Pseudoscience Books

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited. The term pseudoscience is considered pejorative, because it ...more

Pseudoscience Books

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Popular Science)

Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating

The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience: 2 volumes

Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

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?wiaty równoleg?e. Czego ucz? nas p?askoziemcy, homeopaci i ró?d?karze

On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience

The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

Lists

Large Group Awareness Training

29 books — 24 voters

Historical Supernovae and Their Remnants by F. Richard Stephenson

No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again by sarah-editor-simons

Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy by Robert Hewitt Brown

Cycle of Solar Crab-Lice Boil

99 books — 3 voters

Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening by Rose Rosetree

The Blindspots Between Us by Gleb Tsipursky

Never Go With Your Gut by Gleb Tsipursky

Cut Cords of Attachment for Self-Healing by Rose Rosetree

Self-Help Books I Have No Intention of Reading

106 books — 5 voters

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Books Mentioned In RationallySpeaking Podcast Pt.2

2 books — 1 voter

Science 4 for Christian Schools by Dawn L. Watkins

The Inequality of Human Races by Arthur de Gobineau

Worst pseudoscience books

92 books — 9 voters

The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff

Liars, damned liars and their books

179 books — 7 voters

Featured News & Interviews

Readers' Most Anticipated April Books

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Quotes Tagged “Pseudoscience”

“ Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . . TAT: Please do. Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome: 1. If a pat Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . . TAT: Please do. Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome: 1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more; 2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators; 3. If there is denial by the entire family; 4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia; 5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and; 6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology. Are these the kind of things you were asking for? TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome." Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy. TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works! Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved. TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told. ...more ”
― David L. Calof

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“ [...] The statement "Botticelli's Birth of Venus is stunning", for starters, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, because there is no experiment that might show this statement to be false. Parallax method and equations conventionally determined that the average distance between the Earth and the Moon is 384 400 Km (238 855 miles). Now, if we were to conduct hands-on investigation for its validation or an audit to demonstrate its falsification, direct testing of such a distance measure would require a ...more ”
― Vincent Bozzino, Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide

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