Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: Pseudoscience



One problem with the following thoughts is that is would include almost all
"scientists" before Galileo and many after him.

Another difficulty is that it would disregard all thinking on a subject
after some elite group decided that it was worthless.

As a result a group such as Phys-l could come to the conclusion that
astrology was worthless -- mostly because it tired of talking about
it. I would say that any field should be studied as long as there is
someone willing to do it and someone to pay for the effort.

After all Rumford (for example) was disregarded for many years, but he
turned out to be correct --- although many even today don't accept his
findings. <g>

Jim Green

Thagard says:

"A theory or discipline which purports to be scientific is
pseudoscientific if and only if:

1. It has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long
period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but
2. the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the
theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for
attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others and is
selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations"

Thagard points out (and rightly so I think) that by this definition
we can forgive Copernicus, Kepler and the lot for casting horoscopes
(which almost all astronomers at that time did); at the time the idea
was new, untested and there was little in the way of alternative
psycological theory which was any better. Today, in retrospect, we
can see that astrology is a dead end, unproductive and so should be
abandoned as a scientific endeavor.

An interesting problem Thagard's definition solves is a question
about deciding when a theory has been tested enough to make a
conclusion as to its validity. We want scientific theories to be
testable (this is an idea due to Karl Popper). The problem is,
Astrology IS testable. There are several groups who have tried to do
statistical analysis correlating solar system arrangements at birth
to jobs later in life etc. The correlation is always relatively low,
of course, but one could argue that the right tests have just not
been done (we should go into more detail etc). So, as scientist,
should we keep testing these ideas? How deeply should we probe
astrological theory? Thagard says to abandon it altogether for the
above reasons.

kyle
-----------------------------------------------------
kyle forinash 812-941-2390
kforinas@ius.edu
Natural Science Division
Indiana University Southeast
New Albany, IN 47150
http://Physics.ius.edu/
-----------------------------------------------------

Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen