waybread
Well-known member
David, flattery will get you everywhere. Hey, thanks. I think both of us enjoy a good, yet low-key debate.
Academically, the hard and natural sciences tend to belong to the same faculties (colleges in US universities,) unless the departments are big enough to split into something else, like life sciences. They still have more in common with one another than with, say, the humanities. But even within the same geology department, you can get the hard scientist geophysicist, and the natural scientist paleontologist. There is reductionism in science, moreover, where biology gets explained by chemistry and chemistry gets explained by physics.
The social sciences as sciences are really misnamed. Many of these departments got their starts in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when the sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, &c thought that they could develop sciences of human society. But this has proved to be largely illusory, with a couple of exceptions: physical anthropology and the "hard" parts of archaeology; and the parts of psychology that impinge on neuroscience. Psychology as a whole is probably the most scientific of the lot due to their focus on clinical studies as the source of evidence; with something like cultural anthropology and cultural geography as the least scientific. Part of the problem is that the top-down scientific method isn't the best way to study people's belief systems as they understand themselves. When studying a traditional society in the Amazon, for instance, anthropologists couldn't just pluck people out of their homes and stick them in a laboratory; and if by some chance they did, the laboratory would bear no resemblance to the subjects' home.
We have a lot of laws in the sciences, governing gravity, optics, and thermodynamics, to name a few. Social scientists have never come up with laws governing human behaviour.
The state of our nation's economy and Congress should convince us that economics and political science are not predictably scientific.
Things are a little different if we return to the past, and study the origins of science in ancient Greece, when astronomy and astrology shared the muse Urania. But back-then is not today.
Even so, astrology lacks a serious research component or a reasonably-agreed upon methodology whereby its truth-claims could be tested. Tests so far have tended to disprove astrological propositions. Part of the problem is that we have still inherited an astrology from ancient times, in which the gods' attributes were determined first, prior to some planets being named for them and then assumed to display the gods' `a priori qualities. The Gauquelins made a valiant start at statistical studies, but (a) their conclusions indicated a stellar influence-- that was nevertheless very different than conventional chart-readings; and (b) their methods have been criticized and findings not duplicable, yet nobody has come up with superior testing methods.
Why do you even want to call astrology a science? I don't.
Academically, the hard and natural sciences tend to belong to the same faculties (colleges in US universities,) unless the departments are big enough to split into something else, like life sciences. They still have more in common with one another than with, say, the humanities. But even within the same geology department, you can get the hard scientist geophysicist, and the natural scientist paleontologist. There is reductionism in science, moreover, where biology gets explained by chemistry and chemistry gets explained by physics.
The social sciences as sciences are really misnamed. Many of these departments got their starts in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when the sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, &c thought that they could develop sciences of human society. But this has proved to be largely illusory, with a couple of exceptions: physical anthropology and the "hard" parts of archaeology; and the parts of psychology that impinge on neuroscience. Psychology as a whole is probably the most scientific of the lot due to their focus on clinical studies as the source of evidence; with something like cultural anthropology and cultural geography as the least scientific. Part of the problem is that the top-down scientific method isn't the best way to study people's belief systems as they understand themselves. When studying a traditional society in the Amazon, for instance, anthropologists couldn't just pluck people out of their homes and stick them in a laboratory; and if by some chance they did, the laboratory would bear no resemblance to the subjects' home.
We have a lot of laws in the sciences, governing gravity, optics, and thermodynamics, to name a few. Social scientists have never come up with laws governing human behaviour.
The state of our nation's economy and Congress should convince us that economics and political science are not predictably scientific.
Things are a little different if we return to the past, and study the origins of science in ancient Greece, when astronomy and astrology shared the muse Urania. But back-then is not today.
No, first off: economics and sociology are only partly scientific. Psychology is becoming more scientific all the time, but this is not the direction of "psychological astrology" for whom the godfather is Carl Jung and his associates.
Even so, astrology lacks a serious research component or a reasonably-agreed upon methodology whereby its truth-claims could be tested. Tests so far have tended to disprove astrological propositions. Part of the problem is that we have still inherited an astrology from ancient times, in which the gods' attributes were determined first, prior to some planets being named for them and then assumed to display the gods' `a priori qualities. The Gauquelins made a valiant start at statistical studies, but (a) their conclusions indicated a stellar influence-- that was nevertheless very different than conventional chart-readings; and (b) their methods have been criticized and findings not duplicable, yet nobody has come up with superior testing methods.
Why do you even want to call astrology a science? I don't.
