On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 11:28:23AM -0500, Fastfission wrote:
On 12/17/05, Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>
wrote:
OK. I'm not so sure it was, considering the
discussion about
falsifiability.
Well, let me be more specific: the meaning, in a general sense, is
clear. Something which claims to be science but is not science. The
specifics of how one defines "science" in this sense is not clear, not
only not on Wikipedia but not even in the larger academic context in
general, and so things like falsifiability get bandied around as
possible approaches to this.
OK. It's just that falsifiability was brought into the discussion as
what looked like a straw man: I don't recall if it was you or someone
else, but it was introduced in a way which made it seem that I had been
holding it up as a criterion for science, which I wasn't.
(Why does it matter? Falsifiability applies to claims. It holds that a
claim which is not falsifiable can't be studied scientifically at all,
since it isn't amenable to testing. But falsifiability doesn't apply so
well to processes, which is what we're talking about.)
I'm not
sure I see a wide variety of "requirements" here. I'm not
suggesting any complicated philosophy-of-science laundry list of what
makes Good Science, or Normal Science, or whatever. I'm just saying
that we're safe calling it "pseudoscience" when someone parades around
under the banner of "SCIENCE" but isn't actually doing anything
resembling it.
Again, you're begging the question, which is entirely how one tells
when one is "resembling it".
Well, that's going to differ from case to case, but basically along the
same route that I've been describing: find out the *method* by which
the claims in question were arrived at. As noted before, it isn't about
the results; it's about the method.
"Creation scientists" didn't come up with their claims by observing the
world and participating in a scientific process -- they came up with
them by reading the Bible, for instance. Reading the Bible is part of
doing theology, but it isn't part of doing science. We can go to the
proponents and ask (as the Templeton Foundation did) "Where is the
science?" The answer is, it isn't there. And that is why it's both
correct and neutral to class "creation science" as pseudoscience.
Science looks like many things, and whether something
resembles it
depends on whether you stress the similarities or the differences.
Well, sure, that's true. But that's the very same sort of judgment that
we make when we put an article into any other category: "Is this
subject more similar to the other things in this category, or more
different?" It's always possible to find ways to stress the differences
if your motive is to make a subject seem unique and special.
But it seems to me that your argument would lead us to throwing out the
idea of categories entirely, since there are *always* similarities and
differences. Indeed, I'm not sure how we can write a single categorical
sentence that doesn't invoke the same problem if someone wants to
nitpick. "Cats are mammals" is a statement of similarity that glosses
over the differences between cats and other mammals, after all ....
--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>