| Revision as of 22:29, 14 December 2005 editMeidosemme (talk | contribs)87 editsm →Falsifiability and Validity: English...← Previous edit | Revision as of 22:23, 7 January 2006 edit undoFrankZappo (talk | contribs)93 edits →Falsifiability and ValidityNext edit → | ||
| Line 16: | Line 16: | ||
| However, detractors of the "pseudosciences" often point out that falsifiability is a necessary condition of scientificity, but not a sufficient one: a theory has also to be ''valid'', that is, to have been built according the rules of the scientific method. To them, an invalid theory may very well be right, but still unscientific. But I don't see why they aren't satisfied with falsifiability. That the theory must be born in a well-known lab, grown out of previously orthodox theories, and have been peer-reviewed by a lot of important scientists, strikes me as irrelevant to scientificity—those are the rituals of a strongly political "organized science". As long as they insist on playing on that shaky ground, the "pseudoscience" category will remain ambiguous, and last. —] 22:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC) | However, detractors of the "pseudosciences" often point out that falsifiability is a necessary condition of scientificity, but not a sufficient one: a theory has also to be ''valid'', that is, to have been built according the rules of the scientific method. To them, an invalid theory may very well be right, but still unscientific. But I don't see why they aren't satisfied with falsifiability. That the theory must be born in a well-known lab, grown out of previously orthodox theories, and have been peer-reviewed by a lot of important scientists, strikes me as irrelevant to scientificity—those are the rituals of a strongly political "organized science". As long as they insist on playing on that shaky ground, the "pseudoscience" category will remain ambiguous, and last. —] 22:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC) | ||
| To me, the notion of "falsifiability" seems not stupendously useful in actual scientific practice. I think that it is a concept forged in the attempt to shoehorn a "philosophy of science" into a conceptual framework along the lines of the "philosophy of mathematics". It arose out of the intellectual fascination which philosophy developed, in the 1920s and 1930s, for the foundations of mathematics, and I don't think that it has much relevance or adequacy to the scientific process. And the way I see it, neither is it particularly relevant to the Misplaced Pages "war" concerning the category Pseudoscience. | |||
| I think that it is pretty clear what is involved in the scientific method. Its defining parameters have to do with the proper grounding of theoretical conclusions in properly conducted empirical observations. This includes requirements such as that the empirical observations should be reproducible; that they should support the conclusions; that the conclusions should not be at odds with earlier reproducible and reproduced empirical observations; that the conclusions should not simply proliferate interpretations of previously interpreted phenomena, but should have some explanatory or predictive power beyond the currently accepted interpretations, etc. The conclusions may still be wrong, of course - but if the research is conducted in accordance with the scientific method, it is science. And this is so irrespective of whether it is conducted at Lawrence Livermore Labs or on a desert island. It does not cease being science just because only very few people have heard about it. There is nothing in the requirements of the scientific method that says that the given activity has to have been reviewed or approved by some quorum of scientists. | |||
| So the way I see it, the problem with the Misplaced Pages category "Pseudoscience" is that, by definition, it is supposed to be applied to things that pretend to be science but do not follow the scientific method - whereas in reality it gets applied to every scientific claim that has not been accepted into mainstream science. There is absolutely no logical justification for jumping from the fact that something is not part of mainstream science to the conclusion that it does not follow the scientific method. In order to know whether or not something follows the scientific method, one needs to examine and understand its claims and their basis. I have never seen any sign that the Misplaced Pages "science squad" has examined or understood the claims and methods of any of the "dissident sciences" that they label "Pseudoscience". So if they have not examined and understood those claims and methods, they should have a special category that expresses precisely that. To, instead, label those endeavours as "Pseudoscience" - i.e. as not following the scientific method - is pure bias and misinformation. It implies that the claims and methods have been examined and found unscientific, when in fact they have not been examined. | |||
| That's my view of this problem, and I think it has very little to do with the notion of "falsifiability". ] 22:23, 7 January 2006 (UTC) | |||
Revision as of 22:23, 7 January 2006
Read, understand, and obey Misplaced Pages:No personal attacks, otherwise you may find yourself blocked from editing. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:32, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Your comment to me at Misplaced Pages:Requests for page protection is way out of line. I'm not your enemy. You need to read Misplaced Pages:Civility. Fernando Rizo T/C 18:23, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
Categories
Hi, I am calling repeated addition of wildly tangential categories to prove a point, as well as deliberately adding reams of irrelevant and plain wrong inter-wiki links, to be vandalism. What do you call it? - Randwicked 05:39, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
Falsifiability and Validity
I thought that my comment wasn't too appropriate in the Pseudoscience to Science of Questionable Validity voting thread, so here it is: it seems to me that a lot of people (including myself) in the pseudoscience debate are often confused about the logical distinction between the falsifiability of the claims of a scientific theory and its methodological validity.
Advocates of the so-called pseudosciences focus on their propositional contents and say that they have not been falsified. Since in falsificationism at least (which happens to be the philosophy of science that the majority of scientists supports), no hypothesis is ever confirmed, only either falsified or waiting to be falsified—possibly forever—all still unfalsified but falsifiable "pseudosciences" are as scientific in content as orthodox scientific theories. Hence all sciences are "questionable", and "Science of Unconfirmed Validity" category would not make sense—only "Falsified science" and "Science" would! Here, we win the battle.
However, detractors of the "pseudosciences" often point out that falsifiability is a necessary condition of scientificity, but not a sufficient one: a theory has also to be valid, that is, to have been built according the rules of the scientific method. To them, an invalid theory may very well be right, but still unscientific. But I don't see why they aren't satisfied with falsifiability. That the theory must be born in a well-known lab, grown out of previously orthodox theories, and have been peer-reviewed by a lot of important scientists, strikes me as irrelevant to scientificity—those are the rituals of a strongly political "organized science". As long as they insist on playing on that shaky ground, the "pseudoscience" category will remain ambiguous, and last. —Meidosemme 22:24, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
To me, the notion of "falsifiability" seems not stupendously useful in actual scientific practice. I think that it is a concept forged in the attempt to shoehorn a "philosophy of science" into a conceptual framework along the lines of the "philosophy of mathematics". It arose out of the intellectual fascination which philosophy developed, in the 1920s and 1930s, for the foundations of mathematics, and I don't think that it has much relevance or adequacy to the scientific process. And the way I see it, neither is it particularly relevant to the Misplaced Pages "war" concerning the category Pseudoscience.
I think that it is pretty clear what is involved in the scientific method. Its defining parameters have to do with the proper grounding of theoretical conclusions in properly conducted empirical observations. This includes requirements such as that the empirical observations should be reproducible; that they should support the conclusions; that the conclusions should not be at odds with earlier reproducible and reproduced empirical observations; that the conclusions should not simply proliferate interpretations of previously interpreted phenomena, but should have some explanatory or predictive power beyond the currently accepted interpretations, etc. The conclusions may still be wrong, of course - but if the research is conducted in accordance with the scientific method, it is science. And this is so irrespective of whether it is conducted at Lawrence Livermore Labs or on a desert island. It does not cease being science just because only very few people have heard about it. There is nothing in the requirements of the scientific method that says that the given activity has to have been reviewed or approved by some quorum of scientists.
So the way I see it, the problem with the Misplaced Pages category "Pseudoscience" is that, by definition, it is supposed to be applied to things that pretend to be science but do not follow the scientific method - whereas in reality it gets applied to every scientific claim that has not been accepted into mainstream science. There is absolutely no logical justification for jumping from the fact that something is not part of mainstream science to the conclusion that it does not follow the scientific method. In order to know whether or not something follows the scientific method, one needs to examine and understand its claims and their basis. I have never seen any sign that the Misplaced Pages "science squad" has examined or understood the claims and methods of any of the "dissident sciences" that they label "Pseudoscience". So if they have not examined and understood those claims and methods, they should have a special category that expresses precisely that. To, instead, label those endeavours as "Pseudoscience" - i.e. as not following the scientific method - is pure bias and misinformation. It implies that the claims and methods have been examined and found unscientific, when in fact they have not been examined.
That's my view of this problem, and I think it has very little to do with the notion of "falsifiability". FrankZappo 22:23, 7 January 2006 (UTC)