Description
Philosopher Robert Todd Carroll suggests the following criteria for a topic to warrant the term pseudohistory:
- That the work uncritically accepts myths and anecdotal evidence without skepticism.
- That the work has a political, religious, or other ideological agenda.
- That a work is not published in an academic journal or is otherwise not adequately peer reviewed.
- That the evidence for key facts supporting the work's thesis is:
- selective and ignores contrary evidence or explains it away; or
- speculative; or
- controversial; or
- not correctly or adequately sourced; or
- interpreted in an unjustifiable way; or
- given undue weight; or
- taken out of context; or
- distorted, either innocently, accidentally, or fraudulently.
- That competing (and simpler) explanations or interpretations for the same set of facts, which have been peer reviewed and have been adequately sourced, have not been addressed.
- That the work relies on one or more conspiracy theories or hidden-hand explanations, when the principle of Occam's razor would recommend a simpler, more prosaic and more plausible explanation of the same fact pattern.
Read more about this topic: Pseudohistory
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