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Sophistry
The rejection of sophistry and pseudo-science is part of the humanist wisdom. Professional philosophy, for example.
The function of philosophy is the founding of sciences. Thales, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Grosseteste, Galileo, Newton and very few others have contributed to that. Plato, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Russell have not. And the tens of thousands of 'professional philosophers' have contributed nothing to civilization and are mere sophists, i.e., puzzle-mongers for profit. They are not concerned with genuine problems or genuine solutions.
The only kind of philosophy which is important is natural philosophy, that thin stream of thought which led to physics and astronomy in the 17th Century, chemistry and geology in the 18th, biology, archaeology, anthropology, and psychical research in the 19th Century and to spiritual science and value science in the 20th. All else in the Western philosophical tradition is either trivial or sophistical, and that certainly includes the prestigious 'giants' so admired by schoolmen. There have been several long ages in philosophy when the mainstream of thought was entirely sophistical, particularly in Hellenic times after Aristotle, and the Renaissance, and modern times, since within the schools of philosophy the natural philosophical vein is usually considered unimportant.
The philosophical problems concern the fundamental nature of reality, of truth, of goodness, and of rationality and justification. Pursuit of such questions in the abstract, removed from the actual concerns and conditions of human life, merely leads to endless and useless talk. The concrete problems that arise in experience can only be solved by experience. Thus, sophistry is unwilling and unable to put an end to itself. If the public saw through the sophistical art of making puzzles out of thin air, the tens of thousands of 'professional philosophers' would be out of work (fig. 22).
In the 'mainstream' of philosophy as it is taught in the schools the nature of scientific method is entirely misunderstood, and the most sophistical and useless part of all of philosophy is philosophy of science. The fact is, scientific method is the solution to philosophical questions.
There is no discipline of true philosophy, partly because its task is to make a 'discipline of true philosophy' (i.e., science) possible. What we have instead of a discipline are a few isolated peaks of genius over 2500 years, finally culminating in the foundation of new and genuine sciences. The first scientist in a new discipline is also its last philosopher. One can learn to be a scientist, but there is no pattern of study which can turn you into a philosopher. The attempt to do this produces the active evil of sophistry, which might be defined as puzzle-making for money. The sophists are never interested in solutions, only in 'raising questions.' (Question: is it a genuine question if you neither want nor expect an answer?)
The training of graduate students in philosophy consists in teaching them sophistical ways to undermine any argument. Genuine philosophy has a destructive enough effect; sophistry is purely negative and corrosive and destructive without being in any way constructive. We must add to that the fact that the foundation period of the purely Western contribution to rationality is over; all the possible realms of knowledge are now covered by a science (if we include value science and spiritual science), and future extensions of rationality must be in the area of humanist wisdom, or in rational ways of doing and being other than understanding. In short, all the philosophical problem have now been solved.
Thus, philosophy will not be a part of the humanist university, and the history of genuine philosophy will only be studied as a kind of primitive precursor to science.
Psychology is a pseudo-science. The psychologists and the other behavioral scientists (sociologists, political scientists) break every rule of scientific method. Psychologists avoid genuine explanatory theories, and they are unwilling to put their assumptions to the test of experience. That is all that is involved in psychology's celebrated unwillingness to consider psychical research. Psychology will pay for that failure by being banned from the roster of genuine sciences. Therefore, do not be misled by the very negative and limited view of man which comes from the psychologists; they are not reporting discoveries, only repeating their metaphysical assumptions. Any evidence or experience which is contrary to their metaphysical assumptions is simply denied and ignored. Likewise any serious theory is ignored; they content themselves with doing useless 'studies' which never look for explanations, but only for correlations. Today the serious hypotheses about the nature of man are found in spiritual science.
High energy physics is also a kind of pseudo-science. There have been several great physicists in the 20th Century, notably Planck, Einstein, and de Broglie. They were great because the discovered simple underlying facts about reality. After about 1926 physics took a different turn, particularly after 1939, a turn which the early founders did not like. Influenced by sophistry, physics backed away from the basic rule of explanatory sciences and ceased looking for reality and simplicity, and became purely formalistic and instrumental. Once the formalists and mathematicians took over in quantum mechanics, the subject ceased to be the study of the properties and effects of the de Broglie wave and became a purely formal calculus for calculating certain numbers. In that form, quantum mechanics is a dead end which could not have led to any further scientific developments, such as cosmic quantum mechanics.
In high energy physics, the basic rule of explanatory science was ignored in a still more fundamental way. Having discovered the neutron, proton and electron and the quanta of their interaction, the physicists had reached the fundamental level of physical reality. The search for still smaller components of these particles has led to the fantastically expensive world of high energy physics---and to steadily increasing complexity rather than lessening complexity. Instead of three fundamental particles, we now have more than 40 'fundamental' particles. I put scare quotes around "fundamental" because these particles are not part of the stable complement of this universe. They are artifacts, created by the high energy particle colliders. They only exist as fleeting high energy resonances of the fundamental particles in highly rarefied confines of these super expensive machines that the public is asked to support. The machine in Illinois cost half a billion.
High-energy physics is an Alice-in-wonderland universe. Discoveries made in that universe have no relevance for this one. There is no phenomenon known in this universe that can be explained in terms of anything in high energy physics. We reached sufficiency with the electron, proton, neutron, neutrino and their anti-particles. Why go further into useless by-paths of useless knowledge? There is always the argument that something fundamentally new will be discovered. There is an even more frightening possibility. What if these probings beyond the looking glass at higher and higher energies destroy the fabric of space-time? Or perhaps some sort of chain reaction of disintegrating matter might be triggered which would destroy the Earth? You see, the argument from ignorance cuts both ways; we might discover something interesting, but we also might discover something terrible. At the very least, if high energy physics is to be allowed to continue, it should not be allowed to use energies higher than those naturally occurring in the universe, nor should it be supported with public money.