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is advanced. Rachel Laudan attempts to understand the theory change that occurred in geology in the 1970s within the context of Kuhn’s thesis. Laudan concludes by contesting the view of others in the field who contend that that change involved a Kuhnian revolu- tion. John C. Greene argues that Kuhn’s conceptual model inadequately explains the development of natural history from John Ray to Charles Darwin, though he thinks “that an inadequate hypothesis is better than none at all.” Perhaps he makes the most telling point of all when he says that those “who question the validity of Kuhn’s model should feel themselves challenged to provide alternative interpretations of the genesis of revolutions in science” (p. 3 17).

As any anthology, of course, this one has gaps of a more or less serious nature. Im- portant reviews by Popper, Feyerabend, Lakotos, and Scheffler, among others, for in- stance, are not included. T o some degree, Gutting’s incisive and succinct introduction makes up for this omission. In any case, Gutting has put together an essential companion to the works of K u h n that all of us who remain intrigued by the central intellectual con- trovery that he triggered will want to have on our shelves. Editor’s Note: J H B S invited Professor Gutting to reply, but he did not feel that any reply was necessary.

Marsha P. Hanen, Margaret J. Osler, and Robert G . Weyant, eds. Science, Pseudo- science and Society. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. x + 303 pp. $7.50 (Reviewed by BRIAN MACKENZIE)

This volume of edited conference proceedings is one of several recent collections of papers on pseudo-, unorthodox, or unconventional science. In several ways it is akin to the Sociological Review monograph On the Margins of Science,‘ and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) symposium volume The Reception of Unconventional Science.2 The papers in all three were first presented or published in a six-month period in 1979. All three explore the relationship between science and pseudoscience (or marginal, proto-, deviant, and so on, science) in the aftermath of the demise of the reassuring demarcation criteria of an earlier generation. Marx Wartofsky sets the stage in his introductory comments to this volume:

Reduction to the empirical basis, verificationism, operationism, falsificationism, naive and sophisticated, each had its moment of clarity, of triumph, only to fall to the successive waves of criticism, internal and external, which washed away the demarcation lines like so many inscriptions in the sand . . . the old demarcation game is over. The simple divisions of an earlier time will no longer do. Yet, does anything

All three, furthermore, illustrate an emerging consensus (perhaps the only emerging con- sensus in the field) that an understanding of scientific activity cannot develop so long as the practitioners of the different disciplines concerned with science work in isolation. Instead, the historians, the philosophers, and the sociologists of science have to work in close collaboration, combining and eventually merging their insights-even if they re- main suspicious of one another. In the present volume, the papers are divided into three sections, dealing in turn mainly with problems of philosophy (“The Problem of Demar- cation”), of history (“The Impact of Pseudo-science on the Development of Science”),

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and of sociology (“Social Dimensions of Science and Pseudo-science”). Many of the in- dividual papers transcend these neat divisions, however, to attempt a genuine integration of the three perspectives.

The book seems to start off badly, with three papers that vainly try to play the old demarcation game-but by the end of the book they will come to seem as cautionary tales. Paul Thagard argues first that a sufficient (but not necessary) condition for labeling a field pseudoscientific is its reliance on “resemblance thinking,” or the inference of causal connections from observed similarities. Thus, in astrology, the paradigm of a pseudoscience, “Libra, represented by the scales, signifies the just and harmonious, while Scorpio resembles its namesake in being secretive and aggressive. The associations con- cerning the planets and signs of the Zodiac are taken by astrologers as evidence of some causal influence of the heavens on the personalities and fates of individuals” (pp. 17-18). This is, however, incorrect and misleading. I t is mainly in newspaper-level horoscopes that the planets and signs “control” personality traits analogous to their phenomenal properties; these are not even pseudoscience but merely light entertainment, and are treated with derision by “serious” astrologers. Once one starts to work with the elaborate mechanism of planetary influences and aspects needed for casting individual horoscopes, few straightforward analogies occur. Since, in addition, Thagard emphasizes that many other pseudosciences do not involve resemblance thinking (he cites those of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken), his criterion seems to have little applica- tion.

Continuing the demarcation game next at a microlevel, Adolf Grunbaum takes twenty-six pages to show that when psychoanalysts dismiss criticism of psychoanalytic theory as an expression of neurotic resistance to psychoanalysis, their conclusions should not be regarded as scientifically justified. Sometimes, philosophical gold can be found by refining such an obvious insight, but Grunbaum’s general conclusion-that the psy- chological reasons for accepting or rejecting a theory are distinct from the evidential basis for the theory-seems, while perfectly valid, to be a rather slim payoff.

Finally, Anthony Flew sets out to show that parapsychology is a pseudoscience by playing what may be called the “advocate’s choice” version of the demarcation game. In this version, one isolates and where necessary exaggerates some unique features of a field, defines these as criteria of pseudoscience, and concludes that the field is therefore pseudoscientific. Thus, parapsychology is a pseudoscience because “its field has to be defined negatively” (as phenomena not explicable by ordinary psychology, physics, and so forth), because “there is no repeatable demonstration,” and because “there is no even half-way plausible theory with which to account for the materials it is supposed to have to explain” (pp. 56-57). These faults are of course exaggerated: like psychology, para- psychology has a global definition that says little about its actual content; the replicability of parapsychological experiments is only partial but still substantial enough to be objectively evaluated; theory construction in parapsychology is not lacking but is directed more toward models of the distribution, elicitation, and function of paranormal phenomena than toward attempts to reconcile those phenomena with orthodox psy- chology or common sense. The exaggerations, however, although important, serve mainly a secondary function. They make the field look so bud that dismissing it as a pseudoscience can be accepted as a matter of course, even as a relatively mild judgment on it. They thereby divert the reader from asking why these characteristics, exaggerated or not, should be accepted specifically as demarcation criteria in the first place. This is a question that Flew never addresses, but it is surely the central one. Parapsychology,

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whether pseudoscience or not, can only be an example or case study; it cannot be, as Flew’s treatment would make it, the whole raison d’Ctre of the demarcation game.

Just when the reader might be excused for growing tired of these games, the book changes direction suddenly, with a brilliant analysis by Robert Weyant of the role of metaphor, politics, and conflicting intellectual traditions in science. Weyant shows how a particular controversial theory, Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism, could quite reasonably in its own time be regarded by some as a viable attempt to extend the ex- planatory framework of the mechanical tradition, by others as an empirical but false theory, and by still others as a piece of obvious charlatanry and pseudoscience. The point is that nonlogical, nonempirical factors such as political, economic, and cultural pressures do not merely cloud or obfuscate the demarcation between science and non- science or pseudoscience, but necessarily join the logical and empirical ones in con- stituting the grounds for any demarcation, Marsha Hanen then complicates any future demarcation games still further. She argues cogently that the demarcation between science and a nonscientific field such as law cannot be made on a methodological basis, but only on a basis of differing content-in that the law, but not science, has an irreduci- ble moral dimension in its theories.

Thereafter, the book rarely falters. Richard Westfall, Trevor Levere, and A. B. McKillop provide detailed historical analyses of the relationship between scientific and what is now (and was then) considered pseudoscientific thought, in periods of rapid scien- tific advance. Westfall shows that Isaac Newton’s alchemical studies were not an isolated aberration but rather may have been a crucial source for his conception of attractive forces. Newton was well aware of the odium in which alchemy was held in scientific circles, and it may have been partly to avoid the charge that he was dealing in “occult sympathies” that he insisted so vigorously and influentially on the purely mathematical nature of his theories. Levere provides a case study of the remarkable self-consciousness and sophistication of which the romantic reaction against mechanistic science was capable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he shows, experimented serially with anthropology, phrenology, and mesmerism, not as part of a vague yearning for something beyond science, but in an explicit attempt to establish an empirical basis for an integrative, non- reductive human science. McKillop dissects, in the microcosm of the Toronto academic community of the 1860s, the tangled web of religious, moral, poetic, and methodological issues involved in the presentation and evaluation of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. What unites these three historical essays is their combined demonstration that even when the demarcation between science and non- or pseudoscience can be successfully made (as it was in each of the three periods being treated), it is not par- ticularly informative. It provides little or no insight into which ideas will be influential and on whom, into where we will find a commitment to rigorous method, or into how evidence will be marshaled in support of one theory over another.

What, then, is the point of making the demarcation? In one of the mainly sociological essays, Roger Cooter argues provocatively

that at least since the beginning of the consolidation and ossification of the capitalist order in the seventeenth century, the label “pseudoscience” has played an ideologically conservative and morally prescriptive social role in the interests of that order . . . wherever we encounter the deployment of the label “pseudoscience” we are encountering a process of conserving social interests. (p. 237)

Cooter argues his case on the basis of the nineteenth-century reaction to phrenology and the current reaction of (avowed but misguided) Marxists to Arthur R. Jensen, H. J.

Eysenck, and other writers on IQ and race. These latter critics, he claims, are victims of the fallacy of left-wing positivism, accepting the arbitrary dichotomies of fact/value, truth/falsehood, and so on, that are the products of the bourgeois mythology of an “ob- jective” science.

Readers who are turned off by Cooter’s Marxist language can find a disconcertingly comparable thesis about the social constitution of science argued cogently in non- Marxist terms by Margaret and James Jacob. In their paper, they conclude that “the triumph of Newtonian science represents another victory for the Whig con~titution.”~ Some of the details of that victory, or of the unsuccessful resistance to it, are given in James Jacob’s account of Henry Stubbe’s criticisms of the nascent Royal Society in the 1660s. Although Stubbe has often been seen as a hidebound conservative for his defense of Aristotle against the New Philosophy, Jacob argues persuasively that he was a political and religious radical. Stubbe understood all too well the political significance of science, on this view, and his castigation of the Royal Society was a disguised defense of republicanism.

Finally, Margaret Osler returns to the present to examine again the well-worn ques- tion about the extent to which we properly use scientific findings to support positions on political or social issues. All the demonstrations of the role of values in science, she main- tains, do nothing to change the essential truth that values, or social decisions that involve values, cannot be derived from scientific findings as such. Within the restricted context of her argument, furthermore, Osler is surely right, but a comparison of her paper with those of Cooter and the Jacobs suggests a less sanguine conclusion: that the role of science in legitimating the social order is necessarily a covert one.

Science, Pseudo-science and Society travels a winding path, therefore, from the need to root out pseudoscience in the service of real science, through the inextricable in- tertwining of the two, to the social implications of them as a complementary pair. What seem at first merely weaknesses in some individual papers turn out by the end to be valuable demonstrations of the limitations inherent in some traditional historiographic and philosophical tasks. I t is rare to find such a progressive development of a theme in a set of independently prepared papers. That they hang together as well as they do is a tribute to the skill of the conference organizers and editors, as well as of the authors themselves. The book is one that will repay serious study.

NOTES I . R . Wallis, ed., On the Margins of Science: The Social Consiruction of Rejected Knowledge, Sociological Review* Monograph 27 (Keele, England: University of Keele, 1979). 2. S. H. Mauskopf. ed., The Rerepiion of UnconveniionalScience, AAAS Selected Symposium 25 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1979). 3 . Pp. 2, 4. All page references are to Science, Pseudo-science and Society. 4. This paper was presented at the conference but was not included in the book of conference proceedings. I t was published separately as “The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution,” in fsis 71 (1980): 251-267.

Ediror’s Note: JHBS invited Professors Hanen, Osler, and Weyant to respond to the review, but they did not feel that a reply was necessary.