OPINION

I grew up in rural Kerala reading each morning ‘Mathrubhumi’-a Malayalam newspaper. Over those years, I remember seeing small box advertisements on top-corners of the front page; every day I would see different incarnations of similar ads. The ads would read like “scientifically prepared magic amulets to ward off evil spirits” and so on. Even after two full decades, similar ads can still be found in Mathrubhumi and other newspapers of Kerala (and presumably other states as well). The question here is straight forward, what is science? Simply put, science is an evidence-based pursuit of knowledge discovery. Let us consider the example of the previous advertisement, the amulet. The question is how effective the amulet is to ward off evil spirits. Before answering this issue, one has to ascertain the validity of a thing called ‘evil spirit’. Of course, this question evades a fundamental principle in science known as ‘falsifiability’, put forth first by the British philosopher of s...

This comment is in response to “ The march from yesterdays ” by Sundar Sarukkai, published on 10 th August 2017. I am surprised to read a comment from a philosopher colleague that suffer from the logical fallacy of ad ignorantiam in its entirety, that too in the same newspaper issue with an excellent politics article full of profound scientific insights from a non-scientist colleague ( When the Paradigm Shifts , Happymon Jacob). The ignorance stems in part from the author’s poor understanding of what construes the science and how it is different from non-science, erroneous science and pseudoscience- three totally unrelated concepts. Non-scientific disciplines like history, sociology, art, literature and so on are of course not pseudoscientific or erroneous science, and the author’s such a claim suffers from a logical fallacy known universally as ‘false dichotomy’. I am a scientist, and I also work on linguistics and evolutionary socio-politics, I have authored an English fictio...