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The Other Demarcation Problem

Superstition is an awkward category for historians of science, and they do not typically use it. Scientists, on the contrary, frequently do, often in loose terms to describe those beliefs that conflict with or simply ignore what science has revealed about nature’s truths. Occasionally the term has been weaponized to decry claims of which they decidedly do not approve, most memorably in the 1994 opening salvo of the Science Wars, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition—a frontal attack on science studies as an anti-science movement engineered by feminists and the “academic left”—which inspired Alan Sokal’s hoax and a great deal of hand-wringing within our field. Rarely, scientists invoke superstition more concretely. My favorite example is B. F. Skinner’s classic 1948 article “‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon,” which describes how he randomly fed hungry pigeons some tasty pellets. The pigeons, which were of course bobbing and weaving hither and yon as pigeons are wont to do, associated some of their intrinsic maneuvers with the arrival of pellets, which reinforced a nonexistent relationship and led to a repetition of those behaviors in expectation that they would yield another meal. “The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition,” Skinner wrote puckishly. “The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.” The joke here, of course, is that the arch-behaviorist Skinner did not believe that internal states of mind were accessible to the scientist, and what is superstition except an internal belief? Skinner deployed the category ironically; we are not meant to take it seriously. John Burnham, by contrast, intended the readers of How Superstition Won and Science Lost to take superstition very seriously indeed. Burnham’s “superstition” was not an actors’ category but an analytic one, and he wielded it somewhat more in the fashion of Gross and Levitt than Skinner. (The latter has a cameo on p. 104, but, sadly, it is not in reference to the pigeons.) In this impressive study of the popularization of science across two centuries of American history—a research burden that is almost unimaginable for an age before computerized databases and text searching—Burnhampenned a polemic in an elegiacmode about the decline of a genuine public conversation on science that had been replaced by a morass of fads, fantasies, and sheer poppycock