Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science

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Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) was Martin Gardner's second bookFads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957; Dover; ISBN 0486203948. Dover had published a collection of mathematical puzzles the year before, and Gardner had already written many articles throughout the 1950s., and has become a classic in the literature of entertaining scientific skepticism. It is perhaps the first modern book of scientific skepticism of pseudoscience.

The book debunks pseudoscientific ideas, and examines how they arose. It is currently (2005) in its 31st printing. The 1957 Dover publication is a revised and expanded version of In the Name of Science, which was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1952.

It was expanded from an article first published in the Antioch Review in 1950In the preface to the first edition the Author thanks the Review for allowing him to develop the article as the starting point of his book., which became the first chapter of the book; chapter one explains the attraction of science to "cranks" and "pseudo scientists", who he describes as having five invariable characteristics:

The pseudo-scientist has a profound intellectual superiority complex.
The pseudo-scientist regards other researchers as idiotic, and always operates outside the peer review system (hence the title of the original Antioch Review article, "The Hermit Scientist").
The pseudo-scientist believes there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur.
Instead of side-stepping the mainstream the pseudo-scientist attacks it head-on: The most revered scientist is Einstein so Gardner writes that Einstein is the most likely establishment figure to be attacked. He writes: "A perpetual motion machine cannot be built. He builds one".
He coins neologisms.

These psychological traits are amply demonstrated throughout the remaining chapters of the book, in which he examines particular "fads" he labels pseudo-scientific. Most of the book's targets have since passed into obscurity (e.g. Fletcherism), but a few of the ideas labelled "modern pseudoscience"In the introduction, Gardner says that he will be discussing modern pseudo scientists, on which few books had then been written. His writing became the source book from which many later studies of pseudo-science were taken (e.g. Encyclopedia of Pseudo-science). All of the case-studies were contemporary fads, but some had a long history, which the book traces (for example on homeopathy in the "Medical Cults" chapter). by Gardner are still extant more than a half century after the book was first published, including:

Charles Fort's magazine Fortean Timesis still popular, and still even more skeptical than Gardner himself. (Gardner sees some value in Fort's "doubt everything" Hegelian philosophy (or philosophical skepticism versus Gardner's scientific skepticism), but finds the unwillingness to accept varying degrees of confidence "blind".On Page 49, Gardner writes: "...scientific theories can be given high or low degrees of confirmation. Fort was blind to this elementary fact...")
Creationism.
Organic farming
Rudolf Steiner's philosophy (described as an "anthroposophical cult" on page 224) and his belief in Gaia have both become more popular since the book's first publication.
Dianetics.
Unidentified flying objects
Dowsing
Extra-sensory perception
Psychokinesis

Criticism

Modern skeptics (and supporters of the paranormal) have accused the book of lapsing into ad hominem reportage. Critics of the scientific hegemony charge the work with being closed-minded. A recent critique of Gardner, "In the Name of Skepticism: Martin Gardner's Misrepresentations of General Semantics," by Bruce I. Kodish, appeared in General Semantics Bulletin, Number 71, 2004.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science

Criticism

See also

Notes