[ THE PHILOSOPHER’S CORNER

MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk and Philosophy of Pseudoscience (coedited with Maarten Boudry). More by him at http://newstoicism.org/.

Remember CSICOP? The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was the forerunner of the current CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, that publishes the very magazine you are reading. CSICOP was launched by Paul Kurtz, Marcello Truzzi, and others on April 30, 1976. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Just the year before that momentous event, Kurtz spearheaded a public campaign against astrology by publishing a manifesto cowritten with Bart Bok and Lawrence E. Jerome, endorsed by 186 scientists (including nineteen Nobel laureates), and published in The Humanist, the organ of the American Humanist Association. The very first target of the new skeptic movement was, in other words, the broad practice of predicting the future by nonscientific means. And the approach deployed by the signatories of the manifesto was to spell out several criteria that demarcate science from pseudoscience.

And yet the problem of demarcation, together with criticism of what we nowadays refer to as pseudoscience, was far from new. Indeed, the first known example in history is On Divination, a book written by the ancient Roman orator, public advocate, statesman, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero in 44 BCE, the same year Julius Caesar was killed.