Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pseudoscience

By: Michael D. Gordin
Narrated by: Kyle Snyder
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £10.99

Buy Now for £10.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements—both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides—there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides listeners along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies.

©2021, 2023 Oxford University Press (P)2023 Tantor
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Pseudoscience

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.