The UB Dose of Science continues with the debate “About science and pseudoscience”, whose guest is associate professor Dana Jalobeanu, PhD, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bucharest and director of the Department of Humanities of ICUB.
Starting from the premise that, throughout the history of humanity, there have always been pseudo-scientific contents that claim to belong to science, Dana Jalobeanu inventories and discusses a series of demarcation criteria meant to help us make a difference and base our knowledge on scientifically valid content.
The approach is all the more necessary because, the guest points out, we live in a world where we are assaulted by pseudoscience and various types of fake news that bring to the public’s attention all sorts of attractive elements that claim to be scientific, but which, in fact, are and will continue to remain unscientific.
Thus, starting from Karl Popper’s falsification theory and demarcation criterion and going through the good scientific practices identified by Thomas Kuhn, Dana Jalobeanu points out that, in order to differentiate between science and pseudoscience, we can use a series of cumulative criteria of demarcation, in which we have both testing, falsification and good practices of the scientific community. We can thus distinguish between proper scientific fields and those that are either not yet scientific, or have never been scientific, or have always been pseudo-scientific, or have fallen prey to imposture.
The entire discussion on the issue of the demarcation criterion between science and pseudoscience is available in the seventh episode of the UB Dose of Science, which can be accessed with just one click below.
Dana Jalobeanu studied physics and philosophy at the “Babeş-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca and received a PhD in philosophy of science at the University of Bucharest. Then, she followed a series of postgraduate specializations at Oxford University (Balliol College), New Europe College (Bucharest), Warburg Institute (University of London), Princeton University and Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin. Since 2001 she has been program director at the Fundamentals of European Modernity Research Center of the UB (www.modernthought.unibuc.ro) and co-organizer of the Bucharest-Princeton Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy. Since 2009, she is a member of the Center for Logic, History and Philosophy of Science (CELFIS) within the Faculty of Philosophy of UB and organizes the weekly seminar of CELFIS. Since 2014, she has been the director of the Humanities Department of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB).
Her areas of expertise include philosophy of science, history of modern philosophy, philosophy of physics, philosophical cosmology. More information on Dana Jalobeanu’s activity is available here.
Launched in October 2021, the UB Dose of Science is a project that proposes a focused and dynamic way to communicate scientific information in an attractive, intense, and expressive format, establishing a platform for dialogue with the public interested in science.
Initiated within the Science Communication Program, launched by the University of Bucharest during 2018, the UB Dose of Science addresses the public and encourages the connection between the academic and non-academic environment, based on current and interesting topics.
The guests of this series, meant to represent a synthetic and captivating way of communicating the various fields of science, are mainly professors and researchers from the academic community of the University of Bucharest.
The materials from the UB Dose of Science include short and dynamic presentations of topics relevant to contemporary society: pollution, climate change, pandemic, education, digitalization and others. Thus, in addition to the fundamental dimension of communicating scientifically validated information, the UB Dose of Science also proposes an important component of social responsibility, reconfirming the role and mission of the University of Bucharest in society and its contribution to awareness of severe issues of today’s world and popularization of possible solutions to these problems.