Search results for "Pseudoscience"
showing 10 items of 15 documents
En quin grau afecten les pseudociències a la comunitat educativa?
2018
Pseudosciences are present and accepted naturally by broad sectors of the population. Despite their potential risks, they are not taken into account when teaching science; some universities have even offered official pseudoscientific courses. In this text we want to learn about the degree of acceptance of these beliefs in high-school science teachers in training, who have been detected to have significant levels of acceptance of pseudoscience.
Divanes, gurús y trastornos mentales. El origen y los peligros de la pseudopsicología clínica
2017
Pseudoscience is alarmingly present in the context of clinical psychology and is also very dangerous. As a set of pseudoscientific ideas, clinical pseudopsychology has a peculiar characteristic: it has established an entire tradition parallel to psychology, with numerous branches and interrelated theoretical and practical developments. In this paper we will review that tradition, from pseudoscientific hypnosis to psychoanalysis, and from New Age to present-day neuropseudoscience. We will then review some of the dangers of pseudoscience related to mental disorders.
Conceptual foundations and validation of the Pseudoscientific Belief Scale
2019
Pseudoscience and bad science in biomedicine : analysis of evidence, health risk, and media dissemination
2018
Pseudoscience (false science) and science based on faulty and biased studies (bad science) produce false or uncertain knowledge, with poor or no evidence. Both represent a health risk: pseudoscience-based therapies because they can replace or delay conventional treatments, and low-quality biomedicine because it promotes medical interventions that can be dangerous. In the press, alternative therapies are less prevalent than low-quality research, while the former tends to be framed negatively and the latter favourably. Both require more thorough and rigorous studies to better understand their negative effects on critical thinking, economics, and health-related decision making. This work is fr…
Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?
2022
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stan…
A Twitter campaign against pseudoscience: The sceptical discourse on complementary therapies in Spain
2019
The main objective of this article is to analyse the sceptical movement’s discourse on complementary therapies in Spain, as well as comprehend its mobilisation against these therapies. Over the past 2 years, the Spanish sceptical movement, constituted by citizen’s associations against unconventional therapies and in favour of evidence-based medicine, has increased its activism which, as a result, is now more familiar to the public. To perform this study, three sources of information were selected: (a) the #StopPseudociencias campaign, with a corpus of 6252 tweets; (b) 153 news articles published during the study timeline and (c) 7 interviews with members of the sceptical movement, journalis…
Do as the Romans do: On the authoritarian roots of pseudoscience
2020
Recent research highlights the implications of group dynamics in the acceptance and promotion of misconceptions, particularly in relation to the identity-protective attitudes that boost polarisation over scientific information. In this study, we successfully test a mediational model between right-wing authoritarianism and pseudoscientific beliefs. First, we carry out a comprehensive literature review on the socio-political background of pseudoscientific beliefs. Second, we conduct two studies (n=1189 and n=1097) to confirm our working hypotheses: H1 – intercorrelation between pseudoscientific beliefs, authoritarianism and three axioms (reward for application, religiosity and fate control); …
Are Pseudosciences Like Seagulls? A Discriminant Metacriterion Facilitates the Solution of the Demarcation Problem
2019
In this article, I develop a philosophical framework, or ‘metacriterion’, for the demarcation of pseudoscience. Firstly, ‘gradualist demarcation’ is discussed in depth, considering an approach to t...
From creationism to economics : how far should analyses of pseudoscience extend?
2017
Both the scientific and philosophical problems with classic pseudosciences such as astrology and creationism are well known, leading to institutions that are not structured to promote cognitive advancement. A focus on institutions, however, also encourages recognition of gray areas, such as parapsychology, which combines scientifically dubious claims with institutions that are comparable to most social sciences in their structure. Furthermore, institutional approaches to pseudoscience also raise questions about some academically mainstream fields such as economics. In such cases, pseudoscientific aspects of practice are harder to identify, highlighting the need to place analyses of pseudosc…
Whence pseudoscience? An epidemiological approach
2017
In this paper, we develop an epidemiological approach to account for the typical features and persistent popularity of pseudoscience. An epidemiology of pseudoscience aims at explaining why some beliefs become widely distributed whereas others do not and hence seeks to identify the factors that exert a causal effect on this distribution. We pinpoint and discuss several factors that promote the dissemination of pseudoscientific beliefs. In particular, we argue that such beliefs manage to spread widely because they are intuitively appealing, manage to hitchhike on the authority of science, and successfully immunize themselves from criticism.