The Demarcation Problem

I’ve been reading through Sean Carroll’s well written article on ArXiv about his concerns surrounding Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” argument to separate science from non-science. Awesome. However, I wonder how much he is leaning on the problems of “falsifiability” in the setting of Everettian interpretation? Carroll is a proponent of this “many worlds” interpretation. I am in no way a physicist, but his academic work seems to fall more into philosophy rather than physics.

Clinical medicine, engineering, bench chemistry need falsifiability. Otherwise, the world is full of chaos — anti-vax theories, essential oils for all sorts of problems, alchemy, airplanes that cannot fly, buildings that collapse, etc.

I wonder if science itself needs a demarcation. This separation would involve two categories:

A. Demarcation “Yes”: Medicine, bench chemistry, engineering, dentistry, architecture, perhaps mathophysics.

B. Demarcation “No”: theoretical physics, theoretical biology, theoretical evolutionary science (some ideas surrounding convergence or kin selection), perhaps mathology.

So, in the “Yes” category, falsifiability would be crucially important. Clinical trials, stress loading in engineering, the importance of chemical reactions could be potentially falsified which would eliminate pseudo-science. Pseudo-science is incredibly common (unfortunately) in clinical medicine where I work.

In the “No” category, theoretical physics, theoretical biology, the philosophy of math, etc. could progress forward with no need to necessarily “prove” what is occurring. Does this run into categories of philosopy? Theology? Perhaps and probably “yes”. However, it seems Popper is much more helpful in the “Demarcation ‘Yes'” category.

I think some aspect of “ethics” should be involved in the demarcation problem as well although I am just starting to work on this idea. Everettian mechanics (MWI) probably doesn’t make the world worse for existing as an idea. Theoretical evolution involving social Darwinism definitely is ethically wrong. Anti-vax ideology, some ideas surrounding “vascular decompression”, and over diagnosis of genetic syndromes without genetic testing are definitely wrong.