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• Often contradicts itself, even in its own terms. When such logical contradictions of pseudoscience are pointed out, they are imply ignored or rationalized away.

• Deliberately creates mystery where none exists, by omitting crucial information and important details. Anything may be made "mysterious" by omitting what is known about it or by presenting completely imaginary details.

• Does not progress. There are fads, and pseudo-masters may switch from one fad to another; but within a given topic, no progress is made. Little or no new information is uncovered. New theories are seldom proposed. Old concepts are rarely modified or discarded in light of new discoveries, since pseudo-masters rarely make new discoveries. The older the idea, the more respect it receives. No natural phenomena or processes previously unknown to science have ever been discovered by pseudo-masters. Indeed, pseudo-masters almost invariably deal with phenomena well known to scientists, but little known to the general public, so that the public will swallow whatever the pseudo-master wants to claim, such as fire walking.

• Attempts to persuade with rhetoric, propaganda, and misrepresentation rather than valid evidence (which presumably does not exist). Books written by pseudo-masters offer examples of almost every kind of fallacy of logic and reason known to scholars and have invented some new ones of their own. A favorite device is what pseudo-masters call the "Galileo Argument." This consists of a pseudo-master comparing him or herself to Galileo, and saying that just as the pseudo-master is believed to be wrong, so Galileo belief that the earth was round was thought wrong by his contemporaries. Therefore, the pseudo-master must also be right, just as Galileo was. The conclusion is invalid. Moreover, Galileo's ideas were tested, verified, and accepted promptly by his scientific colleagues. The rejection came from established religion that favored the pseudoscience that Galileo's findings contradicted.

• Argues from ignorance. Many pseudo-masters base their claims on incompleteness of information about nature, rather than on what is known at present. But no claim can possibly be supported by lack of information. The fact that people do not recognize what they see in the sky means only that they do not recognize what they saw. This fact is not evidence that what they saw was a flying saucer from outer space. The statement "Science cannot explain" is commonly used by pseudo-masters. In many cases, science has no interest in the supposed phenomena because there is no evidence it exists; in other cases, the scientific explanation is well known and well established, but the pseudo-master does not know this or deliberately ignores it to create mystery.

• Argues from alleged exceptions, errors, anomalies, strange events, and suspect claims, rather than from well-established regularities of nature. Reports that describe well-understood objects behaving in strange and incomprehensible ways tend, upon investigation, to be deliberate frauds, honest mistakes, garbled accounts, misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and stupid blunders. Pseudo-masters always take such reports as literally true, without independent verification.

• Appeals to false authority, to emotion, sentiment, or distrust of established fact. A high-school dropout is accepted as an expert on the martial arts, though he may never never studied it. A movie star swears a pseudo-master is real, so he must be. A physicist says a pseudo-master could not possibly have fooled him with simple tricks, although the physicist knows nothing about magic and sleight of hand.

  Emotional appeals are common, such as "If it makes you feel good, it must be true" or "In your heart you know it's right." Pseudo-masters are fond of imaginary conspiracies, such as "There's plenty of evidence for the death touch, but the martial arts establishment keeps it secret." And they argue from irrelevancies. When confronted by inconvenient facts, they simply reply, "Scientists don't know everything!"

• Makes extraordinary claims and advances fantastic theories that contradict what is known about nature. Pseudo-masters make false claims such as "Every human is surrounded by an impalpable aura of electromagnetic energy, the auric egg of the ancient Hindu seers, which mirrors the human's every mood and condition." Then they not only provide no evidence that their claims are true, they also ignore all findings that contradict their conclusions.

• Pseudo-masters invent their own vocabulary in which many terms lack precise or unambiguous definitions, and some have no definition at all. Listeners are often forced to interpret the statements according to their own preconceptions. For example, what is "biocosmic energy" or a "psychotronic amplification system?" Pseudo-masters often attempt to imitate the jargon of scientific and technical fields by spouting gibberish that sounds scientific and technical. Pseudo-masters would be lost without the term "energy," but their use of the term has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of energy as used by physicists.

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