ABSTRACT
One of the main goals of medicine is to improve the health of individuals. Modern Western medicine prides itself on being based on science. The distinction between science and non-science thus becomes a relevant matter for medicine: to identify the boundaries of modern scientific medicine requires delineating the boundaries of science. The power of the positivist’s verificationism might seem subtle at first sight, but its epistemic implications are staggering. Verificationism seems like a perfect way to separate genuine sciences from the pretenders. Modern physics, for instance, makes empirical predictions. In light of the difficulty verificationism faced, the British-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper proposed an alternative demarcation between science and pseudo-science. The emergence of empirical verification as the defining characteristic of modern science also provided philosophers with a ready tool to delineate science from pseudo-science. A medicine grounded in this Kuhnian view of science would place pragmatic outcomes the scientific status of a practice.
