Werewolves in scientist's clothing: understanding pseudoscientific cognition more

Werewolves in scientist‘s clothing: understanding pseudoscientific cognition Konrad Talmont-Kaminski Marie Curie-Sklodowska University While claiming the authority of science and bearing a similarity to scientific claims that might fool at first glance, most pseudoscientific beliefs have very little in common with real scientific beliefs and should instead be understood either as a version of supernatural claims that has taken on a guise more fitting to the modern world or as drawing their motivation from such beliefs. This basic picture is best appreciated with the help of an approach that focuses upon the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that produce pseudoscientific beliefs and the evolutionary processes that likely shaped those mechanisms. This does not require giving up on the epistemic considerations, but it does mean putting them into the proper context. The method pursued in this chapter is to relate pseudoscientific beliefs to the cognitive picture that Robert McCauley (2010, forthcoming) has put forward of the relationships between theology and popular religion on one hand, and science and commonsense beliefs on the other. The effect is to show that the fundamental difference between science and pseudoscience is to be found in the way they relate to beliefs that humans find intuitively attractive. Science, unlike pseudoscience and the other kinds of beliefs McCauley considers, does not seek to maintain agreement with those ‗maturationally natural‘ beliefs but instead investigates their shortcomings. In both its topic and the underlying theoretical assumptions, this chapter is very closely connected to those written by John Wilkins and Stefaan Blancke & Johan De Smedt. It shares the view that human cognition is best understood in terms of bounded rationality theory, originally put forward by Herbert Simon (1955) and developed by Gerd Gigerenzer (2000) as well as by William Wimsatt (2007). The Blancke & De Smedt paper is doubly relevant in so far at it explores the cognitive explanation of pseudoscientific beliefs that underpins much of the picture that is developed in this chapter. Mechanisms of non-science It is very common for the supernatural to be defined in opposition to the scientific. This will not be the path taken in this paper, however. The difficulty with defining the supernatural or, indeed, the pseudoscientific straightforwardly in terms of scientific knowledge is that such an approach falls foul of a version of Hempel‘s dilemma (Hempel 1969). The dilemma results from the need to define the supernatural in reference to either current scientific knowledge or to the claims that would be shown as correct by scientific enquiry carried to its endpoint (assuming such a thing is even possible). But, going on current scientific knowledge, we may well end up deeming pseudoscientific claims that will actually be shown to be correct by future scientific inquiry. Indeed, this outcome is unavoidable once we recognize, as we must, that scientific inquiry has not reached its endpoint. To avoid this problem we can hold that beliefs are pseudoscientific if they would not be supported by an idealized, final science. But, then, we virtually guarantee that much of what we consider best in today‘s science will turn out to be pseudoscientific. And we cannot even know which parts, since we cannot know what finalized scientific inquiry would reveal till we get there. Beyond this dilemma, there is much that is wrong with thinking about either supernatural or pseudoscientific claims primarily in terms of their relation to scientific claims.  It appears to treat science as primarily characterized in terms of the claims that are justified by it — a view of science that may be partly motivated by science textbooks, but which has little to do with scientific practice and which immediately puts science on par with any belief system — including supernatural ones. Viewed in this way, the conflict between scientific and antiscientific worldviews is reduced to a matter of picking different ontologies. Such an understanding of science (or the supernatural/the pseudoscientific, for that matter) is singularly lacking in insight.  It doesn‘t necessarily distinguish between supernatural and pseudoscientific claims, since both conflict with scientific knowledge. Indeed, it doesn‘t necessarily distinguish between such claims and all other claims that do not accord with science. After all, the claim that electrons and protons have the same weight runs counter to what science tells us, yet it would be hard to argue that it is a supernatural claim.  It fails to tell us anything substantive about supernatural/pseudoscientific claims. In particular, it gives us no insight into why it is that those claims have proved as difficult to expunge as they have. In short, this way of thinking is singularly unhelpful in getting us to understand the phenomenon in question. As such, it is better to abandon it. Before we do, however, it is useful to consider why this way of approaching the issue has proved fruitless. The reason, I would argue, is that it treats both scientific and antiscientific explanations in abstraction from the psychological and cultural processes that produce them. In this, it harks back to a positivist view of science as characterized in terms of a decontexualized inductive logic, instead of as a social endeavor carried out by organized groups of boundedly rational agents — the view that traces back to the work of Herbert Simon (1955) and which will be pursued here (see also Talmont-Kaminski 2009; forthcoming). The alternative approach can be motivated by a seemingly simple question that Pascal Boyer (2001) has put forward:– why do people believe the particular supernatural claims that they do accept? Or, we could just as well ask, why do people believe in particular pseudoscientific claims? After all, it is not the case that supernatural beliefs present a random gamut of scenarios but, instead, usually share many similarities. These questions refocus the issue of what such beliefs are as an investigation of the mechanisms that are responsible for their appearance and stabilization. The ultimate aim is to characterize the claims in terms of the causal processes that produce them. This, in turn, should make it possible to understand under what conditions human cognitive systems produce beliefs that are in an important sense irrational rather than rational. And this strikes me as a particularly worthwhile project, even if this chapter only goes a small way toward that goal. In practice, this way of approaching the question of what the supernatural and the pseudoscientific are entails potentially drawing upon a variety of disciplines that seek to explain human behavior at a range of scales from the neurophysiological, through the psychological, all the way up to the cultural. As is becoming the norm in many investigations of human behavior, the overarching theoretical framework for the approach taken up here is provided by evolutionary theory applied at both the genetic and the cultural levels. Vitally, taking up this approach does not mean abandoning epistemological questions, but requires reconsidering them in the context of the processes that produce actual beliefs rather than in an abstracted fashion divorced from the details of human cognitive systems. Modestly counterintuitive agency The cognitive byproduct account of supernatural beliefs and practices developed by Boyer and others is probably the most widespread at this time and seeks to explain these phenomena in terms of biases produced by the idiosyncrasies of the human cognitive system (for review see Bulbulia 2004). For example, humans appear to have a tendency to be overly sensitive to cues of the presence of other agents in their vicinity (Guthrie 1993). Thus, it is a very common occurrence that someone returning home late at night imagines the presence of shadowy figures where there are none. This oversensitivity is presumably highly adaptive given that the cost of reacting to a non-existent threat is much lower than that of failing to spot a threat that is real (Haselton and Nettle 2006). It has been argued, however, that such instances of imagining the presence of nonexistent agents may lead to the postulation of the presence of agents whose supernatural abilities allow them to, for example, disappear when more closely investigated (Barrett 2000). Originally put forward in the context of discussing religious beliefs, the cognitive byproduct account is coming to be seen as inadequate when dealing with the complexities of religious traditions, leading to the proposal of dual inheritance accounts that combine it with approaches that treat religions as prosocial cultural adaptations (Talmont-Kaminski 2009b; Atran and Henrich 2010). The cognitive byproduct account is much more successful, however, when it comes to such beliefs as superstitions and, indeed, pseudoscientific explanations. This is because these beliefs most often have not been recruited to systematically serve any function and, therefore, generally do not require consideration in terms of cultural adaptation. In answer to Boyer‘s question, Boyer and others who have been arguing for the cognitive byproduct account have drawn attention to the properties that supernatural claims the world over tend to share. McCauley, in (McCauley 2010), focuses upon two. Apart from the extent to which agent-based explanations are deployed within supernatural systems of beliefs, he also considers the degree to which such beliefs come easily to mind for human cognizers. In the context of our discussion, it is useful to see how pseudoscientific beliefs fit into the picture McCauley draws. The first of the two properties McCauley considers is that supernatural beliefs usually give agency a much more fundamental role in the functioning of the universe than is the case with scientific explanations. As McCauley (2010) puts it: Scientific abstemiousness concerning intentional agents and their putative actions is to be contrasted with religions‘ pervasive recruitment of theory of mind and appeals to agent explanations. While McCauley makes the point regarding religions, it is as true of supernatural claims in general. The obvious example of this difference is the contrast between evolutionary theory and creationism — while evolutionary explanations are based upon the processes of blind selection working over millions of years, creationist explanations are fundamentally reliant upon the postulation of purposeful actions undertaken by a supernatural agent. It is highly instructive to consider pseudoscientific beliefs that offer explanations which in some way compete with the evolutionary and creationist accounts. These ‗paleocontact‘ accounts typically involve stories of extraterrestrial species influencing the development of life on Earth. Thus, for example, Zecharia Sitchin, in his The 12th Planet, wrote about a species from the planet Nibiru that genetically engineered humans to work as slave labor for them. Or, to give another example, Erich von Däniken claimed in The Chariots of the Gods? that extraterrestrials constructed many (if not all) of the great prehistoric structures on Earth such as Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues and the drawings in the Nazca Desert in Peru, in the process greatly influencing the development of human culture. Similarly to supernatural explanations and in contrast to scientific explanations, these pseudoscientific accounts tend to fundamentally rely upon the actions of (extraterrestrial) agents. Quite relevantly, many of those proposing paleocontact scenarios claim that world religions trace back to contact with such extraterrestrial agents — another example of an agent-based pseudoscientific explanation where the scientific approach taken in this article (as well as in other research in cognitive science of religion) is to look to evolutionary and cognitive explanations. It would be incorrect to claim that all pseudoscientific claims also lend agency such a central role. One significant exception to this general tendency is Velikovsky‘s catastrophist pseudohistory presented in Worlds in Collision and other books. The past popularity of Velikovsky‘s account probably cannot be explained in the same cognitive terms as will be applied to many other pseudoscientific claims — it appears to be significantly motivated by interest in showing that biblical accounts of plagues were at least to some degree historically accurate. It may seem that the most that can be said is that there is a strong tendency for pseudoscientific claims to be alike to supernatural claims in that they place agency at the centre of the picture of reality they propose. We will see, however, that it is ultimately possible to formulate a stronger claim concerning pseudoscientific beliefs. The second property that McCauley considers is the degree to which pseudoscientific accounts fit with people‘s intuitive ontology. As he goes on to explain, mundane supernatural claims are only modestly counterintuitive (see also Boyer 2001), making it easy for people to make inferences using them; scientific claims, however, typically run radically counter to what people generally expect and require extensive reflective reasoning to be understood and appreciated. Thus, ghosts may not have a physical body but, nonetheless, are believed to be comprehensible in terms of typical belief-desire folk psychology. It is modern neuropsychology that actually presents a picture which differs in much more fundamental ways from folk psychology. Just as in the case of reliance on agent-based explanations, pseudoscientific accounts tend to have much more in common with supernatural accounts than with scientific ones. The point is clear if we consider the extraterrestrial agents central to the pseudoscientific accounts discussed above. These aliens are represented as having extraordinary abilities that allow them to fundamentally alter the course of the development of human life, much like the gods and spirits of many religious traditions. These abilities might not necessarily be impossible from the point of view of science, but they are counterintuitive from the point of view of commonsense — the attraction of Däniken‘s idea of alien architects being that it is hard to imagine that pre-scientific peoples were capable of such feats as building the Pyramids, seemingly necessitating the postulation of counterintuitive agents. At the same time, the decisions made by the extraterrestrials are typically explained in terms of commonsense notions of beliefs and desires — when Sitchin writes about the aliens creating humans, the factor motivating their actions appears to be nothing more than the desire to avoid physical labor. Again, this is much as was the case with gods and spirits. Similarly to Velikovsky‘s avoidance of calls for agency, however, there are examples of pseudoscientific belief systems that have gone a long way towards requiring extensive reflective reasoning. The basics of astrology are only modestly counterintuitive, with the thought that the heavens should reflect human events holding significant intuitive attraction for human reasoners. On this basis, however, professional astrologers have built up an extensive pseudoscience that calls for complex calculations in order to construct horoscopes – professional astrology standing in something like the relation to popular astrology as theology in relation to popular religion. The radically counterintuitive aspect of this practice comes to the fore in their justification for their ability to formulate horoscopes that connect the actions of people, whom they hold to be able to exercise their free will, with the predetermined movement of the planets. In particular, the astrologers hold that the connection between the two is not to be understood as causal — which leaves the question of how the proposed connection is maintained if humans have free will. The overall picture is every bit as radically counterintuitive as the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Popular belief in astrology is only maintained because there is no need to learn and agree with the abstruse pseudophilosophical claims of professional astrologers in order to have a conception of the significance of astrological predictions. The deep similarities between supernatural beliefs and the majority of pseudoscientific claims are instructive in light of the surface similarities between pseudoscientific claims and those put forward by science. While eschewing reference to ghosts or other traditionally supernatural entities and relying upon entities that prima facie fit with scientific knowledge, most pseudoscientific claims exhibit a profound similarity with supernatural claims. In the context of a cognitive byproduct account, the fundamental similarities between supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs invite the conclusion that both kinds of beliefs are the byproduct of the same cognitive mechanisms: the human predilection for taking the intentional stance in the case of the preference for agent-based explanations and the relative ease of using modestly counterintuitive representations. Indeed, the fundamental similarities between these kinds of beliefs suggest that pseudoscientific beliefs (or, at least, some of them) perhaps ought to be thought of as a subset of supernatural beliefs — a conclusion that those who put forward such beliefs would probably find less than comforting. Further evidence for the fundamental connection between supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs is provided by examples of religions based upon pseudoscientific beliefs, the most infamous being Scientology. The claim that many of the modern world‘s problems can be traced back to the genocide of billions of individuals millions of years ago by the Galactic Confederacy is a narrative pulled straight from the pages of second-rate sciencefiction yet it has all the hallmarks of typical supernatural accounts that McCauley considers. The Galactic dictator Xenu and the spirits of the murdered extraterrestrials are at the centre of the narrative, ensuring that it has both the property of focusing on agency and of postulating modestly counterintuitive entities. Indeed, Ron Hubbard‘s (the founder of Scientology) account presents the ancient extraterrestrial civilization as very similar in numerous respects to that of nineteen sixties America, making it particularly easy for people to make inferences about the agents he postulates. It should be noted, that even so, the Scientologist ‗truth‘ is only revealed to individuals who have already made a very significant commitment to Scientology and are, therefore, motivated to accept the story of Xenu. It‘s only known more generally thanks to ex-Scientologists who have been willing to reveal this particular secret to the broader, and much more skeptical, public. The cause of the similarity between supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs can be understood as analogous to the reason for the similarity between animals from radically different lineages that have come to occupy the same environmental niche. Thus, for example, ichthyosaurs, which were an ocean-dwelling species of dinosaur, looked very similar to tuna as well as to dolphins — the similarities between them being explained by their need to make their way through water. In the case of supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs, the niche occupied by them is created by the idiosyncratic nature of human cognitive systems that leads to cognitive byproducts which have particular characteristics and which appear reliably across a wide range of conditions that humans find themselves in. The entities that populate pseudoscientific accounts may have their origin in science but they have undergone significant change to fit the supernatural niche, with the result that they have come to look a lot like supernatural beliefs, even if the latter draw their content from very different cultural reference points. Looking back to intuitions The central point of McCauley‘s discussion of the difference between religion and science is that in one fundamental respect science is a lot more like theology than it is like popular religion, while popular religion is a lot more like commonsense beliefs in this respect. The difference is that religious and commonsense beliefs are produced by what McCauley calls ―maturationally natural‖ cognitive systems, while theological and scientific claims require a great degree of further intellectual development and reflection because of their radically counterintuitive content. This difference, along with the degree to which the particular claims tend to squander agent-based explanations, allows McCauley to plot science, religion, theology and commonsense beliefs on a simple two by two table. It is particularly enlightening to consider what adding pseudoscience to the table tells us. Given the points that have been made previously, the obvious pigeon hole for a lot of pseudoscience is in with popular religion and other supernatural claims. However, as has already been pointed out, not all pseudoscientific beliefs fit into that place in the table. While Scientology does share the traits of traditional religions, professional astrology is much more akin to theology and Velikovsky‘s stories might even have to be put into the same pigeon hole as properly scientific accounts.1 Without denying the significance of the cognitive approach to understanding all these phenomena, it does show that in so far as we wish to understand why 1 While not making extensive use of folk psychology, one highly relevant respect in which Velikovsky‘s story is tied to common sense beliefs is in its use of folk physics. This point was suggested to me by Maarten Boudry and would place Velikovsky‘s account in the bottom right quarter of McCauley‘s figure. — for example — pseudoscientific claims should not have the same epistemic status as scientific ones, we do have to go beyond the cognitive basis of these beliefs. McCauley, quite clearly, agrees with this assessment given the lengths he goes to explain the different epistemic status of theology and science. While a fuller consideration of these issues will have to await until the final section of this chapter, it is instructive to point out that the two traits of scientific explanations that McCauley identifies are implicit in the naturalist stance that science is normally seen as adopting with regard to ontological claims. In particular, the cognitive approach that both McCauley and I are pursuing is probably most in-line with provisory methodological naturalism (Boudry, Blancke, and Braeckman 2010) — a view that sees the basic scientific naturalist commitments as the fallibilist product of a long process of scientific reflection. Science does not presume that agency does not play a central role in how the universe functions — this is just something that science has discovered over time, despite the degree to which this thought runs counter to what people naturally assume. This interplay between normative epistemic considerations and the cognitive picture is exactly what was suggested as the optimal approach at the beginning of this chapter. Introducing pseudoscience into McCauley‘s table makes clear a further point. It breaks up the neat symmetry McCauley might be thought to have set up between the left- and righthand sides of the table. As things stand, it might seem that while theology is the product of reflection upon people‘s maturationally natural religious beliefs, science gets its start from a type of reflection upon commonsense explanations. Of course, as McCauley (2010) makes clear, even here the symmetry is not perfect. While science soon breaks free of commonsense beliefs; ―[t]heology, like Lot‘s wife, cannot avoid the persistent temptation to look back — in the case of theology to look back to popular religious forms.‖ Unlike science which has its own justification, theology gets its raison d’être from the existence of popular religion. At the same time, neither popular religion nor commonsense beliefs necessarily owe much to the more reflective sets of practices. Thus, popular religion pays little heed to theology as revealed by research into theological incorrectness (Slone 2004). Theists may be able to reproduce theologically correct dogma when explicitly required to but they seem to operate with much simpler and less counterintuitive supernatural beliefs than those condoned by theology. Of course, it would be possible to talk about something quite similar — a scientific incorrectness, perhaps — in the case of popular understanding of phenomena that science has explained. The obvious example is provided by the fact that even though in many societies the majority of people will claim that they believe in Darwinian evolution, most of Comment [ 1]: Or do you want to extend the same line of reasoning to realism? them will not be able to characterize it even in broadest terms if asked to and will instead regularly produce something more akin to a Lamarckian account — an account that gives the endeavors of individual agents a much more central place as it claims that they directly lead to changes in the next generation, rather than affecting it only indirectly and in a limited fashion through changes in the incidence of particular genes. Pseudoscientific claims present us with an interesting addition to this picture in that at least on the outside they wear conceptual cloth originally spun by the scientists. Many of the basic concepts necessary to express the idea of extraterrestrial agents traveling to Earth millions of years ago in order to influence the progress of evolution, for example, were originally made meaningful in the context of scientific research — even if some of them never rose above the level of conceptual possibilities there. Yet, as already discussed, the similarities between pseudoscientific and scientific explanations are mostly skin deep. It seems that scientific concepts surprisingly easily devolve into pseudoscientific concepts given the right conditions. Many scientists whose work came to be referred to in newspapers or popular magazines have painful personal experiences of this process. Quantum physics is one area of science that has become infamous for the numerous pseudoscientific interpretations it has given rise to, with the likes of Deepak Chopra popularizing claims that actually have little in common with the original science. Indeed, the radically counterintuitive nature of scientific concepts might render them particularly suitable for pseudoscientific misunderstanding, since it makes understanding them correctly so difficult. It seems that, whereas theological beliefs are what results from reflection upon popular religious beliefs, pseudoscientific beliefs are what one gets when scientific beliefs are allowed to erode away from the lack of necessary reflection. Recognizing this difference between theology and science leads to two further points. The first is just how fragile science is from a cognitive point of view. While McCauley makes this observation, considering the example of pseudoscience emphasizes that it is not just that science requires social institutions to continue developing, but that it probably requires them in order for scientific beliefs not to devolve in the pseudoscientific ones that are just so much more natural for humans. Even with the existence of numerous research institutions and universal education, public understanding of scientific claims regularly has more in common with pseudoscience. Without such institutions it seems unlikely that scientific concepts could survive for long. The second point is that scientific beliefs do not necessarily provide the best example of a contrast class to theology. As has already been observed, science owes little to commonsense beliefs. In this, it is unlike theology, which is reliant upon the beliefs of popular religion in two regards: by retaining them as the subject of its reflection, as well as by having its motivation dependent upon people‘s commitment to them. Much more similar to theology in both these regards is traditional philosophy in its relationship to commonsense beliefs. Intuitions play a vital role in both regards when it comes to traditional philosophy. They provide the raw material that philosophy attempts to analyze rationally through careful reflection, and typically act as the ultimate justification of the views that traditional philosophers have proposed. As we will see, these similarities between philosophy and theology point to a very important difference between science and theology. It should be noted that naturalized philosophy has a very different relationship to commonsense beliefs. Similarly to science, it sees no advantage in referring back to the beliefs that are intuitive to human cognizers. Breaking free of common sense intuitions is in part justified by the extensive evidence that science has provided for the shortcomings of commonsense beliefs in general and intuitions in particular (Nisbett and Ross 1980), the specific implications for philosophical methodology having been explored by Bishop and Trout (2005). Instead of looking back to commonsense beliefs, naturalist philosophy takes scientific claims as the reference point for the further reflection it engages in. Conclusions Having drawn out a range of implications that arise from considerations of the cognitive basis of pseudoscientific beliefs, it is time to show how they help to come to grips with the issues that the view of pseudoscience as non-science proved so unhelpful with back at the start of this article. These, slightly rephrased, were:    Why are pseudoscientific (as well as supernatural) beliefs so hard to eliminate? What is the difference between supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs? What is the difference between pseudoscientific and scientific beliefs? The easiest to deal with is the question of why it is that pseudoscientific beliefs are so difficult to counter. Many of them rely upon the same cognitive byproducts that lend plausibility to supernatural beliefs. This means that they will likely remain attractive so long as human cognitive systems produce those byproducts. Without needing to buy into the whole of memetics, it can be seen that human cognitive systems provide these kinds of beliefs with a ready environment in which to prosper. Eliminating individual pseudoscientific beliefs is only likely to allow others to take their place. Some evidence for this claim is provided by the history of superstitions. Folklorists have come to the conclusion that individual superstitions have tended to remain popular for a limited amount of time measured in decades rather than centuries. However, with the disappearance of old superstitions, new ones have tended to appear and fill their place (Roud 2006). Similarly, getting rid of individual pseudoscientific beliefs is only likely to lead to new ones becoming popular, much in the same way that eliminating certain species often only leads to other species quickly invading that particular environmental niche. As we saw, the difference between pseudoscientific and supernatural beliefs is, for the most part, little more than skin-deep. The supernatural beliefs may get their content from commonsense beliefs while the pseudoscientific beliefs are usually dressed up in scientific garb. This does not substantially alter how they interact with human cognitive systems, however. All that it may do is render pseudoscientific beliefs somewhat more attractive in the context of modern cultures that hold scientific knowledge in great regard, but which have limited actual understanding of it – cultural systems constrain what concepts can be acquired (Sørensen 2004). Having said that, it does appear that pseudoscientific beliefs may interact successfully with human cognitive systems in a greater variety of ways than those utilized by supernatural beliefs. It is not clear to what degree this is just a matter of the ways those different sets of beliefs are classified — the difference between popular religion and theology is stressed a lot more than that between popular and professional astrology. Even so, it might be possible to find clear examples of pseudoscientific beliefs that avoid excessive reference to agent-based explanations and run profoundly counter to human intuitions, thereby sharing those traits with properly scientific claims — Velikovsky‘s views being a potential example I earlier suggested. The question with such pseudoscientific beliefs is how it is that they hold sufficient attraction to remain viable, given that they cannot straightforwardly rely upon the cognitive byproducts that supernatural beliefs find support in, while lacking the kind of support that properly scientific claims have. This suggests a way of thinking about pseudoscientific beliefs that is based upon the cognitive picture we have been examining and develops out of the analysis provided by McCauley. Pseudoscientific beliefs need not all involve moderately counterintuitive agents, but many do and those that do not draw their strength from that well. While both Velikovsky‘s claims and professional astrology fall outside of the box typically occupied by supernatural and pseudoscientific beliefs, they both call upon the beliefs that are found in that box in order to find sufficient motivation to make them attractive. In the case of Velikovsky, the motivation is to provide existing religious beliefs with pseudoscientific interpretations that are attractive in modern culture. In the case of professional astrology it is to reconstruct naive astrological beliefs in a more logical fashion. This is much the same kind of relationship as that between theology and popular religion in so far as theology would hold little or no interest were it not for the cognitive attraction of the popular religious views. But, as has been already noted several times, science does not seek its motivation in unreflective beliefs, be they commonsense or supernatural. Instead, it finds justification in the way it ties its claims to empirical evidence, which is intended to be independent of the idiosyncrasies of human commonsense beliefs. By divorcing itself from those beliefs, science is therefore different even from the potential pseudoscientific accounts that might fall inside the same box as it does on McCauley‘s table. Pseudoscientific beliefs find their motivation, directly or indirectly, in the cognitive byproducts that human cognitive systems produce — science looks to standards of evidence that are significantly different from those that come intuitively to humans. It is in this, ultimately, that the difference between the two lies. At the start of this article it was suggested that a focus on the content of pseudoscientific as opposed to scientific beliefs did not lead to a deep understanding of the difference between them. The alternative that has been pursued here focused upon the cognitive basis for pseudoscientific as opposed scientific reasoning. This has revealed that while there are significant dissimilarities between the content of the two kinds of beliefs science and pseudoscience produce, the reason for the difference between them is ultimately to be found in the disparate attitudes they take in relation to human maturationally natural beliefs. The dissimilarities between pseudoscientific and scientific beliefs are a reflection of that deeper and more profound difference. Drawing the difference between science and pseudoscience in this way is important in that it helps to bring out very clearly what it is that is special about science. This is particularly important given that any cognitively informed account of science must recognize that the cognitive basis for science is the same as that for common sense beliefs and well as supernatural or pseudoscientific beliefs. Human cognitive mechanisms underpin all these phenomena, the differences between them lying in the details of how those mechanisms are utilized in each case. Science is already hobbled in that it is undertaken by boundedly rational humans. In order to build upon this basis, rather than be trapped by it, it must be free to explore conceptions that are not maturationally natural to our minds. Acknowledgements Science is a cooperative endeavor. 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