"We Are Constantly Told to 'Trust the Science,' but What Does That Mean If We Cannot Quite Tell Where or What the Science Is?"

"It is not quite sufficient, in answering this question, to point to a near-consensus on the part of the scientific community, thus in effect arguing that science is what the vast majority of scientists say it is. If this is largely how the argument does indeed function in the cases of debates about the safety of vaccines or the causes of global warming, we should nonetheless be aware of its flaws. Scientific revolutions, after all, involve rejections of scientific orthodoxy by a committed minority. If many anti-vaxxers or climate-change denialists appear more like Venkman than Galileo, it is nonetheless Galileo's mantle that they seek. We're back to Popper's problem: is there an in-principle way of distinguishing a revolutionary from a dedicated flim-flam artist that doesn't assume the correctness of either position in advance?"

Suman Seth at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Michael D. Gordin's On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience.