[Pen-l] pseudoscience [was: Jared Diamond and the New Yorker, part 2

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

me:
>> Science is not about logic being the whole story, since a lot of it
>> involves testing seemingly logical notions against empirical evidence.
>> "Logic" and reductionism are quite distinct from "hard, cold facts."

raghu
> That's the point. As Carrol pointed early in the discussion, it has
> always been controversial exactly what constitutes science. That
> leaves the door open for pseudo-sciences like creationism.
>
> The point is there are huge grey areas between science and
> pseudo-science. It is best to get away from an excessive worship of
> science which I am afraid is what is happening today.

There's a scientific literature on pseudoscience by the way. See, for
example, Henry H. Bauer. 2001. _Science or Pseudoscience? Magnetic
Healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies_ Univ. of Illinois
Press.

It turns out that (as as any intelligent person should know by now)
that science can be wrong and pseudoscience can be right, as in the
case of plate tectonics (which was originally a "pseudoscience").
Another way to say this is that science _in practice_ (which dismissed
plate tectonics out of hand) is often distinct from science _in
theory_ or ideal science (which should not have done so).

As I said, science (in practice) involves skepticism, which always
questions the validity of existing propositions about the world, and
also respect for the research of others (the scientific community).
Unfortunately, the latter sometimes dominates the former, so that an
orthodoxy prevails and persists (cf. neoclassical economics). On the
other hand, sometimes the skepticism dominating respect for the
research of others and we see chaos.

By the way, I don't remember the "grey area" being mentioned when you
said that the Bush administration followed scientific ways. They
didn't believe in "grey areas" at all (global warming was WRONG! to
them) except when it came to moral principles, in which case they
sought them out (what's wrong with a little torture?). All their
"scientific" pretensions served their political agenda.

As I said before, "excessive worship of science" is  NOT "what is
happening today." Maybe you don't live in the US, ravi, but here we're
still going through a major religious revival (and it's not the kind
of religion that respects science the way, say, much of Roman
Catholicism does) while we see the counterattack by "atheists" like
Dawkins, who make the non-existence of deities into a religion.

For all his many faults, Obama is pushing the US back toward a more
balanced view of science than has been prevailing in recent memory.
-- 
Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine
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