Courtney Shepherd's List: Pseudoscience

Bigfoot was first reported as seen by a white man in Jasper, Alberta, Canada in 1811.  Bigfoot
hoaxes were spawned since that time and newspapers from over a hundred years ago referenced
him as Sasquatch due to the Canadian sightings.  The first Bigfoot attack was reported in 1924 in
Washington State.  Miners and prospectors alike reported attacks of stones thrown at their cabins
and big footprints left as evidence of the Bigfoot.  The Bigfoot craze sort of subsided until the 1950’
s in California.

It was Karl Popper who first identified what he called “the demarcation problem” of finding a criterion to distinguish between empirical science, such as the successful 1919 test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and pseudoscience, such as Freud’s theories, whose adherents sought only confirming evidence while ignoring disconfirming cases. Einstein’s theory might have been falsified had solar-eclipse data not shown the requisite deflection of starlight bent by the sun’s gravitational field. Freud’s theories, however, could never be disproved, because there was no testable hypothesis open to refutability. Thus, Popper famously declared “falsifiability” as the ultimate criterion of demarcation.