Karl A. Krueger wrote:
It seems to me that the sides of this debate are somewhat talking past each other.
I think that I can read that comment as a step forward. I found the article that David Gerrard cited to be mostly quite good. As Karla McLaren says: "It is not merely, as many surmise, a conflict between fact-based viewpoints and faith-based viewpoints. Nor is it simply a conflict between rationality and credulity. No, it's a full-on clash of cultures that makes real communication improbable at best." To make her point she did not once use the term "pseudoscience" in her article. Her comments about how the skeptic community uses language are significant:
It's vital that a way be found to help people in my culture question, think about, and critically interpret the barrage of information and misinformation they receive on a daily basis. However, it's also vital that the information be culturally sensitive. For instance, the first time I visited the skeptical health care Web site called Quackwatch, it felt as if I were walking into enemy territory. "Quack" is a very loaded word-it's a fighting word! Though site owner Dr. Stephen Barrett has every right to call his excellent Web site anything he likes, I wonder why it couldn't have been called, for instance, HealthWatch, HealingInfo, DocFacts, or something equally nonthreatening. Why do I have to type the word "quack" when I want a skeptical review of the choices I make in medical care? And why do I have to spend so much time translating on the skeptical sites I visit-or just skipping over words like scam, sham, quack, fraud, dupe, and fool? Why do I (the sort of person who actually needs skeptical information) have to see myself described in offensive terms and bow my head in shame before I can truly access the information available in your culture?
If a comfortable accomodation is to be found in this subject area, we need to find language that is acceptable. When you can let go of the prejudicial language you will probably find an alternatives community that is far more accomodating to your ideas than you might have expected. From reading her article it is evident that the writer had a level of insights and skill that her spiritual transformation possible. This is not characteristic of the majority who believe as she did. If they feel a need to review their beliefs the kind of welcome that they normally get from the skeptical community may effectively drive them back into beliefs that are familiar to them, or into an institution for the mentally disturbed.
I take the opposition to the term "pseudoscience" as based on the claim that we should not be judging whether particular experiments or observations are done scientifically or not.
More or less. It is not just about "particular" experiments and observation but about all the experiments and observations, and whether there are any where good-faith experiments are carried out, and where a failed experiment will simply cause the experimenter to revise his hypothesis and plan a new experiment. That, after all, is what science is. Science does not have a 3RR which says that if you continue experimenting after your third failure you are engaging in pseudoscience. Science will take its bad results as a basis for experimenting further; true pseudoscience will take bad results, and draw premature conclusions, or worse, ignore the results all together. As long as there are some practitioners pursuing the scientific method you cannot fairly extrapolate those selected outcomes to represent the entire field of study.
In that, I actually agree. Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic of scientific methodology. In such cases we should report what was done and how the world responded to it.
I agree there, and the closer our source is to the original source the more believable our reporting will be.
But I've been talking about fields where there _aren't_ any experiments or methodology to report on. There's just speculation, tradition, marketing, or religious pronouncement ... and an adherent claiming that the noises of same are "scientific".
Yes there is. If we can't find any evidence of scientific experimentation we can say exactly that. If the adherents make the kinds of claims that you envision, and there is evidence for that we can say that too. But that's still not enough to draw a conclusion from it all.
I just don't see what's non-neutral about saying that speculation doesn't count as science just because someone says it is. Or that while 3000-year-old religious tradition is a fine thing, it isn't a form of scientific methodology.
At one level "speculation" and "claim" are just synonyms for "hypothesis" The 3000 year old tradition predates what we now call the scientific method, hence the term "ancient science". It obviously does not meet today's standards, but they had no way of knowing better. The four traditional elements (5 among the Cninese) was as far as they could go with the tools that they had at the time. Does the fact that Aristotle did not supply experimental data with his speculations make him wrong, or worse unscientific?
Is it the "pseudo-" prefix, that some people have taken as an imputation of criminal fraud? We could simply say "nonscience" or "not based on experiment" or whatever instead. But I don't think we should fail to report the fact that some fields _do_ claim to be "science" for political or marketing reasons, even when there's no science around.
It's a matter of fraud and a whole lot of other things that the alternative community believes to be demeaning. Maybe it's the word "science" itself that's problematic. When you use a word, you use all its meanings: the ones you intend, the ones you consider to be wrong, and the ones you never eve heard about. You have absolutely no control over haw the reader is going to interpret what you say. Thus in some of its older forms, science could be any body of knowledge, not just only a body that was defined by certain rigid rules and requirements. Traditionally the "seven liberal sciences" were grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. There are also a number of set phrases which include the word science, many of whioh like "political science"would not fit a rigid definition of "science". When you consider most set phrases in which "science" is qualified by another word most would not be hard sciences. "Alternative science" carries with it the connotation of difference from strict science much better than "political science". Some terms like "creation science" can even be oxymorons.
So I agree too that it's important that we make prominent note the fact when for whatever reason an area of study deviates from mainstream science including marketing. But we need to do that in a more nuanced way than can possibly be stuffed into a single word in a category. The degree to which these topics deviate from mainstream science is just too wide.
Throughout this debate I have never said that I consider any of these topics a proven science. I have always been largely sceptical about many of them, but without ever losing my fascination. I read once that the scientific failure of many of these in general, and astrology in particular was not in their inability to design and test experimental models, but in their inability to develop credible hypotheses, i.e. in a different part of the scientific process than what is generally stated. Even if I believe that there are transient phenomena I do not feel compelled to build a whole science around them. I can accepy that there is not enough information upon which to establish an understanding of any individual phenomenon. It would be nice to be able to design an experiment that reproduces a transient phenomenon, but we don't have enough information upon which to design that experiment. Some event just whooshed by and one is left singing, "Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones?"
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