NOT EVEN WRONG

Not even wrong is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. For a meaningful discussion on whether a certain statement is true or false, the statement must satisfy the criterion of falsifiability, the inherent possibility for the statement to be tested and found false. In this sense, the phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable. Any argument or explanation that can be neither correct or incorrect, because it fails to meet the criteria by which correctness and incorrectness are determined. As a more formal fallacy, it refers to the fine art of generating an ostensibly "correct" conclusion, but from premises known to be wrong or inapplicable. It implies not only is someone not making a valid point in a discussion, but they don't understand the nature of the discussion itself, or the things that need to be understood in order to participate. Something that is not even wrong is usually so far from reality that it is, quite simply, flabbergastingly irrelevant.