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.
Appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific methodology while simultaneously denying their validity. A procedurally invalid experiment that seems to show that astrology works is advanced as "proof" that astrology is correct, while thousands of procedurally sound experiments that show it does not work are ignored. The fact that someone got away with simple magic tricks in one scientific lab is "proof" that he is a psychic superman, while the fact that he was caught cheating in several other labs is ignored.
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