The sceptic’s question
In a culture that prizes double-blind trials, meta-analyses and “evidence-based” everything, feng shui is usually met with the same challenge: Where is the peer-reviewed proof? If it cannot be measured in a laboratory, how can you say it works?
It is a fair question, and after more than forty-five years of practice and several years of doctoral research into feng shui, I want to answer it properly rather than defensively. The answer has two halves. The first half is that feng shui is not a modern empirical science, has never claimed to be one, and does not need to become one in order to be useful. It is an art, a philosophy and a practice (if you want the short version, see What is feng shui? What is feng shui for? Short answers). The second half is that this does not place feng shui beyond examination. A claim can be traditional and still be testable; the only question is what to measure.
Is feng shui a pseudoscience? Only when it pretends to be a science
This is also the right place to deal with the word “pseudoscience”, because it is thrown at feng shui more often than it is earned. The philosopher of science Michael R. Matthews devoted a whole book, Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience, to using feng shui as a classroom example of how to tell science from its imitations, and his charge sheet is worth reading: an aversion to empirical testing, no attempt to disentangle variables, immunising explanations whenever evidence disconfirms a claim, conflicting advice between practitioners, and the borrowing of scientific words such as “energy” and “magnetic” without their scientific meanings. I summarised the book on this site when it came out (Summary of Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience by Michael R. Matthews) and I recommend it to every practitioner. But notice what the charge actually is. Pseudoscience is not a property of a tradition; it is a property of a claim. Something becomes pseudoscience at the moment it dresses itself in the authority of science without doing the work of science. Feng shui as an art and a philosophy makes no such claim, and it needs none: nobody accuses painting, ethics or architecture of being pseudoscience, because none of them pretends to be physics. The “scientific feng shui” that Matthews rightly takes apart is the invention of people who understand neither science nor feng shui, and who imagine that a tradition is only respectable if it can be relabelled as a laboratory result. The sensible position, and the one I hold, is the opposite: feng shui is an art, a philosophy and a practice; some of its principles can be studied scientifically and should be; and the moment a practitioner says “science proves” where the evidence does not, they have stopped doing feng shui and started doing pseudoscience.
