I challenge you:cite ONE paper that discerns Science from Pseudoscience wth CERTAINTY

devhdb said:
Hi all,

I consider myself a true skeptic in the sense that I know that I know nothing... and even I couldn't be sure of that, may I add. :-)

My philosophical and intellectual position is that there is NO WAY to tell science from pseudoscience with certainty. But I'm happily open to you changing my mind, of course.
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What is your your idea?

Threads like this don't happen without an idea. There's a backstory here about an idea you had, that was rejected for not being "scientific". I want to know that backstory. What is the idea?
 
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The forum members are being spoken at with very little reciprocal engagement with their interesting ideas. Boring.
 
devhdb said:
9 pages. 300+ comments. Not ONE single paper cited yet.
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Don't shout so loud, please. We're not deaf.
Do you really think that there are not a lot of philosophers who think the opposite of Harry Laudan? I can quote you a few. Shall we start with Mario Bunge, for example?
Mario Bunge (University of Montreal): "What is science? Does it matter to distinguish it from pseudoscience? A reply to my commentators", New Ideas in Psychology
Volume 9, Issue 2, 1991, Pages 245-283.

Whenever you want.

The thing about Laudan is that he's a bit ingenuous. If you don't want to use terms like truth, pseudoscience, well-confirmed and others you don't like, you have to explain what is "adequate" knowledge and "significant" problem. Then you will be faced with the same lack of definition that you attribute to the concept of pseudoscience. In other words, in these matters we cannot pretend to make a clear distinction between black and white. But the distinction does exist.
 
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9 pages on and the thread starter still hasn't come to the point.

So what? Why does there have to be a sharp cut-off between science and non-science?

Only a few months ago I said on this forum that no-one had come up with a cut and dried method to distinguish science from pseudo-science and no-one batted an eyelid.

So what is the big deal?

Pretending little bottles of plain water are medicine is still just pretending little bottles of plain water are medicine even if you call it science.
 
Actually, technically, I win, because I pointed out that there was no cut and dried way to distinguish between science and pseudo-science in August last year.

Sorry devvy babe, you snooze you lose.
 
Robin said:
Actually, technically, I win, because I pointed out that there was no cut and dried way to distinguish between science and pseudo-science in August last year.

Sorry devvy babe, you snooze you lose.
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But did you use 72pt red text? If not it doesn’t count!
 
Darat said:
But did you use 72pt red text? If not it doesn’t count!
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Is there some sort of terminology for that exact point, that moment in time when someone decides that increased font size, different colored text and seemingly random bolding of specific words or sentences becomes a good persuasive tactic?

It's way too common a thing to not have one, right? I can't help but be reminded of timecube.
 
Crazy isn't more or less crazy because it's not well formatted.

He's not saying anything more insane then stuff we hear from this board's resident "Philosophers" in every thread they participate in.

If you regularly argue "Well this long dead person said something in Latin... therefore here's a bunch of unscientific, un-falsifiable nonsense" you have zero right to try and take the OP's nonsense to task just for being less erudite.

If your problem with Woo is its lack of style and not it's intellectual hollowness, you're no better.

That's always been my issue with these kind of pile on threads. Not that the OP has earned or deserved it, but that we don't do in equally valid cases where the person spewing it is just more well spoken.

There's multiple people in this thread who would be gushing over the OP as yet another defender of philosophy's virtue if he had just worded what he was saying differently.
 
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Deadie said:
Is there some sort of terminology for that exact point, that moment in time when someone decides that increased font size, different colored text and seemingly random bolding of specific words or sentences becomes a good persuasive tactic?

It's way too common a thing to not have one, right? I can't help but be reminded of timecube.
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It’s the modern day equivalent of “green ink”.


https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Green_ink
 
Robin said:
So what? Why does there have to be a sharp cut-off between science and non-science?
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There doesn't have to be, but the absence of one means that decisions about what is science and what else is pseudoscience become more debatable. And for people who are on one side but who want to be on the other can argue that since the criteria aren't clean cut and well demarcated, the decision that something is pseudoscience is "really" being made on political or ideological grounds, not according to the merits. In other words, if there can be no objective agreement on the merits of something, then it's rhetorically advantageous for the aggrieved party to look for justification elsewhere. It's just an inept attempt at social engineering when other arguments fail to convince.

Pretending little bottles of plain water are medicine is still just pretending little bottles of plain water are medicine even if you call it science.
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There's a story attributed, I believe, to Abraham Lincoln when he was a practicing lawyer. He was asked (or he asked it rhetorically) how many legs a dog has if you call a tail a leg. His answer was four, because a tail is not a leg no matter what you call it. Since hearing that story I've learned to beware people whose argument begins and ends with quibbling over nomenclature. As with Jabba's search for the soul, such propositions never escape the confines of word games.
 
David Mo said:
In other words, in these matters we cannot pretend to make a clear distinction between black and white. But the distinction does exist.
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The O/P’s implication seems to be that because we cannot categorise some grey things as black or white, nothing can be categorised as black or white.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Crazy isn't more or less crazy because it's not well formatted.

He's not saying anything more insane then stuff we hear from this board's resident "Philosophers" in every thread they participate in.

If you regularly argue "Well this long dead person said something in Latin... therefore here's a bunch of unscientific, un-falsifiable nonsense" you have zero right to try and take the OP's nonsense to task just for being less erudite.

If your problem with Woo is its lack of style and not it's intellectual hollowness, you're no better.

That's always been my issue with these kind of pile on threads. Not that the OP has earned or deserved it, but that we don't do in equally valid cases where the person spewing it is just more well spoken.

There's multiple people in this thread who would be gushing over the OP as yet another defender of philosophy's virtue if he had just worded what he was saying differently.
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Speaking of scientism.
 
Sideroxylon said:
Speaking of scientism.
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*Yawn* Someone else who wants to use "Label the epistemologies" to try and turn "Reality exists" into a conspiracy theory and "Doesn't pretend reality doesn't exist" into a slur.

Be gone figment of my imagination or stop arguing with me if I'm a figment of yours, either way.
 
JoeMorgue said:
*Yawn* Someone else who wants to use "Label the epistemologies" to try and turn "Reality exists" into a conspiracy theory and "Doesn't pretend reality doesn't exist" into a slur.

Be gone figment of my imagination or stop arguing with me if I'm a figment of yours, either way.
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*yawn*
 
Mojo said:
The O/P’s implication seems to be that because we cannot categorise some grey things as black or white, nothing can be categorised as black or white.
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Exactly as I have been saying. If you cannot say if a person halfway through a doorway is inside or outside then you can never be sure if anyone is inside or outside.

At the start he kept saying he understood the point but kept going back to the same fallacy.
 
Robin said:
Exactly as I have been saying. If you cannot say if a person halfway through a doorway is inside or outside then you can never be sure if anyone is inside or outside.

At the start he kept saying he understood the point but kept going back to the same fallacy.
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To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his argument depends on not understanding it.
 
Robin said:
Exactly as I have been saying. If you cannot say if a person halfway through a doorway is inside or outside then you can never be sure if anyone is inside or outside.
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It may not be known whether a person is on exactly one side of a border or the other, but that does not mean that borders do not exist. They allow us to know which side the others are on. There is nothing strange about this, it happens with any delimitation between fields of knowledge. There are even more difficult cases: where is the boundary between chemistry and physics? Does that mean that chemistry and physics are not different fields?
Exactly the same with the boundaries between science and pseudoscience. Even more precisely, perhaps.

)
 
Here is an interesting proposal for a definition of pseudoscience from Hansson:

1. It pertains to an issue within the domains of science (in the wide sense).
2. It is not epistemically warranted.
3. It is part of a doctrine whose major proponents try to create the impression that it is epistemically warranted.
​
And it's completed by Boudry. A theory has no scientific guarantee when:

(i) minimized risk of refutation, (ii) phony appearance of empirical boldness, or (iii) opportunities for “confirmations” without actual threat of refutation.
Strategies for pulling off such sleights of mind recur across the pseudoscientific domain.​

Both quotations from: Maarten Boudry: “Loki’s Wager and Laudan’s Error On Genuine and Territorial Demarcation”, In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press. pp. 79--98 (2013)

Does anyone want to comment on this? I thing it is an interesting proposal.
 
David Mo said:
There are even more difficult cases: where is the boundary between chemistry and physics?
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Ah, I know that one: It's exactly at the divide between school and university. At school it's chemistry, but as soon as you get to university you think "wait, this is all physics".

(See also biology and chemistry)
(See also physics and maths)
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Ah, I know that one: It's exactly at the divide between school and university. At school it's chemistry, but as soon as you get to university you think "wait, this is all physics".

(See also biology and chemistry)
(See also physics and maths)
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But also ( attributed to Richard Feynman), “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”
 
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David Mo said:
Here is an interesting proposal for a definition of pseudoscience from Hansson:

1. It pertains to an issue within the domains of science (in the wide sense).
2. It is not epistemically warranted.
3. It is part of a doctrine whose major proponents try to create the impression that it is epistemically warranted.
​
And it's completed by Boudry. A theory has no scientific guarantee when:

(i) minimized risk of refutation, (ii) phony appearance of empirical boldness, or (iii) opportunities for “confirmations” without actual threat of refutation.
Strategies for pulling off such sleights of mind recur across the pseudoscientific domain.​

Both quotations from: Maarten Boudry: “Loki’s Wager and Laudan’s Error On Genuine and Territorial Demarcation”, In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press. pp. 79--98 (2013)

Does anyone want to comment on this? I thing it is an interesting proposal.
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Yes, I want to comment, thanks.

Let's take the multiverse hypothesis, where there are a hypothetical group of multiple universes.

Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them and the different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes", or "alternate universes".

Millions of dollars are granted by governments worldwide to fund hypothesis such as the multiverse.

Is that hypothesis falsifiable? If so, how?

According to Hansson & Boudry, is the multiverse hypothesis...

...Science or Pseudoscience?

tenor.gif


:rolleyes:
 
devhdb said:
Yes, I want to comment, thanks.

Let's take the multiverse hypothesis, where there are a hypothetical group of multiple universes.

Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them and the different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes", or "alternate universes".

Millions of dollars are granted by governments worldwide to fund hypothesis such as the multiverse.

Is that hypothesis falsifiable? If so, how?

According to Hansson & Boudry, is the multiverse hypothesis...

...Science or Pseudoscience?
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Seems to me this thread is much ado about nothing but perhaps I can help devhdb out of the morass of nothing he seems to find himself in.

From y dictionary:

pseudoscience | ˈsjuːdəʊˌsʌɪəns |
noun
a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method:

Now a hypothesis is just an idea someone comes up with to explain a particular phenomena. The hypothesiser may have made some observations that point to the hypothesis as a possible explanation for that phenomena. Making those observations is using the scientific method.

The hypothesiser now has to gather more observed information and perhaps explain a mechanism behind the hypothesis. If the collected information becomes overwhelmingly positive, the hypothesis may progress to becoming a scientific theory. If the evidence is not forthcoming the hypothesis is discarded, but that doesn't mean it was pseudoscience if the method was true.

That is the way science works and why you want to draw the multiverse into the picture is beyond my understanding.

Pseudoscience is where you start off with something you want to be true, and try to prove its truth with very dodgy evidence - usually dismissing anything that contracts what you want to believe. Religious doctrine about the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea used as proof of the event, and some mysticism saying the wind is caused by some god farting, are two examples.
 
devhdb said:
Yes, I want to comment, thanks.

Let's take the multiverse hypothesis, where there are a hypothetical group of multiple universes.

Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them and the different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "other universes", or "alternate universes".

Millions of dollars are granted by governments worldwide to fund hypothesis such as the multiverse.

Is that hypothesis falsifiable? If so, how?

According to Hansson & Boudry, is the multiverse hypothesis...

...Science or Pseudoscience?

[qimg]https://media1.tenor.com/images/89f8c1e3d2fa4d0081e6af67ff5a78d4/tenor.gif[/qimg]

:rolleyes:
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From my lay understanding, these ideas follow from the consequences of mathematical models that have demonstrated explanatory power in things we can observe and test. Call it grounded speculation, hypothesising or even philosophy but it isn’t pseudoscience.

I am not a philosophical pragmatist (Putnam’s no miracle argument) but it is a fine haven from radical skepticism. Scientific models/paradigms work in that they provide predictive power that delivers technology and discovery.

Contrast this with astrology, creationism or homeopathy, none of which have explanatory power and predictive models that work. None have ideas that inform corporate enterprises, where competitive advantage is hungered for. Each have extensive narratives that make predictions that are ignored or the subject of ad hoc hypothesis*. These ideas have no practical value. The businesses that grow around these ideas only have one product to sell and that is the very narratives themselves.

Bleeding edge physics extends from a project with this kind of success. We want lots of different irons on the fire. We want all kinds of ideas on the table in the hope that one may start paying off.

* I have a few examples of this happening in science and love history of science so by all means bring more but this is a constant in pseudoscience. Pseudoscience seems to be in a constant Kuhnian crisis mode. It never has a normal science problem solving mode.
 
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Thor 2 said:
Seems to me this thread is much ado about nothing but perhaps I can help devhdb out of the morass of nothing he seems to find himself in.

From y dictionary:

pseudoscience | ˈsjuːdəʊˌsʌɪəns |
noun
a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method:

Now a hypothesis is just an idea someone comes up with to explain a particular phenomena. The hypothesiser may have made some observations that point to the hypothesis as a possible explanation for that phenomena. Making those observations is using the scientific method.

The hypothesiser now has to gather more observed information and perhaps explain a mechanism behind the hypothesis. If the collected information becomes overwhelmingly positive, the hypothesis may progress to becoming a scientific theory. If the evidence is not forthcoming the hypothesis is discarded, but that doesn't mean it was pseudoscience if the method was true.

That is the way science works and why you want to draw the multiverse into the picture is beyond my understanding.

Pseudoscience is where you start off with something you want to be true, and try to prove its truth with very dodgy evidence - usually dismissing anything that contracts what you want to believe. Religious doctrine about the Hebrews crossing the Red Sea used as proof of the event, and some mysticism saying the wind is caused by some god farting, are two examples.
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Its not the origin of an idea that matters, only the honest rigour in which it is examined. Consider Kekulé's dream.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé
 
The word games don't seem to end. To me it has been well explained, far beyond my earlier knowledge.
 
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