---
title: "Demarcation problem"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:17.130830+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Laudan ==
Larry Laudan concluded, after examining various historical attempts to establish a demarcation criterion, that "philosophy has failed to deliver the goods" in its attempts to distinguish science from non-science—to distinguish science from pseudoscience. None of the past attempts would be accepted by a majority of philosophers nor, in his opinion, should they be accepted by them or by anyone else. He stated that many well-founded beliefs are not scientific and, conversely, many scientific conjectures are not well-founded. He also stated that demarcation criteria were historically used as machines de guerre in polemical disputes between "scientists" and "pseudo-scientists". Advancing a number of examples from everyday practice of football and carpentry and non-scientific scholarship such as literary criticism and philosophy, he considered the question of whether a belief is well-founded or not to be more practically and philosophically significant than whether it is scientific or not. In his judgment, the demarcation between science and non-science was a pseudo-problem that would best be replaced by examining the distinction between reliable and unreliable knowledge, without bothering to ask whether that knowledge is scientific or not. He would consign phrases like "pseudo-science" or "unscientific" to the rhetoric of politicians or sociologists.

== Modern proposals ==
Others have disagreed with Laudan. Sebastian Lutz, for example, argued that demarcation does not have to be a single necessary and sufficient condition as Laudan implied. Rather, Laudan's reasoning at most establishes that there has to be one necessary criterion and one possibly different sufficient criterion. 
Various typologies or taxonomies of sciences versus nonsciences, and reliable knowledge versus illusory knowledge, have been proposed. Ian Hacking, Massimo Pigliucci, and others have noted that the sciences generally conform to Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances.

Other critics have argued for multiple demarcation criteria, some suggesting that there should be one set of criteria for the natural sciences, another set of criteria for the social sciences, and claims involving the supernatural could have a set of pseudoscientific criteria. Anthropologist Sean M. Rafferty of the University at Albany, SUNY in his text Misanthropology: Science, Pseudoscience, and the Study of Humanity contrasts science and pseudoscience within his discipline thusly:[E]ven for those subfields where there is a significant element of interpretation, those interpretations are still based on and constrained by physical evidence. And interpretations are always provisional, pending possible refutation by contradictory evidence ... Pseudoscience, by comparison, is scornful of evidence. The pseudoscientist reaches a preferred conclusion in advance, then selects evidence, often removed from any relevant context, to lend supposed support for their conclusions. Often the preconceived conclusion is one that justifies some closely held identity or ideology. Contradictory evidence is waved away or ignored, and as a last resort, one can always claim conspiracy to keep pseudoscientific ideas suppressed.
In 2025, Springer Nature published the monograph A Working Scientific Demarcation, by Damian Fernandez-Beanato, which purports to use multi-criterial meta-analyses to offer the first working general solution to the demarcation problem.

== Significance ==
Concerning science education, Michael D. Gordin wrote:

Every student in public or private schools takes several years of science, but only a small fraction of them pursue careers in the sciences. We teach the rest of them so much science so that they will appreciate what it means to be scientific – and, hopefully, become scientifically literate and apply some of those lessons in their lives. For such students, the myth of a bright line of demarcation is essential.
Discussions of the demarcation problem concern the rhetoric of science and promote critical thinking, which is important for democracy. For example, Gordin stated: "Demarcation remains essential for the enormously high political stakes of climate-change denial and other anti-regulatory fringe doctrines".
Philosopher Herbert Keuth noted:

Perhaps the most important function of the demarcation between science and nonscience is to refuse political and religious authorities the right to pass binding judgments on the truth of certain statements of fact.
Concern for informed human nutrition resulted in the following note in 1942:

If our boys and girls are to be exposed to the superficial and frequently ill-informed statements about science and medicine made over the radio and in the daily press, it is desirable, if not necessary, that some corrective in the form of accurate factual information be provided in the schools. Although this is not a plea that chemistry teachers should at once introduce the study of proteins into their curricula, it is a suggestion that they should at least inform themselves and become prepared to answer questions and counteract the effects of misinformation.
The demarcation problem has been compared to the problem of differentiating fake news from real news, which became prominent during the 2016 United States presidential election.

== See also ==

Boundary-work
Idealism
Relativism
Scientism

== References ==

== External links ==
Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Pseudoscience and the Demarcation Problem". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.