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*.