Pseudoscience and Pseudoskepticism

I have just finished reading Lynne McTaggart's The Intention Experiment, described in Wikipedia as a work of "pseudoscience". Now this book contained plenty of things that made me go "Hmmm", but still…"pseudoscience" is a particularly nasty word to throw at an author, unless the author is someone like, say, Rhonda Byrne, in which case "pseudoscience" might actually be a compliment. McTaggart is surely not in Byrne's league; she may not be a scientist, but at least she speaks the language. The Intention Experiment is not a scholarly work, and is mooching around the fringes of what we would call "science", but I wouldn't say that it was actually pseudoscientific in the way that, say, astrology is pseudoscientific. I could perhaps accuse her of violating Occam's razor, in that whenever there are two theories that explain the data, my suspicion is that McTaggart will choose the kookier one, but even so, they are still theories that explain the data, that are falsifiable and have, at least in some cases, stood up to experimental testing.

It seems that the label of pseudoscience is based largely on the content of the book, which concerns the supposed effects of human intention on matter. This is, admittedly, a weird subject. We are accustomed to the idea that our thoughts can affect our bodies; if we didn't believe this, we would not be able to perform voluntary physical actions like walking or eating. If mind over matter is a fiction, it is at least a convenient fiction. The only non-absurd alternatives here are (i) the hypothesis that our intention to walk is somehow a side-effect of our walking and (ii) a rejection of "mind" and/or "matter". Things get weird when we consider the possibility of our thoughts influencing matter outside our bodies—other people's bodies, for example. It is here that skeptics rush in where angels fear to tread, proclaiming loudly, and with lashings of sarcasm, that such things are impossible. Not just unproven, but impossible, unscientific and the kind of thing only New Age Californian airheads believe in.

Let us imagine an experiment. Some scientists fly to Haiti and hire a bunch of Voodoo sorcerors to curse a randomly selected group of patients at a hospital in New York. The sorcerors are given the names and photographs of the patients but no other information. Meanwhile in New York, doctors monitor the health of these patients compared to that of a control group. Neither doctors nor patients are aware of which group is being cursed. Finally, someone does the maths and finds that the fatality rate of the cursed group is higher than that of the control group to a statistically significant degree.

The experimental protocols look fine. If, instead of a curse, the patients had been given a drug, that drug would have been taken off the market pretty quickly. But I suspect that were such an experiment to be performed, it would be slammed, not just on ethical, but also on scientific grounds, simply because of the hypothesis that is being tested. After all, we simply need to reverse cursing to healing and we have something similar to dozens of studies that have actually been carried out—and rejected by most of the scientific community.

Now this could just be a case of scientists following Laplace's dictum that "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness" (popularised by Carl Sagan as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"). However, I suspect that here, as with McTaggart's book, we are starting to see pseudoskepticism. The reasoning is something like "It can't possibly be true, so it can't be scientific." Over in the Philosophy department, they call that "begging the question".