On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 11:28:23AM -0500, Fastfission wrote:
On 12/17/05, Karl A. Krueger kkrueger@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 ....