opinionpage fengshui ...feng shui is a set of beliefs and practices arising from an ancient...

september 2019 hps&st newsletter

Opinion Page

Feng Shui: Philosophical Appraisal and Educational Opportunity

Michael R. Matthews, School of Education, University of New South Wales

Feng shui is a set of beliefs and practices arisingfrom an ancient deeply-entrenched Chinese andEast-Asian worldview. The ontological core of theworldview is commitment to the reality of an all-encompassing cosmic life-force or energy calledchi (qi). Feng shui includes medical, health, archi-tecture, construction, design, decoration, burialand divination practices. Its worldview is nat-uralistic. Its ontology has no supernatural entit-ies nor allows for divine interventions in nature;yet it promotes astrology, divination and fortunetelling. The worldview underwrites and justifiesthe traditional Chinese medicine (tcm) practicesof acupuncture and herbal medicine.

Although feng shui practices and worldview havetheir origin in Asia, both have an increasing in-ternational presence. Feng shui medical practices,under the title of ‘complementary’ or ‘alternative’medicine, are routinely taught inWesternmedical

schools; feng shui architecture is likewise taught inmany Western architecture faculties. The world-wide web brings hundreds of thousands of fengshui commentary and advice sites into the mostremote corners of the world.

There is a surprising asymmetry between the pres-ence, spread and impact of feng shui and its philo-sophical appraisal; there is little of the latter. Thereis some exposition, but little appraisal. And thereis almost no discussion of the educational oppor-tunities and responsibilities afforded by feng shuifor science teachers. This brief piece is a modestbeginning contribution to both the philosophicaland educational tasks.

Feng Shui and Chi

The naturalistic and ‘scientific’ core of feng shuiis commitment to the existence of a putative all-encompassing special energy or life-force chi orqi that has existed since the beginning of time;that occupies the entire cosmos – the universe,solar system, earth, and everything on the earth;and that flows through the human body whereit moves in defined meridians that can be ma-nipulated by acupuncture treatment. Clearly Chilives in the borderland of physics, metaphysics andpseudophysics; it moves between the domains de-pending upon who is appraising it.

Simon Brown, author of The Feng Shui Bible, givesan account of chi that can be found in thousandsof popular books on the subject:

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hps&st newsletter september 2019

Chi is the subtle charge of electromagnetic energythat runs through everything, carrying informationfrom one thing to another. The chi flowing throughyour body predominantly carries your thoughts, be-liefs and emotions. At the same time some of yourchi is floating off, while you are also drawing innew energy. … Your energy field connects you toeverything else, whether you like it or not. Thesecret to making this energy work is understand-ing the process and finding out how you can makeit help you in life. (Brown 2005, p.24)

Chi belief has been engrained in Chinese culture– Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist and other variantsfor at least three thousand years. The practice ofdirecting and controlling personal chi (qi) is calledqigong (gong meaning work/effort). Feng shui be-lief bears upon most aspects of everyday life: thedesign of domestic, commercial and governmentbuildings; the siting and orientation of graves;personal fortune telling and divination; choos-ing auspicious times for marriage, commence-ment of building construction, opening a restaur-ant, launching a public company, going on holi-days, and much more.

Chi is perhaps best known for its utilization inTraditional Chinese Medicine (tcm). It is in-voked in practices such as herbal medicine, acu-puncture, yoga, and qigong exercise. All of theseare efforts to promote, harness and direct lifeforces. In China 240 universities offer degreeprogrammes in tcm; 18 countries have includedacupuncture in their medical insurance schemes;countless Western medical schools have tcm un-der the name of ‘complementary’ or ‘alternative’medicine’. The Tianjin-based Quanjian herbalcompany was worth $2.8 billion in 2015; it had10,000 staff in 110 countries; it operated the largestcancer-treatment hospital in the world.

Just like Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religious be-

liefs, feng shui impinges on daily personal and so-cial life; it informs people’s understanding of theirplace in the cosmos; it is a secular worldview. Onecommentator has said:

Based on ancient Chinese philosophical traditions,feng shui has developed for over two millennia toinclude knowledge, rituals, aphorisms, and super-stitions from throughout China. As such, it is cent-ral to any understanding of Chinese cultural his-tory, life, and psychology, as well as that of manyother East Asian cultures that also practice Chinesefeng shui. (Puro 2002, p.108)

A study of feng shui in Korea commencedwith thestatement: ‘The importance of geomancy [divina-tion or foretelling the future] in understanding theEast Asian cultural landscape and cultural ecologyis difficult to overemphasize’ (Yoon 2006, p.xiii).

Dr Yan Xin, a former TCM practitioner whoworked in different Chinese and US universities isa celebrity super-Qigongist with an internationalreputation for healing thousands of patients ata distance by generating and casting his own qiover them. Some of his lectures, including in theUS, were attended by tens of thousands. In 1986he was attached to the Qigong Cooperative Re-search Group at Tsinghua Technical University inBeijing, and claimed that:

the mind power or Qi emitted by a trained Qigongmaster can influence or change themolecular struc-ture of many test samples, including those of DNAand RNA, even if these test samples are 6 to 2,000kilometers away from the master. Qi can also affectthe half-life of radioactive isotopes and the polar-ization plane of a beam of light as emitted from aHelium-Neon laser.

Much has been written on the history, philosophy,and practice of feng shui (Bruun 2008). But des-

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pite feng shui’s significant historical, cultural andeconomic footprint, there has been little criticalphilosophical appraisal of the theory and practice.Feng shui is surprisingly ignored in the consid-erable philosophical discussion of pseudoscience(Pigliucci & Boudry 2013). And there has been noeffort to examine how feng shui might be handledas a topic in schools, specifically in science pro-grammes.

This is a pity on both counts. Any philosoph-ical examination of feng shui will lead directly toimportant and engaging issues about the role ofmetaphysics in science, realism vs instrumental-ism, ontological versus methodological natural-ism, the function of empirical evidence in theoryappraisal, the demarcation of science from non-science, and more specifically the demarcation ofscience from pseudoscience.

Feng shui has long migrated from Asia and has anincreasing international commercial, domestic,and personal presence. Feng shui is a billion-dollar international growth industry. As a writerin the American Institute of Architects newslettercommented: ‘Feng Shui is no longer just an an-cient Chinese secret. While slow to take root out-side of its original heartland, it is now global andtranscends culture and politics’ (Knoop, 2001).The Amazon Kindle site lists over one thousandfeng shui books in English alone; there are manytimes this number on second-hand book sites;there are countless thousands, if not hundredsof thousands, of commercial feng shui web sites;hundreds of thousands, likely millions, of peoplethroughout the world daily visit these sites andto varying degrees regulate or inform their life bywhat they read and purchase.

Feng shui is but one component of the wide spec-trum of chi or life-force based Eastern beliefs,

therapies, health practices and medicine. Oversome two to three thousand years, under differentphilosophical and cultural influences, many ver-sions of chi-based practice have evolved. Alongwith feng shui, others are: Qigong, Falun Gong,Tai Chi, and Jin Shin Jyutsu. They all combine chi(qi) with gong, meaning work, practice, or exer-cise.

Chi andtcmwere givenhuge exposure in theWestwith the publication of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao ofPhysics (Capra 1984). This book was first pub-lished in 1975, it went through three editions, waspublished in 23 languages, and sold over a mil-lion copies. For decades it was a ‘must have’ bookon countless undergraduate bookshelves. Caprawrote:

Traditional Chinese medicine, too, is based on thebalance of yin and yang in the human body, and anyillness is seen as a disruption of this balance. Thebody is divided into yin and yang parts. Globallyspeaking, the inside of the body is yang, the bodysurface is yin; the back is yang, the front is yin; in-side the body there are yin and yang organs. Thebalance between all these parts is maintained by acontinuous flow of ch’I, or vital energy, along a sys-tem of ‘meridians’ which contain the acupuncturepoints. (Capra 1984, p.98)

Ken Tobin, a former president of the National As-sociation for Research in Science Teaching and ahugely cited education researcher embraced chi-related medical practice, saying:

The underlying theory relates to Qi, universal en-ergy, and its flows through the body. In the caseof humans there are 26 pairs of safety energy locks(sels) through which Qi flows, providing the lifesource to the body … When a body is disharmon-ized, energy can be blocked at or close to the SELs,

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thereby disrupting one or more of the flows neededto distribute the life force to different parts of thebody. (Tobin 2015)

That a person so prominent in the internationalscience education community can talk so eas-ily, confidently and without hesitation about lifeforces, chi flows, sels, and energy blockages – un-derscores the degree of penetration of feng shuithinking beyond its Asian homeland.

Two philosophers identify chi as the foundation ofChinese cosmology and medicine:

Qi is one of the most important and widely inter-preted concepts in Chinese intellectual history. Asa shared notion underlying all schools, qi is believedto be a dynamic, all-pervasive, and all-transformingforce animating everything in the universe. The airone breathes, the force that drives the flow of blood,the food one eats, the strength of one’s mind, theflow of one’s thoughts, the deepest urges of one’sheart–all of these are understood in terms of qi.Thus qi extends across realms that might other-wise be divided in the spiritual, mental, or physical.(Wang & Ding 2010, p.42)

In the Confucian and Daoist (Taoist in the earlierWade-Giles translation) Chinese traditions philo-sophy and science were not separate enterprises.It is not that the first influences the second, orthat the second corrects the first; there is no suchdramatic separation. Traditional Chinese science(natural philosophy) was a part of, or interwovenwith, religion and philosophy. This is just howit also was in the West until the Scientific Re-volution began to make separations possible. Thesubsequent Western preoccupation of demarcat-ing one from the other, and examining their inter-action, is alien to the Chinese tradition. When theissue does arise, the answer is even more complexthan that given in the West. Ole Bruun writes:

The concept of qi, which may be translated into‘breath’ or ‘breath of nature’, is fundamental toChinese natural philosophy. It is strongly indicativeof an organic predisposition in Chinese thinking ingeneral, as opposed to the mechanistic orientationthat became dominant in European natural philo-sophy after the Middle Ages. (Bruun 2008, p.108)

Failing the Test

It is noteworthy that the putative universal life-force, chi or qi, has not featured in the history ofmodern science, and has never been identified inany reputable science laboratory. Despite chi be-liefs and practices having a 3,000+ years history,there is no instrument that indicates chi’s pres-ence, its flow, or measures its intensity. Thereis no standard chi unit comparable to the stand-ard units for every quantity measured in science:there is nothing equivalent to a standard metre,kilogram, ohm, calorie, watt or joule. There is no‘chi-counter’ equivalent of the Geiger counter; in-deed, there is simply no chi meter at all. In thewhole constellation of chi talk, theory and prac-tice, there are no standards. The remarkable chiclaims have never been confirmed in any reput-able laboratory test or reported in anymainstreamscience journal.

Western science has seen some brief efflorescenceof life-force type thinking such as Franz Mes-mer’s animal magnetism or Henri Bergson’s élanvital but these never persisted; the constructs wereshown to have no ontological reference. TheBenjamin Franklin chaired eighteenth centuryFrench Royal Commission (which included Ant-oine Lavoisier) comprehensively examined Mes-mer’s claims, theory and practice and:

[we] concluded unanimously about the question ofthe existence and utility of magnetism, that nothingproves the existence of animal magnetism; that this

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non-existent fluid is consequently useless. (Frank-lin et al. 1784/2014, p.37)

This ‘failure to find’ situation is altogether oddas the foundational energy-centric commitmentof feng shui should have practitioners lining upat the doors of science laboratories for vindica-tion. The very first reaction to Simon Brown’sabove claim, made also by countless others Chiis the subtle charge of electromagnetic energy thatruns through everything would be to demonstrate:When? Where? How much? In a world desperateto find alternate energy sources and less expens-ive healthcare, one might expect everyone wouldbe seeking scientific endorsement of chi. But thishas not happened. This repeated ‘failing the test’situation coupled with continued unchanged pro-nouncements, is a powerful indicator that chi talk,although sounding scientific, is pseudoscientific.

The noma (Non Overlapping Magisteria) optionpromoted by Stephen Jay Gould and many others(Gould 1999) is not available to chi adherents asclearly chi claims are about regular, causal mech-anisms in the world; they are claimswithin the do-main or ‘magisteria’ of science.

Entrenched disregard of test failure has unfortu-nate consequences: if citizens are raised to simplyaccept, without evidence and testing, the founda-tional claims about chi and its yin/yang governedmanifestations, then what other such claims willthey accept?

For almost two thousand years crushed rhino-ceros horn has been a stable of Traditional ChineseMedicine (tcm) on account of it supposedly con-taining prodigious amounts of distilled chi. Itis estimated that 800-1,000 are slaughtered eachyear and their horns sold for around USD300,000each. The White Rhinoceros whose double hornswere especially chi-rich has, in the past few dec-

ades, been hunted to extinction in the wild. TheChinese government has belatedly banned its im-port. But the government has skirted around say-ing that the horn has no chi; such a pronounce-ment would obviously open up toomany other in-vestigations into what does and does not containchi, and so undermine the ontological foundationof State-endorsed tcm.

If people are routinely accustomed to acceptclaims without evidence, then the pool of such ‘noevidence’ claims is open to further expansion andcan take in all manner of objectionable, dangerousand abhorrent beliefs. The demand for evidencecan be problematic when the claims are about su-pernatural entities, powers and activities. Itmight,with some initial plausibility, be argued that be-lieving supernatural claims is independent of, orremoved from empirical, ‘natural’ evidence: to askfor the latter is to misunderstand what the claimis about, it is about supernatural events and pro-cesses of which, many maintain, science needs toremain mute. But feng shui and chi claims areprecisely not about a supernatural realm but pur-portedly about the natural realm in which we live.

Historical Critiques

The deleterious flow-on cultural and scientificproblems occasioned by feng shui have long beenrecognised. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) the Sino-phile leader of the famed late-16th century Jesuitmission to China (Laven 2011) wrote in his TravelJournal:

In choosing a place to erect a public edifice or aprivate house, or in selecting a plot of ground inwhich to bury the dead, they study the locationwithreference to the head and tail and the feet of theparticular dragons [chi lines] which are supposed todwell beneath that spot. Upon these local dragonsthey believe that the good and bad fortune, not only

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of the family but also of the town and province andthe entire kingdom, is wholly dependent. Manyof their most distinguished men are interested inthis recondite science and, when necessary, they arecalled in for consultation, even from a great dis-tance. ... Just as their astrologers read the stars, sotheir geologists [diviners] reckon the fate, or the for-tune of a place, from the relative position of moun-tains or rivers or fields, and their reckoning is justas deceitful as the reading of the stargazers. (Ricci1615/1953, p.84)

Ricci appreciated that serious Chinese adoptionof European natural philosophy, that is not justits instrumental use for astronomical calculations,would have cultural consequences and that theseneed to be acknowledged:

And in truth it thus happened that many, hav-ing learnt our mathematical sciences [astronomy],laughed at the law and doctrine of the idols [mas-ters], saying that if they taught so much error innatural matters and those of this life, there is noreason to give them credit in supernatural mattersand those of the other life. (Rule 1986, p.166)

This comment was directed specifically at ChineseBuddhists, but it has become a perennial issue inall cases of contact between traditional belief sys-tems and modern science: how to maintain tradi-tional authority structures when authorities makeclaims about the world that younger people whohave had some science classes can see are demon-strably false andwithout foundation? If respect forelders is predicated upon their being custodians ofa culture’s knowledge, then when that knowledgeis seen to be hollow then either respect is lost orother grounds for respect of cultural authorities ornorms need to be found.

Two hundred and fifty years after Ricci’s accountof Chinese natural philosophy and culture, Ernst

Johann Eitel (1838-1908), a Lutheran missionaryand Sinologist, took the same path (Wong 2000).He published a substantial appraisal of the history,metaphysics and functioning of feng shui FengShui: The Rudiments of Natural Science in China(Eitel 1873/1987). Eitel recognises that feng shuisite selection and medical guidance goes beyondharmless and benign commonsense practices:

Well, if Feng-shui were nomore thanwhat our com-mon sense and natural instincts teach us, ChineseFeng-shui would be no such puzzle to us. But thefact is, the Chinese havemade Feng-shui a black art,and those that are proficient in this art and derivetheir livelihood from it, find it to their advantage tomake the same mystery of it, with which Europeanalchemists and astrologers used to surround theirvagaries. (Eitel 1873/1987, p.1)

He echoes Emmanuel Kant and anticipates Alex-andre Koyré in affirming the centrality of experi-ment in modern science:

There is one great defect in Feng-shui, which ourWestern physicists have happily long ago discarded.This is the neglect of an experimental but at thesame time critical survey of nature in all its details.(Eitel 1873/1987, p.69)

Joseph Needham (1900-1995) the greatest andmost influential twentieth-century student ofpre-modern Chinese science wonderfully doc-umented the interplay of science, technology,philosophy, and metaphysics in Chinese culture(Winchester 2008), saying that:

Superstitious practices flourished in China just asstrongly as in all other ancient cultures. Divinationof the future, astrology, geomancy [fortune telling],physiognomy, the choice of lucky and unlucky days,and the lore of spirits and demons, were part of

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the common background of all Chinese thinkers,both ancient andmedieval. (Needham&Ling 1956,p.346)

And:

The Neo Confucians [eleventh century] arrived atwhatwas essentially an organic view of the universe.Composed of matter-energy (Ch’i) and ordered bythe universal principle of organization (Li), it wasa universe which, though neither created nor gov-erned by any personal deity, was entirely real, andpossessed the property of manifesting the highesthuman values (love, righteousness, sacrifice, etc.)when beings of an integrative level sufficiently highto allow of their appearance, had come into exist-ence. (Needham & Ling 1956, p.412)

Needhamcorrectly said of traditional five-elementthinking that:

The only trouble about the Chinese five-elementtheories was that they went on too long. What wasquite advanced for the +1st century was tolerablein the +11th century, and did not become scandal-ous until the +18th century. The question returnsonce again to the fact that Europe had a Renais-sance, a Reformation, and great concomitant eco-nomic changes, while China did not. (Needham &Ling 1956, p.294)

Criticism of feng shui came not only from out-side the Chinese tradition; it has been persistentwithin. In 1915 following the collapse of the Man-chu dynasty and establishment of the new Repub-lic of China, in the bubbling economic, cultural,philosophical and warring times of the period,a hugely popular and influential periodical, NewYouth (La Jeunesse Nouvelle), was launched. Itwas edited by Ch’en Duxiu (1879-1942), a noted

champion of science, critic of traditional Con-fucian philosophy and culture, and a founder ofthe Chinese Communist Party (ccp). Its openingeditorial opined:

Our men of learning do not understand science;thus they make use of yin-yang signs and beliefs inthe five elements to confuse the world and deludethe people and engage in speculations on geomancy…The height of their wondrous illusions is the the-ory of Ch’I [primal force] …We will never com-prehend this Ch’I even if we were to search every-where in the universe. All of these fanciful notionsand irrational beliefs can be corrected at their rootsby science, because to explain truth by science wemust prove everything with fact. Although this isslower than imagination and arbitrary judgment,every progressive step is taken on firm ground. Itis different from those flights of fancy which in theend cannot advance one bit. (New Youth, 1915,vol.1, p.1. In Kwok 1965, p.65)

The Chinese Communist Party has had an ambi-valent relation to feng shui. In 1940 Mao Tse-tungdeclared for science and against superstition, in-cluding feng shui, saying:

The culture of this New Democracy is scientific. Itopposes all feudal and superstitious thought; it ad-vocates practical realism, objective truth, and theunion of theory and practice. From this point ofview, the scientific thought of the Chinese prolet-ariat, along with the comparatively progressive ma-terial monists and natural scientists of the capitalistclass, must unite to oppose imperialism, feudalism,and superstition; [they] must not ally themselveswith any reactionary idealism. (Selected Works,vol.2, p.700; in Kwok 1965, p.19)

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When the Chinese Communist Party came topower in 1949 feng shui was outlawed as a formof backward superstition incompatible with thematerialist ontology of Marxist theory; feng shuiwas dismissed as one of the ‘Four Olds’ (Sha-piro 2001). Not surprisingly senior party figurescontinued to employ feng shui consultants, usu-ally under the guise of cleaners or cooks. Thenfrom the beginnings of this century, in their bol-stering of Chinese nationalism, the Party, withgreat intellectual contortion, formally supportedfeng shui. They brought tcm into university med-ical schools and feng shui design and theory intouniversity architecture programmes; they hostedinternational congresses on ‘Feng Shui Architec-ture’. Notoriously, one variant of feng shui, namelyFalun Gong, remains illegal and can only be prac-ticed in prison if its adherents live to do so (Lemish2008).

Feng Shui in a Science Programme

Feng shui is not a supernatural belief. It is aboutthe constitution and workings of the world. Itscore is explicitly energy-centric; it claims to bea scientific practice so in principle it can be dis-cussed and examined in science classes. Furtherthere are quite general philosophical, cultural, andeducational lessons that can be learnt from its in-formed and critical appraisal.

Such examination offers rich opportunities for sci-ence teachers to elaborate on important features ofscience, or ‘nature of science’ (nos) as selectionsof these are often labelled. Features such as: therelationship of science to metaphysics, scientificmethod, the connection of science to worldviews,ontological and methodological naturalism, thedemarcation of science from pseudoscience, andthe central scientific concept of energy. This could

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be an important part of the contribution of scienceeducation to cultural health.

The same education argument favours the exam-ination in science classes, of any competing or al-ternative system of beliefs about the world andits mechanisms. Such examination can promotebetter understanding of the methods, methodo-logy and domain of science. So, for example,when evolution is studied, then contrast Dar-winism with creationist and Lamarckian science;when Mendelian genetics is studied, then contrastit with Lysenkoism; when the Copernican systemis studied, then contrast it with the Ptolemaic sys-tem; when the geophysics of earthquakes or volca-noes is studied, contrast it with pre-scientific theo-logical accounts of both phenomena. With en-ergy being a constant and universal componentof all science programmes, there is ample oppor-tunity to study and discuss the startling chi-energyclaims of feng shui.

The careful and sympathetic teaching of false the-ories and pseudoscientific theories not only illu-minates the methodology of science, such teach-ing can prepare students for their inevitable dailyencounters with bad science, bogus science andpseudoscience.

Further, feng shui can be a rich topic for co-ordinated, cross-disciplinary teaching betweendifferent school faculties: science, history, socialstudies, philosophy, art, economics and religion.The cross-disciplinary appraisal of feng shui isan excellent case-study for much-advocated stem(Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics)education, and its Arts-augmented steam educa-tion.

Almost 20 years ago Mario Bunge observed:

Given the intrinsic interest and the cultural import-

ance of pseudoscience and anti-science, it is surpris-ing that they should receive so little attention onthe part of philosophers, particularly in our times ofcrisis of public confidence in science. (Bunge 2001,p.189)

Subsequently philosophers have attended to con-ceptual and demarcation issues occasioned bypseudoscience. But feng shui is noticeably miss-ing from all such discussion.

Conclusion

The philosophical appraisal and educational ex-amination of feng shui can be fitted into a largereight-step argument concerning history, philo-sophy and science teaching (Matthews 2015). Theargument, in brief, is:

1. Science needs to be taught in conjunction withthe history and philosophy of science (hps) asit is only in this way that proper student un-derstanding and appreciation of science – itsmethodology, ontology, epistemology, ethicsand interrelations with culture can be acquired.

2. Science education has to fulfil disciplinary, per-sonal, social and cultural purposes. Each is ad-vanced by the development of a scientific habitof mind which will bear upon student appreci-ation of feng shui.

3. Accepting the social and cultural purposes ofscience education means that teaching aboutfeng shui is an educational obligationwhere thepractice and beliefs are entrenched; to ‘look theother way’ is educationally and culturally irre-sponsible.

4. Such teaching about feng shui, or its local sur-rogates (astrology and other such belief sys-tems), allows for clarification of many central

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issues inhps, specifically concerning the natureof science (nos), a topic that appears in nearlyall national and provincial science curricula.

5. No creditable scientific or non-scientificgrounds have been advanced for the existenceof chi, consequently, belief in chi is fanciful.This conclusion, though clear, need not be con-veyed in any closed-minded, dogmatic way;it can be done in a culturally sensitive man-ner that problematises issues and seriously en-gages student thinking about the plentiful chiclaims. An at-a-distance historical approach isone such pedagogical avenue (Heering & Höt-tecke 2014).

6. Acknowledging whatever success astrologicalhealing, divination, tcm, herbal infusions, acu-puncture and qigong exercises have does notmean that the success is attributable to chi ma-nipulation. Sound scientific explanations, in-cluding that of placebo effects, can be found;indeed they should be found. This is thelong history of identification of the efficaciouschemicals in effective herbal treatments andthen their commercial production – the storyof aspro and quinine. Recourse to chi is just adistraction; itmuddies the researchwaters. Theinference to chi from effective treatment is an-other example of the common fallacy of affirm-ing the consequent. The argument:

C → T

T

∴ C

is invalid. Many other factors can equally im-ply T.

7. Nor can a non-realist, instrumentalist inter-pretation of chi be advanced as an answer tothe ‘failure to find’ problem. That is, it can-not be said that the failure to find chi is because

there is no existent there to find but neverthe-less the chi concept is useful as it does instru-mental duty. Much like, for instance, ‘intelli-gence’ which on an instrumentalist interpreta-tion is not there to find, rather it marshals to-gether various empirical accomplishments andtest performances. On this account, to look forintelligence is a category mistake; it is to con-fuse an intervening variable with a hypothet-ical construct (MacCorquodale &Meehl 1948).But the chi concept is so nebulous, ill-definedand confused, that it cannot function as an in-tervening variable, it cannot act as a theoreticalplace-holder for empirical data. Thinking chiis of instrumental use is a step towards mysti-cism about nature. Like special creation the-ory, chi is always a post factum inference. Thisis another indication that the chi edifice is apseudoscience.

8. Contrary to popular philosophical belief(Laudan 1983/1996), the distinction betweenscience and pseudoscience can be consistentlyand intelligently maintained and feng shui canbe shown to be a pseudoscience.

This brief Opinion Piece is more programmaticthan programme; there are more signposts thanroad. But a 340-page elaboration of the argument,along with 840 references, can be read in: MichaelR.Matthews (2019) Feng Shui: TeachingAbout Sci-ence and Pseudoscience, Springer, Dordrecht.

Springer provides pdf files for book reviews, whenthe review is published the reviewer is sent theprint version of the book. For details contact au-thor or Springer Reviews.

To contribute to a possible anthology in which re-search on philosophical, historical, cultural, soci-ological and educational issues occasioned by fengshui will be published, contact the author.

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https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030188214

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030188214


References

Brown, S.: 2005, The Feng Shui Bible: The Defin-itive Guide to Practisiing Feng Shui, OctupusPublishing Group, London.

Bruun, O.: 2008, An Introduction to Feng Shui,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Capra, F.: 1984, The Tao of Physics, 2nd revisededition of 1975 original, Bantam Books, NewYork.

Eitel, Ernest J.: 1873/1987. Feng Shui: TheRudiments of Natural Science in China, Lane,Crawford & Co., Hong Kong, (Graham Brash,Singapore).

Franklin, B., Le Roy, M., Bailly, S. J.-S., Guillotin,

J.-I. de Bory, d’A. & Lavoisier, A.: 1784/2014,‘Report of the Commissioners Charged by theKing with the Examination of Animal Mag-netism’. In I.M.L. Donaldson (trans. & ed.)The Reports of the Royal Commission on Mes-mer’s System of Animal Magnetism and OtherContemporary Documents, James Lind Libraryand Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh,pp. 39-76.

Gould, S.J.: 1999, Rock of Ages: Science and Reli-gion in the Fullness of Life, Ballantine Books,New York.

Heering, P. & Höttecke, D.: 2014, ‘Historical-Investigative Approaches in Science Teach-ing’. In M.R. Matthews (ed.) InternationalHandbook of Research in History, Philosophyand Science Teaching, Springer, Dordrecht, pp.1473-1502.

Knoop, A.: 2001, ‘Feng Shui for Architects’, Amer-ican Institute of Architects, Newsletter, http://www.lezley.info/feng-shui.htm.

Kwok, D.W.Y.: 1965, Scientism inChineseThought:1900-1950, Yale University Press, New Haven,CT.

Laudan, L.: 1983/1996, ‘The Demise of the De-marcation Problem’. In L. Laudan BeyondPositivism and Relativism: Theory, Methodand Evidence, Westview Press, Boulder, CO,pp.210-222.

Laven, M.: 2011, Mission to China: Matteo Ricciand the Jesuit Encounter with the East, Faber &Faber, London.

Lemish, L.: 2008, ‘Why is Falun Gong Banned’,The Economist, 19 August.

MacCorquodale, K. & Meehl, P.: 1948, ‘On a

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http://www.lezley.info/feng-shui.htm

http://www.lezley.info/feng-shui.htm


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