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Re: PSEUDO-SCIENCE



My apology to Robert Cohen who, for want of an "O", became Robert Chen.
Regards,
Jack

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Jack Uretsky wrote:

Hi all-
I'll pick on Robert Chen's posting to say my brief piece.
Definitions are arbitrary. Tell me your definition of "science"
and I'll know what YOU mean whenever you use the term (well, more or less,
"know"). Although people do occasionally go to war over definitions, I
don't consider that to be a worthwhile enterprise.
The one question that I think is fair is whether a particular
definition is useful; the answer depends on the context in which the
definition is used.
I have not seen, so far in this discussion, any benefit from
defining who is, or is not, a "scientist". Have I missed something?
Regards,
Jack

Adam was by constitution and proclivity a scientist; I was the same, and
we loved to call ourselves by that great name...Our first memorable
scientific discovery was the law that water and like fluids run downhill,
not up.
Mark Twain, <Extract from Eve's Autobiography>

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Robert A Cohen wrote:

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.

----------------------------------------------------------
| Robert Cohen Department of Physics |
| East Stroudsburg University |
| bbq@esu.edu East Stroudsburg, PA 18301 |
| http://www.esu.edu/~bbq/ (570) 422-3428 |
----------------------------------------------------------

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