4.6 Multi-criterial approaches
Popper’s method of demarcation consists essentially of the single criterion of falsifiability (although some authors have wanted to combine it with the additional criteria that tests are actually performed and their outcomes respected, see Section 4.2). Most of the other criteria discussed above are similarly mono-criterial, of course with Merton’s proposal as a major exception.
Most authors who have proposed demarcation criteria have instead put forward a list of such criteria. A large number of lists have been published that consist of (usually 5–10) criteria that can be used in combination to identify a pseudoscience or pseudoscientific practice. This includes lists by Langmuir ([1953] 1989), Gruenberger (1964), Dutch (1982), Bunge (1982), Radner and Radner (1982), Kitcher (1982, 30–54), Hansson (1983), Grove (1985), Thagard (1988), Glymour and Stalker (1990), Derkson (1993, 2001), Vollmer (1993), Ruse (1996, 300–306) and Mahner (2007). Many of the criteria that appear on such lists relate closely to criteria discussed above in Sections 4.2 and 4.4. One such list reads as follows:
1. Belief in authority: It is contended that some person or persons have a special ability to determine what is true or false. Others have to accept their judgments.
2. Unrepeatable experiments: Reliance is put on experiments that cannot be repeated by others with the same outcome.
3. Handpicked examples: Handpicked examples are used although they are not representative of the general category that the investigation refers to.
4. Unwillingness to test: A theory is not tested although it is possible to test it.
5. Disregard of refuting information: Observations or experiments that conflict with a theory are neglected.
6. Built-in subterfuge: The testing of a theory is so arranged that the theory can only be confirmed, never disconfirmed, by the outcome.
7. Explanations are abandoned without replacement. Tenable explanations are given up without being replaced, so that the new theory leaves much more unexplained than the previous one. (Hansson 1983)
Some of the authors who have proposed multicriterial demarcations have defended this approach as being superior to any mono-criterial demarcation. Hence, Bunge (1982, 372) asserted that many philosophers have failed to provide an adequate definition of science since they have presupposed that a single attribute will do; in his view the combination of several criteria is needed. Dupré (1993, 242) proposed that science is best understood as a Wittgensteinian family resemblance concept. This would mean that there is a set of features that are characteristic of science, but although every part of science will have some of these features, we should not expect any part of science to have all of them.
However, a multicriterial definition of science is not needed to justify a multicriterial account of how pseudoscience deviates from science. Even if science can be characterized by a single defining characteristic, different pseudoscientific practices may deviate from science in widely divergent ways. Hence, the above-mentioned seven-itemed characterization of pseudoscience was proposed as representing seven common ways to deviate from a minimal (necessary but not sufficient) criterion of science, namely:
Science is a systematic search for knowledge whose validity does not depend on the particular individual but is open for anyone to check or rediscover.
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