Scientific superstition

Calling it superstition rather than bias is the argument, since superstition is fear of an object rather than a distortion of judgement, and what the definition names is fear. What is feared is not being wrong but being contaminated by association, which is why the refusal extends past study to acknowledgement. The pattern of exclusion follows the pattern of the negative image exactly, which is Marsh's evidence that it is structural rather than methodological. Knowledge associated with women and with indigenous people is excluded because those are the negative images of the dominant endo-idealism, and knowledge associated with religion is excluded because religion is the rival endogroup. Nothing about the reliability of the knowledge enters into it. The consequence she names is not merely unfairness but gaps in what is known, since the superstition produces an aversion to knowledge from the wrong sources and leaves gaping and inexplicable holes in scientific knowledge. Her sharpest observation is about presentation, since scientists like to misrepresent this superstition as skepticism, which converts a refusal into a virtue. She describes the recognizable version plainly. This is endoreality masquerading as science, or as economics or anywhere else that facts are found to meet and support the laws of a pre-ordained worldview, and the deliberate self-blinding to life is the case she is most concerned with.

Sociology of scientific knowledge, following the Edinburgh school, studies scientific claims as social products and the symmetry principle requires explaining accepted and rejected claims the same way. Feminist epistemology after Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway holds that a view from nowhere conceals a position, and there is a substantial literature on the exclusion of traditional ecological knowledge from scientific institutions. Kuhn described paradigms determining which questions are legitimate. Marsh's addition is the affective claim, since bias and paradigm both describe cognitive or institutional limits and superstition names fear, which predicts avoidance and denial rather than disagreement.