On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 03:31:12PM -0500, Fastfission wrote:
But this result is one in which Wikipedians will be
arguing with each
other about the methodology and whether something like Creationism
counts as a science. However this is not a problem that even
philosophers have been able to work out to any satisfaction. Aside
from that, it ends up violating NOR. This is what inevitably happens,
anyway. Is Intelligence Design a science? Someone says, "not
falsifiable," someone else points out that there are ways in which ID
thinks it can be falsified, and start pulling out complicated
arguments on the subject, and also notes that evolution might not be
falsifiable, etc. etc. etc.
To me, falsifiability isn't really at issue here. (If you want to be
epistemological, I'm following a more reliabilist approach rather than a
logical-positivist or -empiricist approach.)
The issue isn't what subject matter the field deals with, or what sort
of claims the practitioners make. Science can yield all kinds of weird
and nonintuitive claims. Many people find evolution nonintuitive --
how can natural selection, a process which is based on death, lead to
the survivors becoming better fitted to their environments?
The issue is whether the practitioners are in fact *doing science* ...
whether they're coming up with their claims by studying the world and
participating in processes such as peer review and repeating of
experiments and observations ... or whether they're just pulling their
claims out of wishful thinking or their religious text or whatever, and
just _call_ them "science" for political or economic benefit.
Pseudoscience isn't about the subject matter -- it's about the method,
and the difference between what the practitioners *say* about the
method, and what they actually *do*.
--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>