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December
2001 Issue- Technicalities Long-Distance Robots
- From the Editors Here's Looking at You
- News Scan Special Report: Better Killing through Chemistry
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When exploring the borderlands of science, we often face a "boundary problem" of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. The boundary is the line of demarcation between geographies of knowledge, the border defining countries of claims. Knowledge sets are fuzzier entities than countries, however, and their edges are blurry. It is not always clear where to draw the line. Last month I suggested five questions to ask about a claim to determine whether it is legitimate or baloney. Continuing with the baloney-detection questions, we see that in the process we are also helping to solve the boundary problem of where to place a claim.
6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one?
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