Talk:Pseudoskepticism

message: Why is all the 'contemportary usage' parapsychologists (pseudoscientists) attacking people who disagree with them? Hows about we trim back the ghost-and-UFO-promotion and include maybe holocaust denial or AIDS denial? This is horribly POV, promoting supernatural phenomena and ignoring ACTUAL pseudoscepticism. Not that there aren't a few pseudosceptics in CSISOP or whatever but I would imagine most members simply haven't seen sufficient evidence. Earfetish1 (talk) 10:47, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Why do you see a need to trim any sourced material which is not incorrect?  If you have sources for "ACTUAL pseudoscepticism" (including what that phrase means) please help improve this article.  Alternately, if we cannot find usage examples beyond "parapsychologists (pseudoscientists) attacking people who disagree with them" then we really need to change the lead.  NJGW (talk) 19:37, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Contemporary usage

message: I'm proposing that this article, which really just relates to Marcello Truzzi's critique of a certain trend in scientific skepticism, be merged either to scientific skepticism or Marcello Truzzi.  Discuss this at talk:scientific skepticism. --TS 14:46, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I left a comment on the first talk page already suggesting that there needs to be a coupe of sentences there, but from looking at the second article I think what it already has covers this topic quite admirably, so this article should just redirect to that one. DreamGuy (talk) 17:26, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've gone ahead with the merge to Marcello Truzzi. --TS 22:17, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've gone ahead and undid your improper, discussion-free merge.  --Wjbeaty (talk) 21:55, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi, you'll find the discussion on talk:scientific skepticism.  No problem with undoing it.  --TS 22:12, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

text:  But I also notice that you've hauled back into the article a rather large amount of material that I had deleted in a cleanup.  Could you explain why you did that, please? Please come and discuss your concerns at Talk:Scientific skepticism#Marcello_Truzzi:_a_proposed_merge_for_pseudoskepticism. --TS 22:14, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed merge with [[scientific skepticism]] or [[Marcello Truzzi]]

message: There's a table that goes "Truzzi attributed the following characteristics to pseudoskeptics".  I tried to balance it by adding a similar table describing Truzzi's ideal of skepticism.
What concerns me about this is that it reduces Truzzi's nuanced opinion to a set of sound-bites.
Truzzi himself wrote:
: "In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof....
: "...Thus, if a subject in a psi experiment can be shown to have had an opportunity to cheat, many critics seem to assume not merely that he probably did cheat, but that he must have, regardless of what may be the complete absence of evidence that he did so cheat and sometimes even ignoring evidence of the subject's past reputation for honesty. Similarly, improper randomization procedures are sometimes assumed to be the cause of a subject's high psi scores even though all that has been established is the possibility of such an artifact having been the real cause. Of course, the evidential weight of the experiment is greatly reduced when we discover an opening in the design that would allow an artifact to confound the results. Discovering an opportunity for error should make such experiments less evidential and usually unconvincing. It usually disproves the claim that the experiment was "air tight" against error, but it does not disprove the anomaly claim."
The first quote is already in our article on Truzzi, the second is from two paragraphs further on in Truzzi's article.
I think that taken together these two lengthy quotes give a very accessible explanation of the phenomenon he was concerned about. The beauty of the writing above is that it depersonalizes the term and lays the issues bare--something even Truzzi himself was not always at pains to do.  --TS 05:55, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: The table

message: Some of this is good, most of it is junk. Some of it is just broken links.  I've brought it here for now.  The WikiQuote thing didn't work because the section it pointed to no longer exists on WikiQuote.
* Truzzi, Marcello, "On Pseudo-Skepticism".  Anomalist. (Commentary) 
* Truzzi, Marcello, "On Some Unfair Practices towards Claims of the Paranormal".  Oxymoron, 1998
* Drasin, Daniel, "Zen and the Art of Debunkery". aol.com, 1997.
* Milton, Richard, "Scientific skepticism".
* Mooney, Chris, "Abuses of Skepticism : Doubting is a powerful tool, but it can definitely be taken too far". CSICOP, December, 2003. 
* Haack, Susan, "Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism". CSICOP, December 1997. 
* Hall, Stephanie A. "Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics" Paper presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Folkore Society
* Sofka, Michael D., "Myths of Skepticism". ISUNY, March, 2002.
* Beaty, William J., "Symptoms of Pathological Sketicism". 1996.
* Hyman, Ray, "Proper Criticism". (csicop.org)
* Martin, Brian, "Strategies for dissenting scientists". Society for Scientific Exploration. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 12 No 4. 1998. (PDF)
* Baez, John, "The crackpot index : Method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.".
* Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Department of Psychology, Cornell University.
*  Debunking Pseudo-Skeptical Arguments of Paranormal Debunkers  by Winston Wu
*  A Logical Analysis of Winston Wu's Anti-Skeptical Article by Paul Sandoval
* Wilson, Robert Anton, interview in which he discusses CSICOP and pseudoskeptism, what he calls "irrational rationalists" and "fundamentalist materialism"
* Sarma, Amardeo, Misguided Stigmatization of "Organized Skepticism"
* Skeptic's pages - Quotes and links to articles about skepticism and pseudoskepticism.
--TS 06:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: The link farm

message: I don't think the pathological skepticism thing holds up. The examples we have  here, Leiter, Meynell, Kluft, even Blackmore to a certain extent, are diverse and focus on different aspects.  Leiter has encountered former fundies who have swung to the other side of the pendulum.  Meynall basically caricatures orthodox skeptical approaches.  Kluft wishes for more dispassionate (and presumably less derisive) skeptics.  Blackmore comes closest to a genuine characteristic when she highlights a priori dismissal.  She seems to be using the term "pseudoskepticism" in the same sense as Truzzi.
And perhaps Truzzi's "psi" example seemed more weighty when Geller was still claiming to be doing something other than entertain people.
All of those objections are coming from the heterodox side (Blackmore still chafes), and they're very weak and disorganized.  Can somebody convince me, perhaps with examples from the "link farm" above, that there's a coherent phenomenon distinct from Truzzi's "biting off more than one can chew" pseudo-skepticism? --TS 08:12, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose what I'm getting at is that there are bad painters, there are names for bad painting, such as "daubing", but there is no article on bad painting, or pathological painting, and daubing is a redirect to wattle and daub, an entirely different meaning of the word.  There is a phenomenon known as pathological science, but compared to the few comments about pathological skepticism this is an absolutely vast field, with sources by Nobel Prize-winners and science professors.  I suspect that pathological skepticism may be more towards the "daubing" end of the spectrum of "bad ways of doing things that have names" than the "pathological science" end.  Significant criticisms of scientific skepticism (and there are some in the link farm) should probably be mentioned in scientific skepticism, but probably do not need a separate article in my view. --TS 01:04, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  There has been no response in over a week.  I'm inclined to restore the redirect, and include the Blackmore quotation as an example of the use of the term with the same meaning by others.  The "link farm" contains much dross, but I propose to move it to the talk page of scientific skepticism to see if there's material in it that can be worked into that article. --TS 04:35, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, restore the redirect. There's just no reason to have this article as a separate toic. DreamGuy (talk) 19:24, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

text: I apologize but I missed this conversation. Can I request that we do a proper "Merge" discussion before we do such a redirect? Thanks. -- Levine2112 discuss 19:47, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: The problem

message: Okay, I set up a proper merge template and am opening this for community discussion. Thanks again! -- Levine2112 discuss 19:50, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Undid it.  We can see if there's consensus to undo it, but this has been done twice already.  NJGW (talk) 19:53, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Okay. Can you please point me to the two proper Merge conversations? I can't seem to find it (except for one informal one on this page from 2007). Thanks. -- Levine2112 discuss 19:57, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: "Proper"?  Is there such a thing as an "unproper merge conversation"?  This was discussed extensively over the course of months.  Read the talk page and archives.  Feel free to state your case, but existing consensus is that they should be merged.  NJGW (talk) 20:00, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

text: I'm not sure if it was a good idea or not. I'm not really commenting on that at the moment. I just want to make sure that the standard protocol (including a merge template on this and the target article) was followed. Above I see a decision made by a limited amount of editors without the benefit of such a template. The templates are used to garner more community input. That is the way to properly propose a merge and have a discussion. If such a process has already occured, that is fine. I am just asking to be pointed to some diff of the article or section of the talk page where the "Merge proposal" discussion happened. Thanks. -- Levine2112 discuss 20:37, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're not commenting about the redirect then you're disrupting Wikipedia to make a wp:POINT. Please don't do that. Have a look at the article history and the process above, in which a group of editors (and by the very nature of WP, a group will ALWAYS be limited) whittled down the article TWICE until they realized there was nothing left worth its own article. You were bold, I reverted, let's discuss what you think the issue with the redirect is, not what you think the only way to do a merge is. NJGW (talk) 20:44, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The article was still in flux, but I found it pointless to edit with people who were more concerned about getting the article deleted than developing an article on the philosophical debate that caused the schism in csicop. The same kind of debate happened repeatedly on every topic on this schism. Just check out all the links in the article now pointing to the truzzi article. And how all the references that were in place in the article has been moved into a a biography on Truzzi, ie not his work. It's silly and the wp:POINT was really just a bunch of editors feel pseudoskepticism is a touchy subject. Remember this article started as "pathological skepticism" - but renamed pseudoskepticsm later on. This edit-and-reduce-then-delete tactic is annoying to us editors who like to return to articles when we DO find something to add instead of getting it deleted because we can't present data on the subject within two days. --Benjaminbruheim (talk) 02:38, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I would suggest that you continue to add to the "Pseudoskepticism" section of the Truzzi article. If enough well-sourced, encyclopaedic information is added there which establishes the notability of the concept "Pseudoskepticism", then it will become too big for the Truzzi article, and as such, we would be mandated to split the Pseudoskepticism information off into its own article. -- Levine2112 discuss 02:56, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, I feel it is bad form, because anything on pathological skepticism belongs here and not to Truzzi. But I guess there's no option at this pace. I'd prefer a stub notice rather than being forced into a section in a barely relevant article; and notice what's gone in the merge. --Benjaminbruheim (talk) 03:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree. I think the merge was decided on and executed poorly. That said, I am not sure what I would have "voted" if this had gone through the proper merge procedure. For now, don't think it weird to add non-Truzzi-related information to the "Pseudoskepticism" portion of the Marcello Truzzi article. For all intents and purposes, that section is the Pseudoskepticism article now and can and should be treated as such. Again, if that section becomes too overwhelming and irrelevant for the Truzzi article, then splitting it off to its own article would be warranted. -- Levine2112 discuss 03:13, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

text: That article was this article. This article is about the concept pseudoskepticism and the word pseudoskepticism was solely chosen because it was a better designator. That is from reading and following the debate. That the article turned into specifically defining pseudoskepticism and not the wider (and with more names) the phenomena and concept is because editors seems to have forgotten this. Actually it would rather make sense to merge it with scientific skepticism since that article is now devoid from criticism (and that is due to the same process that this article has gone under). And pseudoskepticism is mostly a critique of the shallowness of the culture surrounding scientific skepticism after all. --Benjaminbruheim (talk) 09:13, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't been around long enough to have been a part of those changes.  Making Scientific skepticism a more dynamic article may be a good idea too, as long as it's done well and without being too attached to this term.  I'm just concerned that, given the sources I've seen and dug up personally, any article under the name 'pseudoskepticism' would be a wp:coatrack for Truzzi's philosophy... which it didn't even do so well to begin with.  NJGW (talk) 15:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

text: It has been stated that the merger was not tagged and discussed.  That is incorrect as can be seen in the history of this merger, which was first proposed on January 11th with formal taggings. --TS 07:29, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  For clarification, I was looking for a merge tag and subsequent formal discussion about merging this article with Marcello Truzzi. The merge tag which you added on January 11 was for Scientific skepticism, not to Marcello Truzzi. I see that a discussion happened not here on this article talk page, but rather at Talk:Scientific_skepticism#Marcello_Truzzi:_a_proposed_merge_for_pseudoskepticism. That's fine. But I don't see much of a consensus for such a merger there. I see three editors in favor and two editors against. Am I missing something? -- Levine2112 discuss 08:37, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: So to summarize, I believe that the first part of the article may be taken as an explanation of the way in which "pseudoskeptic" was a neologism developed in the middle of the nineteenth century to describe the philosophical overreach that tempted young European gentlemen who, having received proper upbringings in good Christian homes, encountered troubling cognitive dissonance upon reaching educated, thoughtful adulthood.
At the same time the second part of the article describes the hijack of this very word at he end of the twentieth century by an obtuse and derivative sociology teacher of no particular merit who provided the stunning revelation, constituting absolutely no news whatsoever among the community of thoughtful skeptics, that James Randi can often be a kind of a prick.
Is that correct?
Rt3368 (talk) 08:16, 6 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  In Summary 

message: In many cases today, this is more a claim, used in supernatural-denialism accusations.  This may perhaps explain the previous "a term referring to" which was recently removed, but if so this was still unclear.  This article itself of course needs work, but the lead appears to lack this distinction, the sentence reads like if this was always true.  Common examples are spiritualist healers or alternative medicine practitioners calling pseudoskeptics those who investigate their claims scientifically and/or dismiss their extraordinary claims as improbable when a better explanation is understood (an example of use against editors was at WP:ARBPS, not usable as a source).  The article already mentions Truzzi in this context, also see CSICOP#Controversy and criticism.  CSI was accused of pseudoskepticism when evaluating cases like Natasha Demkina's.  —PaleoNeonate – 00:41, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lead definition 

message: This looked as if someone had dredge the literature and collected all the sources they could find where someone used the word. But the WP:PRIMARY usages of it are WP:UNDUE. Every loon and crank, when contradicted by skeptics, will search for some way of deflection, and Truzzi's concept is useful for such tactics. That does not mean that we have to directly quote all of the instances. Secondary sources are needed here. I deleted two primary sources. --Hob Gadling (talk) 07:11, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subsequent usage