Feng Shui as Pseudoscience

Abstract

Given the extent of feng shui belief, and the personal, social, cultural, and economic impact that it has, everyone can benefit from judging its scientificity. Efforts to distinguish science from non-science, the original ‘demarcation problem’, have been pursued since at least David Hume’s assertion of empirical confirmation as the differentia. Karl Popper proposed a new demarcation of science from non-science, namely, falsificationism. The mushrooming, internationalizing, billion-dollar feng shui industry, and its related alternative or holistic medicine industry, is an example of the ethical, political, and cultural consequences of failing to identify pseudoscience or saying that such identification is impossible. Carl Hempel usefully offered a list of seven desiderata that identified good scientific theories and which can serve in characterizing good scientific practice. Larry Laudan claimed that the demarcation quest was hopelessly and in-principle contentious. Although many philosophers concurred with Laudan’s arguments, not all did so. The feng shui movement is sectarian, and it is a mark of pseudoscience that these sectarian differences cannot be settled. Science always occurs in a social-economic-technological context which has its own conceptual and philosophical characteristics that can be listed as five couples, or a conceptual pentagon: humanism/commercialism; systemism/compartmentalism; materialism/spiritualism; realism/subjectivism; and scientism/irrationalism. For any society, to the degree that the first member of the couples is maximized, then science can flourish. To the degree that the second member is elevated, then the society allows and promotes the growth of pseudosciences. Contemporary USA provides a case study for this claim.