right) – appears to employ very similar rhetorical devices as the religiously motivated pseudoscience, suggesting that perhaps both are sharing the same underlying emotional disturbances.
Pseudoscientists of various colors, the denialists of reality, have been the topic of a couple of interesitng blog posts recently, most notably this one on GiveUp Blog. PZ Myers chimed in as well, adding a couple of other rhetorical devices. A number of commenters also added some good ones, e.g., David Harmon:
— binary splitting (everything MUST be one way or another, no mixing)
— idealization and denigration (combines with the previous, e.g., “good” must be perfect; any contamination of “evil” makes something entirely “evil”)
— projection (assigning to others the characteristics they reject in themself)
and adspar:
Another common tactic is to magnify doubt, which goes along with setting impossible expectations. Chris Mooney mentions numerous examples of this tactic in his book.
If you can’t say something is 100% certain, or if your statistics have some margin of error, they jump all over it as if any sliver of doubt undermines a scientific claim.
Prometheus of Photon In The Darkness blog wrote a similar list of The Seven Most Common Thinking Errors of Highly Amusing Quacks and Pseudoscientists, in four installments: Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV. This was done with a lot of care for detail and is well worth your time to read.
I do not have too much to add to this, though I’d like to see a complete taxonomy of rhetorical strategies, tabulated as to which ones are more likely to be used by politically motivated vs. religiously motivated purveyors of nonsense, which are more likely to be found on big bully-pulpits and which in comment threads on blogs.
Recently, when looking at an example of medical quackery (another category of pseudoscience), I identified several more rhetorical strategies, which are all familiar to you, I’m sure:
Reverence for the Past
Reverence for the Ancient Wisdom of the Orient
Naive Scientism
Complexity
Appeal to Mathematics
Prosecution Complex (which may foster Secrecy)
What do you think?
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