“Scepticism” or “skepticism”?

I have a personal taste for an evolving international English for my writing, which is to say that for the most part, I’ll use UK and US English interchangeably without giving a monkey’s. The exception to this is for technical or otherwise specific terms where the difference matters.

I can remember once as a kid, early in my programming experience in MSX-BASIC, wondering why I got a syntax error out of the “COLOUR” command. Well, it was the “COLOR” command wasn’t it. Just out of spite, I’ll b sure to spell “colour”, c-o-l-o-u-r for the rest of my life. Frigging syntax error.

There is of course, my use of the word “skepticism”. The UK or Australian way of writing the word is reported by various dictionaries as “scepticism”. I deliberately use the words “reported by”, because it seems many people don’t appreciate what dictionaries are for; they report on word usage, they don’t dictate it (unless you live in Orwell’s fictional 1984 or under some other totalitarian regime – grammar school?)

I use the word “skepticism” quite deliberately. The meaning of the word is being misappropriated by “evolution skeptics”, “climate change skeptics”, “geological record skeptics”, “immunization skeptics” and other “skeptics” that apply nary a critical thought. Logic and evidence take second place to cooked statistics, falsified graphs, misquotations and leaps of non sequitur.

Even amongst popular skepticism, like amongst fans of James Randi, pseudo-skepticism can be found (I make no such accusation against Randi himself).

Pseudoskepticism (a term popularised by Marcello Truzzi) is essentially the phenomena where one takes a positive position, then attacks or defends from it by whatever argument is available. A genuine skeptic on the other hand, forms their conclusions from the quality of arguments, without credulity or giving in to prejudice. Even then, the genuine skeptic must be corrigible and welcome criticism of whatever they take on board.

One can be a pseudoskeptic critic of Young Earth Creationism. All it takes is one to take a position before thinking about it, then trying to rationalise the position and calling it skepticism. For example.

1. I don’t like creationism.
2. Look at Ken Ham’s silly beard. Are you going to take this bozo seriously!?!? He’s like from the dark ages or something!
3. I’m a skeptic of creationism! Yay!

It needn’t be so obviously fallacious of course (indeed, there need be no logical fallacy to be either wrong or pseudoskeptic) but this is text book pseudoskepticism. The position is more important than the method (which indeed can be said of Ken Ham – try his explanation of speciation of canid “types” on for size where he gets the population genetics wrong and suggests that traits would diversify when they would actually become fixed).

When surrounding the likes of Randi, these pseudoskeptics are at worse mild phonies and most often just naive flag wavers. But they aren’t always so naive. Anti-evolution pseudoskeptics like those at the Discovery Institute want to indoctrinate your kids with political dogma and to do so are willing to peddle screed that in addition to being wrong, undermines much of modern medicine to the detriment of humanity.

We could talk at length about the pseudoskepticism of the Global Warming Denialists, but I’ve done enough of that for the time being. There are even pseudoskeptics in the (ahem) “new atheism” and people would be mistaken to view whatever solidarity or support (e.g. scarlet letter campaign, atheist blogroll etc) that may exist between atheists as endorsement of anyone’s views.

Predominantly this pseudoskepticism is coming out of the US. At least the motivated and well publicised variety. This is where the think-tanks and lobbyists and so forth do the most of their fundraising after all.

Skepticism is at the frontline, scepticism (with a “c”) isn’t. I’m just posting my ideas at the frontline of the culture wars.

~ Bruce