Content area
Full Text
RR 2003/263
The Skeptic Encyclopedia of PseudoScience Edited by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse ABC-Clio Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford 2002 2 vols ISBN 1 57607 653 9
L129.95/$185
Keyword Naturalism
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120310481165
"Skeptic" or "sceptic" has many meanings. For The Skeptics Society and its Skeptic Magazine, it means taking a provisional approach to claims. It is a method rather than a position. It is embodied in the scientific method that gathers data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, leading to provisional conclusions. This is how Michael Shermer and his colleagues define their work: being a skeptic, he says in Why People Believe Weird Things (Shermer, 1997), is not being satisfied with simple explanations, but looking for true claims and factual reasoning and burdens of proof. He has discussed his views in numerous places, including in a confessional piece forming the epilogue of the work under review.
Shermer himself is the director of the Society and publisher/editor-in-chief of the magazine, while Linse is managing and Art Editor of the magazine. Readers will probably recognize Shermer's name as author of readable and controversial works like The Borderlands of Science (Shermer, 2001) where he attacks superstition and "bad science" (real science is big band theory, borderland science is superstring theory, and plain nonsense is Big Foot), Denying History (Shermer et al., 2002) (which examined holocaust revisionism), and How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (Shermer, 2000) (which, like the work of Could and Dawkins, has provoked spirited opposition). A...