Fred Bauder wrote:
Ah, but the field in question is diagnosis of disease,
of which iridology is
just one approach. Almost all experts in diagnosis of disease dismiss
iridology.
This defining of fields is actually an interesting issue that is fairly
broad. The one I'm particularly interested in is "mental illness".
According to some experts, this belongs within the field "philosophy of
mind"; according to other experts, it belongs within the field
"psychiatry"; and according to still other experts, it belongs within
the field "psychology".
I would caution in general being too rabidly in favor of the scientific
establishment (as represented by "experts"), as they seem to make quite
a lot of significant errors. If Wikipedia had existed in the 19th
century, I would hope we would have covered the debate over racial
differences from all sides, rather than strongly taking the "racial
science" viewpoint and dismissing other viewpoints as "unscientific". A
similar issue might have arisen in the 1930s, when the medical
establishment was firmly in favor of systematic forced sterilization of
"undesirables", but quite a lot of non-doctors were firmly against it
(the New England Journal of Medicine's editorial board even lamented
that the US was too religious to be as scientifically progressive as
Nazi Germany).
Of course, perhaps that was in the past and science is no longer biased,
but as a PhD student in a scientific field who sees the sort of politics
and shenanigans that go into deciding what papers get accepted for
publication in major journals and conferences, I wouldn't put money on it.
-Mark