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Comment by Buldak | Hacker News Reader

I tend to view "science" as quintessentially a "success term." We call a discipline a science if we have a high degree of confidence in its results. In this sense, math is a science, and whether psychology or economics are scientific has less to do with their subject matter than whether we think they produce real knowledge.

I like this notion of science because it helps to account for the broader sense of "science" you see in earlier periods of history, before it became more narrowly associated with experimental science. More importantly, I think it gets at what actually interests us in the designation of "science."

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On the other hand, whether or not philosophy is a science is also up for question; if we go by what you're saying, we can approximate "real knowledge" to be "progress", but whether or not philosophy makes progress is hotly debated in metaphilosophy. There are some interesting arguments on this[0] site about it. In particular, as you note, the notion that science is purely empirical/"experimental" is relatively new, and outside of the Anglosphere, at least, it was common to see philosophy take up the name of science through words such as Wissenschaft - both Kant and Hegel published works which had their titles translated as the "Science of Logic", for instance.

But most people seem to agree that the crudest formulation of science as that which is falsifiable (a la Popper) is inadequate; as the SEP notes, astrology is falsifiable and would thus qualify as a science! Furthermore, research has shown that what we regard as "science" published in the Nature journal actually doesn't usually come in the form of starting with a falsifiable hypothesis, but the research is exploratory in the first place.

Defining science is tricky, and I think we should reconsider how much weight we assign to the term as a proxy for the concepts of rigor, progress, replicability, ability to provide new knowledge, to confirm old knowledge etc.

[0] http://www.philosophyisscience.com/

> astrology is falsifiable and would thus qualify as a science

To qualify as science it should also not have been falsified. There is simply no problem in astrology being a candidate here, it's not reject because of form, but because of the contents.

Not at all, the matter is of falsifying hypotheses, and just as one can falsify hypotheses in physics, one can also falsify them in astrology. Popper said:

>“statements or systems of statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations”

But this excludes the possibility that there is a pseudoscientific claim that is refutable. One such claim from astrology might be that the position of the planets decide our fate to die on a particular day etc. But this can be and has been falsified. According to Popper, if it can't be tested then it's not science, but if it can be tested and shown to be correct or incorrect then it is science. Popper confirms this interpretation later:

>“A sentence (or a theory) is empirical-scientific if and only if it is falsifiable.”

Testing and refining the "theories" of astrology would qualify as scientific inquiry, but what practitioners of astrology actually do is far from scientific, so the subject itself really shouldn't be considered a science.

But this process of testing and refining theories is the application of the scientific method to claims of astrology isn't any different to the way it's done in physics, nor does it rule out a possible hypothesis being put forward which is successful. Practitioners of astrology put forward at least some falsifiable hypotheses (or at least, we can interpret them as hypotheses) just as physicists do.

If the criterion for science is simply whether or not the hypotheses can be falsified, this very much includes astrology and can exclude (as I mentioned in the case of Nature) legitimate science. By saying that astrology is far from scientific simply opens the question again: what counts as science?

We both agree that astrology isn't science, or it shouldn't be considered science, but my point is simply that the criterion of falsifiability is not sufficient to delineate science from non-science. Maybe we should say that the majority of claims made in the field should be (i) falsifiable (ii) shown to be correct, but that still leaves several cases open.

I agree that science is more than just making falsifiable claims, but I don't think that's a fair characterization of Popper. From what I understand of Popper's philosophy (not having read his work first-hand), science is the development and refinement of theories that produce falsifiable claims. That already disqualifies astrology, and we could certainly add more criteria. But I don't think "shown to be correct" should be one because it's impossible in general, which is what inspired the falsifiability criterion in the first place.

How is astrology falsifiable?

The popular conception of astrology as a mechanistic and predeterministic way to evaluate someones life is trivially falsifiable. Like any mechanistic and predetermined way to evaluate someone's life.

But that's straw dogging it to the max.

The more realistic conception of astrology is as a prehistoric psychological counseling tool which cannot be falsified; some anxious panic ridden pregnant woman asks an astrologer if her newborn will be healthy or not; astrologer sees anxiety will only make the mom and soon to be newborn more unhealthy, calms mom down by explaining the baby will be fine and she can trust him because he's so smart that he knows the constellation Pisces was in the sky when she was born (in the spring, because he's old and remembers her). He knows so much about nature and biology that he can mathematically and mostly correctly even predict star positions, not bad for 10000 BC. She's like "oh wow this dude is smart, for a pre-historical dude anyway" and calms down and the lower stress hormones mean her and the baby survive delivery; holy cow astrology works? That's cut and dried example; a more modern example is nothing in medicine is 0% or 100%, and most times anything that makes the patient feel better results in a better outcome; again; astrology as an auxiliary additional side therapy in concert with modern medicine works?

Astrology makes definite claims, and the claims have shown to be false. Check out Shawn Carlson's 1985 piece "A Double Blind Test of Astrology" in Nature.

The final part of science, then, is giving up paradigms which have been falsified.

Astrologers... refuse to do this, to put it politely.

I agree! But the popular conception of science as merely something falsifiable doesn't include that condition - my whole point here (which for some reason people are downvoting me for...?) is that Popper's definition isn't sufficient, because it both includes pseudoscience (astrology) and excludes legitimate (exploratory) science.

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