Science

Four senses, and separating them is the argument, since conflating them is what allows the authority of the first to be claimed by the fourth. A research methodology is a way of finding things out and Marsh has no quarrel with it. The second sense names what the methodology is embedded in, a set of ideologies and philosophies used as frameworks to interpret data, which is where mechanism sits alongside animism as one framework among possible ones. The third is the sharp one. Science as an endo-identity is a word enabling exclusive membership and marking a group as exceptional, with all the machinery that follows, and the fourth is what that identity produces, an endoreality term for an authoritative source of knowledge. Her complaints follow from the distinction rather than from hostility to enquiry. The scientific taboo against everything classified as divinity leaves authoritative knowledge restricted, and superstition, which scientists like to misrepresent as skepticism, produces an aversion to knowledge from the wrong sources and leaves gaping and inexplicable holes. Cross-disciplinary work is almost universally ignored, and when a paper does appear that mentions it, the treatment is typically so surface level it reads as gratuitous. Her positive proposal is a discipline rather than a rejection, since vitology, the study of life, ought to replace psychology and should include power, gerontology, physics, medicine, neuroscience and sociology.

Demarcation, the question of what distinguishes science from non-science, is unsettled, with Popper's falsifiability criterion widely taught and widely criticized. Kuhn described paradigms shaping what counts as a legitimate question, and the sociology of scientific knowledge after the Edinburgh school studies scientific claims as social products. Scientism names the criticized extension of scientific authority beyond its competence, which is closest to Marsh's fourth sense. Her four-way split is unusual in holding all four together, since most critics either defend the method against its institutions or attack both, and she is explicit that the first sense is not the target.