The problem of demarcation of science and pseudoscience and the idea of family resemblance
The problem of characterization scientific knowledge and its difference from other forms of activity has been discussed since antiquity. Nevertheless, in its modern guise, the problem of demarcation of science and non-science appeared in the works of logical positivists and their critic K. Popper. Thanks to their efforts, this problem has become one of the central problems of the philosophy of science of the XX century. However, the difficulties of the well-known classical and modern criteria of demarcation (including the verificationist and falsificationist criteria) prompted the American philosopher of science L. Laudan to declare «the demise of the demarcation problem». According to Laudan, any satisfactory criterion of demarcation must provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, on the basis of which only it will be possible to distinguish between science and non-science. Meanwhile, based on the heterogeneity of the forms of scientific knowledge and long unsuccessful attempts to give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for what determines science, Laudan concluded that attempts to find the criterion of demarcation are futile. However, as further investigations have showed, Laudan may have been hasty in his conclusions. In particular, one of the promising approaches to the solution of the demarcation problem may be associated with the idea of family resemblance popularized by L. Wittgenstein and the application of developments from the field of fuzzy logic.