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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.
The 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, the 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)