The Importance of Pseudosciences

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience' started by Asexperia, Nov 5, 2017.

  1. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    The pseudoscience is the system of ideas that haven't been generalized.
    The pseudoscience provides solutions to science of problems that haven't
    been proven.

    Astrology evolved to Astronomy.
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2017
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  3. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Astrology looks at the skies and made shit up. Astronomy looked at the skies and found things you couldn't make up. You can't equate the two.

    BTW, "pseudo" means "false".
     
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  5. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    No.

    No.

    Beside the point, if they'd not bothered with the astrology part they could have spent more time developing astronomy.
    Astrology started as observations of the stars - i.e. astronomy - and got side tracked into pseudo science: this does not make a case for pseudo being either important or valuable.
     
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  7. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    Alchemy evolved to Chemistry.
    Quackery evolved to Parapsychology.
     
  8. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Again, you're missing the point.
    (And altogether wrong on the latter: quackery is normally taken to mean "dishonest practices with regard to medicine").
    Pseudoscience is "attempted"/ proto science that's simply taken the wrong track (i.e. become unscientific).
    That doesn't lend it any validity or credence whatsoever.
     
  9. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    Is the Psychoanalysis a pseudoscience?
    What about Marxism?
     
  10. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    "Oh, yeah? What about..." argument is a fail.

    Oh, and Marxism is an economic theory.
     
  11. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Yup - what's your point?

    What? Marxism doesn't even pretend to be science: it's a political and economic view.
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    What are 'pseudosciences' and what makes them 'pseudo'? In order to answer that question, one would have to have some idea of what 'science' is (a famously difficult question). And we would need to know how the various 'pseudosciences' differ and deviate from whatever this canonical image is of what science is supposed to be.

    Perhaps. My sense is that's too broad. People have lots of interrelated systems of particular ideas that don't aspire to the status of 'science'. (Examples might be your understanding of current events, your family or of what's going on at work.)

    That seems to me to be one of the basic problems. Few of these things that get called 'pseudoscience' on boards like this have any predictive or explanatory power.

    True. Astrology is an interesting case. It began in ancient Mesopotamia where people believed that the heavens were literally that, the heavens. So the lights they saw moving around up there were assumed to have some relationship with the activities of the gods. That led to the idea that particular actions would be most auspicious (have the best likelihood of success) if the lights in the sky were in particular configurations. So they watched the sky closely and kept elaborate records of the positions of everything they saw up there and when they saw it. (The ancient Chinese had similar ideas and did much the same thing.)

    Going over their records, the Mesopotamians noticed regularities. Things seemed to happen cyclically. That's obvious with the Sun and the fixed stars that are observed to revolve around an observer on Earth once a day. What interested them most for their astrological purposes were the motions of the wandering stars (what we would call 'planets'). And when they pored over their records, they noticed that these too displayed cycles and regularities. So they gradually developed the ability to predict the positions of everything in the sky on particular dates, both past and future, with considerable accuracy using algebraic techniques.

    Then the Greeks conquered the Middle East (all the way into India) and fell heir to these ideas. Applying their Greek intellectual sensibility (which was more geometrical than algebraic) to centuries of carefully collected astrological data, the Hellenistic Greeks invented physical models of how everything was moving around up there. So we got Ptolemaic-style geocentric astronomy and cosmologies.
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2017
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  13. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    The explanations for the celestial events is what makes astrology a pseudoscience.
     
  14. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Deleted: others have adequately responded.
     
  15. Asexperia Valued Senior Member

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    I think that both Psychoanalysis and Marxism are philosophical views.

    Graphology, feng-shui and scientology are pseudosciences.
     
  16. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Psychoanalysis is more "cold reading" than philosophy.
     
  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not comfortable defining 'pseudoscience' as attempted science that's taken the wrong-track.

    The history of science is littered with the bones of scientific hypotheses that are no longer widely accepted today. Phlogiston, late 19th century ether theories, early 20th century biological ideas that the heritable genetic material was proteins. Endless examples can be dredged up, but I don't think that we would want to dismiss most of them as pseudoscience. I expect that a lot of what people say today about string-theory or dark energy might fall by the future wayside too.

    One needs to keep in mind the so-called 'pessimistic induction'. Looking back on the past, many of past scientists' scientific beliefs were at least partially mistaken by our contemporary lights. So what justification do we have that our own science of today will look any better to the scientists of tomorrow?
     
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  18. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    That's okay because I didn't define it as that.
    I worded it badly: that"definition" applies to the examples given by Asexperia.
    I.e. astrology and alchemy.
     
  19. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    They were never attempting to be scientific, just to follow their own rules. There's an important difference.
     
  20. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Quite - because, essentially, science didn't exist as such back then.
    But they did make systematic observations, "collated the numbers" and started what became astronomy - it was the "application" to people's lives and "using" the data to make "predictions" that turned it into pseudo.
    Likewise with alchemy: rules were formulated, a system was followed but the "objective" (e.g. transmutation of base metals into gold and the like) was a diversion from what became the science of chemistry.
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2017
  21. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    They took the data they wanted and tossed the rest, and they didn't care if the data was wrong as long their conclusions were "right". The "rules" of alchemy included a recipe for "making mice".
     
  22. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Like I said: "they did make systematic observations, "collated the numbers"" and "rules were formulated, a system was followed" - they STARTED in a "scientific manner" and got waylaid by having a preconceived notion and then "perverting" the observations/ data to suit the pseudo. If they hadn't had the idea of "applying" the data to suit the wrong conclusions then things would have gone better.
     
  23. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    No, they didn't start in a scientific manner, that's the point.
     

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