—On Epistemology, Pop Psychology, and the Cult of Empirical Pretence
Science, we’re told, is the beacon in the fog – a gleaming lighthouse of reason guiding us through the turbulent seas of superstition and ignorance. But peer a bit closer, and the lens is cracked, the bulb flickers, and the so-called lighthouse keeper is just some bloke on TikTok shouting about gut flora and intermittent fasting.
We are creatures of pattern. We impose order. We mistake correlation for causation, narrative for truth, confidence for knowledge. What we have, in polite academic parlance, is an epistemology problem. What we call science is often less Newton and more Nostradamus—albeit wearing a lab coat and wielding a p-hacked dataset.
Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit—the rotting mango of modern inquiry: nutritional science, which is to actual science what alchemy is to chemistry, or vibes are to calculus. We study food the way 13th-century monks studied demons: through superstition, confirmation bias, and deeply committed guesswork. Eat fat, don’t eat fat. Eat eggs, don’t eat eggs. Eat only between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00 under a waxing moon while humming in Lydian mode. It’s a cargo cult with chia seeds.
But why stop there? Let’s put the whole scientific-industrial complex on the slab.
Psychology: The Empirical Astrological Society
Psychology likes to think it’s scientific. Peer-reviewed journals, statistical models, the odd brain scan tossed in for gravitas. But at heart, much of it is pop divination, sugar-dusted for mass consumption. The replication crisis didn’t merely reveal cracks – it bulldozed entire fields. The Stanford Prison Experiment? A theatrical farce. Power poses? Empty gestural theatre. Half of what you read in Psychology Today could be replaced with horoscopes and no one would notice.
Medical Science: Bloodletting, But With Better Branding
Now onto medicine, that other sacred cow. We tend to imagine it as precise, data-driven, evidence-based. In practice? It’s a Byzantine fusion of guesswork, insurance forms, and pharmaceutical lobbying. As Crémieux rightly implies, medicine’s predictive power is deeply compromised by overfitting, statistical fog, and a staggering dependence on non-replicable clinical studies, many funded by those who stand to profit from the result.
And don’t get me started on epidemiology, that modern priesthood that speaks in incantations of “relative risk” and “confidence intervals” while changing the commandments every fortnight. If nutrition is theology, epidemiology is exegesis.
The Reproducibility Farce
Let us not forget the gleaming ideal: reproducibility, that cornerstone of Enlightenment confidence. The trouble is, in field after field—from economics to cancer biology—reproducibility is more aspiration than reality. What we actually get is a cacophony of studies no one bothers to repeat, published to pad CVs, p-hacked into publishable shape, and then cited into canonical status. It’s knowledge by momentum. We don’t understand the world. We just retweet it.
What, Then, Is To Be Done?
Should we become mystics? Take up tarot and goat sacrifice? Not necessarily. But we should strip science of its papal robes. We should stop mistaking publication for truth, consensus for accuracy, and method for epistemic sanctity. The scientific method is not the problem. The pretence that it’s constantly being followed is.
Perhaps knowledge doesn’t have a half-life because of progress, but because it was never alive to begin with. We are not disproving truth; we are watching fictions expire.
Closing Jab
Next time someone says “trust the science,” ask them: which bit? The part that told us margarine was manna? The part that thought ulcers were psychosomatic? The part that still can’t explain consciousness, but is confident about your breakfast?
Science is a toolkit. But too often, it’s treated like scripture. And we? We’re just trying to lose weight while clinging to whatever gospel lets us eat more cheese.
Philosophics 
next time you want some dentistry, on your argument you might be equally well served going to a third world country.
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Right. I had a dentist back in 2012 or so, who argued that I shouldn’t hope for Universal Single-Payer insurance to cover dental work because ‘look how people’s teeth look in Europe.’ Most dental work in the United States is for vanity rather than any medical benefit.
Suffice it to say that was my last visit to his office.
As far as doctors go, much of the world has better health outcomes for less than half – sometimes a third – the cost.
But this is about epistemology and science – and those disciplines masquerading as science.
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I’m protesting about your one-sided argument – Yes Illich took medicine to task with his ‘Medical Nemesis’ – and you are saying nothing new. But with all its flaws I would rather a dentist in the first world than the third (although you can get 1st world dentists in Thailand if you know where to look – for about 1/4 the price)..
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I suggest you read Jana Uher’s 2024 paper ‘Agential realism as an alternative philosophy of science perspective for quantitative psychology’ (Frontiers in Psychology, 15: 1410047 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1410047) – it has a section on the current dilemma of replication of results….
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I see – interesting, though to me, Agential Realism feels like a can-kicking exercise dressed in metaphysical robes. It doesn’t solve the problem; it just reframes it, and in doing so, risks becoming an apology for a discipline in epistemic crisis. Perhaps I’m misreading it, but it smacks of moving the goalposts because the original game didn’t yield the expected results.
As you may know, I already view much of psychology as a pseudoscience – more akin to tarot with a research grant than to anything genuinely empirical. This defence, then, feels like rationalising the failure of predictive models by declaring that the universe is too entangled to measure. Convenient.
It’s not that humans defy measurement because we haven’t yet found the right tools or models. It’s that the premise itself – that human behaviour can be boxed, labelled, and predicted with scientific precision – is flawed from the start. We are not machines. We’re not consistent. We’re not even internally coherent.
If psychology wants to wear the lab coat, it needs to play by the rules of science: falsifiability, replicability, methodological rigour. If it can’t do that, fine – but then it should stop pretending it belongs in the same ontological space as physics or biology. It should embrace its nature as a narrative craft and build whatever ontologies it needs to tell useful stories. But let’s not confuse that with science.
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We are uncertain if Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive before we look. Heisenberg claimed that the uncertainty arises because we cannot know certain things due to the unavoidable disturbance created by our measuring instruments. Heisenberg in saying this was offering an epistemological understanding of why there is uncertainty. Let’s call this Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” (although he used Bohr’s term “indeterminacy” often – but as we shall see this generates confusion). Now Bohr’s “indeterminacy principle” is different – it is an ontological claim that the interaction (what Karen Barad was later to call the ‘intra-action’) between the measuring instrument (or for that matter any other quantum system) and the object under investigation brought that object into existence. (Or in the case of the cat – dead or alive.) Prior to that interaction (intra-action), because of the complementarity principle (nature comes in pairs of properties), we cannot predict which property it will be unless we set up our instruments one way or the other – Bohr was very particular about describing his set up.
So Heisenberg, because he relied on Kant, had a ‘linguistic turn’ to his principle. Don’t be a Kant (pronounced in your best German accent – to get the joke). Be a Bohr. As Deleuze says this changes everything, as you find yourself in an immanent universe – a universe you can’t step outside of (as Abrahamists have been doing since 539BCE).
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