With this new column, we are delighted to welcome back to our pages on a regular basis our esteemed colleague the philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci. His f irst SI column, “Thinking about Science,” ran for twelve years from 2002 to 2015. This new column will explore skepticism from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science. —The Editors
The term pseudoscience has been the object of a renewed interest by philosophers of science in recent years. This is not just because the so-called demarcation problem—the question of what distinguishes science from pseudoscience—is inherently interesting to philosophers and epistemologists. It is also because pseudoscience matters, as in the case of the increasingly clear negative personal and societal effects of, for instance, vaccine and climate change denialism.