Sheldon Rampton brilliantly wrote:
The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has
also given rise to
a variety of scientific pretenders--disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics
that merely claim to be scientific. The renowned philosopher of science
Karl Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and
coined the term "pseudoscience" to help separate the wheat from the
chaff. The difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded,
is that genuinely scientific theories are "falsifiable"--that is,
they are formulated
in such a way that if they are wrong, they can be proven false
through experiments. By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so
vaguely that they can never be proven or disproven. "The difference between
a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific statements can be
proved wrong and pseudoscientific statements cannot," says Robert Youngson
in his book Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists
Can Sometimes Be. "By this criterion you will find that a surprising
number of seemingly scientific assertions--perhaps even many in which
you devoutly believe--are complete nonsense. Rather surprisingly this is
not to assert that all pseudoscientific claims are untrue. Some of them may
be true, but you can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim the
cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and place, in scientific
facts."
Judged by this standard, many of the "social sciences"--including
the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, and others--are actually
pseudosciences
rather than the real thing. This does not mean that Freud and
Jung were charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating
insights into the human psyche, but a research methodology that derives
its data from the dreams of mentally ill patients is a far cry from the
orderly system of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like
physics and chemistry.
I beg you to donate this passage, which is from your book "Trust Us We're
Experts" to Wikipedia, Sheldon. May we have your permission to incorporate it into
the [[pseudoscience]] article?
For that matter, what are the legal technicalities involved in the case where a published
author wants to donate a tiny portion of a copyrighted work, to the public via the GPL?
(I'm not saying Sheldon would want to do so in this case: this is brilliant prose, and
he's entitled to make money off it; more power to him!)
Jimbo, Cunctator, do you know whether an author can simply announce something like the
following?
* "I hereby license the following text under the GPL."
Or is it more complicated than that? I'd hate to have to spend an hour or two
massaging Sheldon's brilliant prose into unrecognizeability just to evade copyright
restrictions. And it wouldn't be brilliant any more either. :-(
exhaustedly,
Uncle Ed