There is, to be sure, a genuine problem in the phenomenon of quantum measurement, but I will not discuss it here. It concerns introspective systems, where subject = object so that the basic conception of a single subject observing an ensemble of objects must be modified.
- David Finkelstein

If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
- Carl Sagan

Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel 'threatened' by science-studies scholars. My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots.
- Alan Sokal

1. Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
2. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
3. Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.

Why The Laws of Thought Are, After All, the Laws of (Evolutionary) Logic

Driven by an understandable desire for consilience, and a willingness to rethink received views in light of new discoveries, a cottage industry has grown up around showing how a neo-Darwinian worldview can shed light on the origin and justification of such things as morality, rationality, and knowledge. William Cooper’s The Evolution of Reason: Logic as a Branch of Biology is a fascinating contribution to evolutionary epistemology, and as such, it focuses primarily on the last two fields, with the emphasis on reasoning classically construed…as computation across representations, where the computational structure takes canonically rational form. Some critics will think Cooper and his naturalistic brethren are dramatically misguided: evolution has nothing to do with norms, be they moral, logical, or epistemic. Don’t mix your facts with my norms, they would say (and yes, the allusion to the old commercials about the origin of Reese’s peanut butter cups is intentional, with the structural relations of the metaphor to be preserved across the mapping). For his part, Cooper steers clear of the big-picture debate about the relationship between the empirical and the normative, preferring to let the explanatory power of his approach speak for itself.

Definition: The name in Latin means "after this therefore because of this".
This describes the fallacy. An author commits the fallacy when it is assumed that because one thing follows another that the one thing was caused by the other.

Examples: (i) Immigration to Alberta from Ontario increased. Soon after, the welfare rolls increased. Therefore, the increased immigration caused the increased welfare rolls.(ii) I took EZ-No-Cold, and two days later, my cold disappeared.

Alice laughed. "There's no use in trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the comparison is ludicrous.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
- Bertrand Russell