On 6/26/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
[[Category:Pseudoscience]] is one which gets objections at fairly regular intervals. The reasons for the objections are pretty straightforward -- the users making such objections are almost always either Creationists or Eugenicists or other people who believe in bodies of thought labeled as "pseudoscience" -- and the response is generally pretty straightforward as well: Wikipedia is not claiming these so-labeled articles are actually "pseudoscience", but rather that they are labeled *by the mainstream scientific community* as "pseudoscience".
Well, I didn't finish my PhD but I am not creationist, neither a fan of eugenics, is not very interested in ghosts and not involved in alternative medicine. Still, I don't think science is the ruler with which everything should be measured. Let's remember that the category Pseudoscience is sorted under the category Science; we have a category for non-sciency in the section for science. To me this is illogical.
Let's study what is not put in this category. The category Religion, for some reasons, is not put as a subcategory to Pseudoscience. I'd say the reason for this is that the major religions are to powerful to be called pseudosciences, and then the other religions can follow. However the difference, from a scientific point of view, is pretty small - no, let's be frank. The difference between believing in ghosts, or in Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ who died for us but lived again is, from a scientific perspective, non-existent. The fact that there are scientists who are Moslims and Christians doesn't make the major religions of the world more scientific. Btw I am sure there are scientists who do believe in ghosts; they just don't say so in the interviews as it doesn't look good.
Here I expect someone to say "but religion doesn't claim to be science". Actually, a large part of what is in the Pseudoscience category doesn't either. A fraction of the people who are interested in ghosts imitate a scientific language, but that is mainly a way of adopting to the prevailing paradigm. Most people who are deeply into alternative medicine actually frown at science, and think the concepts of science are not valid or at least greatly over-estimated. Sometimes they try and get a treatment scientifically proven - but that is mainly a way of trying to adopt to society and to the paradigm, to gain acceptance. In their hearts, they don't believe in science. We can study religions from outside, that is a kind of science - but if so we can study antroposofy also, write papers about the roots and consequences of their beliefs and publish in scientific journals.
Today, science has almost taken the place of religion. No, I am _not_ saying that science is a religion, but thinking about what decides what we find important and valuable in life - what and who we let guide us - science has taken a huge chunk of the space that some hundred years ago was filled by religion alone. A Wikipedia created in, say, 1650 would probably have a huge category for Heresy. Under it would be subcategories for the slowly sprouting Western science and the small pieces of quite advanced Arabian science that reached Europe, another for pre-christian religions plus Islam and other foreign religions, and a third for "wrong" christian beliefs such as gnosticism, catharism, and psilanthropism. IMO we should not have this organisation in the reverse order. Today we should be able to look more neutrally at our own prevaling paradigm.
A small subset of the articles in the Category Pseudoscience actually is about science; old scientific beliefs now abandoned. For those, I suggest the category Obsolete scientific theories. Possibly one could complement it with a meighbouring category for questionable or not accepted scientific theories; the line isn't easy to draw, but that only illustrates that the concept isn't as easy as we sometimes like to think. There is no need to lump this together with all kinds of stuff that never was scientific in the first place. Actually, almost all articles in the Pseudoscience category are already placed in at least one other category - in most of the cases several. This also speaks for the redundance of the category. The only hole it would leave after itself, is that of the garbage can for those who through everything they find non-scientific there and don't want to spend more time finding out if this is Folklore, Quackery, Paranormal phenomena, Creationism or something else.
/Habj