Welcome, listeners. What you're about to hear is a new format for the podcast that we're experimenting with, a mini episode in which either I or Massimo will interview a guest one-on-one in a shorter version of the podcast. We'll be interspersing these mini episodes occasionally with our regular format of the podcast. Hope you enjoy and keep on tuning in to the Rationally Speaking podcast.

Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City Skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org. Welcome to the rationally speaking interviews.

My name is Massimo Piliuchi, and today we have Martin Badri from Ghent University.

Martin is a philosopher of science, and we've been friends for a number of years, and in fact he has been a guest on the rationally speaking podcast, the full version of it,

to talk about what philosophers call the demarcation problem, the difference between science and pseudoscience.

Thanks for being back, Martin.

Thanks for having me again. I hope I didn't do anything wrong last time.

I'm giving me a second shot, perhaps.

Well, yeah, you deserve a passion, that's the idea.

So with Martin today, I want to talk about something we did together recently here at the

Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

We run a two-day workshop on Scientism. And this was characterized by lots

of interesting speakers, lots of interesting discussion. Eventually, at some point, very likely the

proceedings of these things are going to be published. But in the meantime, I thought it was going

to be interesting for the listeners of Russian speaking to just talk about scientism. So the first

and obvious question, Martin, is

what is scientist anyway?

That's a very good question. That was one of the

major topics of the workshop, of course.

Whether there is such a thing as

Scientism and whether or not it is something to worry about.

...