Re: Pseudoscience

[Jack Uretsky <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>]

Hi all-
        I would modify Kyle's remarks by changing "validity" to
"invalidity" in the 4th para of his posting.  It is <never> possible
to conclude that a theory is valid.
                                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, 14 Mar 2000, kyle forinash wrote:

> There was a thread a few weeks back about pseudo-science and I just
> ran across an essay by Paul Thagard titled 'Why Astrology is a
> Pseudoscience' which gives an interesting definition of pseudoscience.
>
> 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/
> -----------------------------------------------------