Re: PSEUDO-SCIENCE

[Robert A Cohen <bbq@ESU.EDU>]

My two cents worth...

It seems to me that a lot of this discussion is focusing on defining what
is LIKE science.  Science involves a lot of things, e.g., observation,
testing, predicting, etc.  Certainly most scientists may focus on one
particular "mode" or facet of this process but we recognize that it is
only one piece of the puzzle.

The problem, IMHO, is that it is easy to attribute science to those things
that are similar to one or two aspects of science and so are LIKE science.
For example, the observations and theorizing that creation "scientists"
carry out might be LIKE science in that sense, but there is little
attempt to predicting, testing, etc.  Unfortunately, defining science by
only one or two aspects may be reinforced by the science one gets in
school, which may focus only on the observation or theorizing part of
science.  In that respect, creation science certainly SEEMS (to the
untrained eye) as much LIKE a science as evolutionary science.

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| Robert Cohen               Department of Physics       |
|                            East Stroudsburg University |
| bbq@esu.edu                East Stroudsburg, PA  18301 |
| http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/   (570) 422-3428              |
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On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Greg Kifer wrote:

> It seems that much of the discussion on this thread has been about
> justifying the apellation "science" in many instances, but (unless I
> missed it) not much has been said about what science IS.  At its most
> democratic I propose to define science as any systematic observation of
> a phenomenon.  Perhaps as pscyhology and other "soft" sciences have
> attempted to standardize nomenclature and and derive quantitative
> representations for their observations they have become sciences (?)
> Just a thought.
>
> Greg Kifer
> Olathe North High School
> Olathe,  KS  66061
> gsanda@tfs.net