Furious Styles said:
In psychology there are numerous theories that have little to no empirical evidence, like, for example, most of the theories that aren't biological. Seriously, most of its based around conjecture and the subjective interpretation of fairly vague data. Some, such as the psychodynamic approach, have literally no support whatsoever. Which is, to my mind, unscientific.
I will admit to be largely ignorant to the details about psychology. If what you say is true, and I honestly have no reason to think otherwise, then what those people are doing is not science and you are right.
yeah, that isn't science. Not everything thought up based on the info at hand is science. the whole ancestor's thing isn't science because it wasn't based on empirical observation, it was based on conjecture as to the afterlife and the nature of stars. By your logic, religion and the supernatural would be scientific.
Frankly, I do think that the study of the supernatural can be scientific. The Coelacanth, for instance, was thought to have been extinct for millions of years (needs fact checking, not sure of the exact time frame), and people who claimed to have seen them were said to be pseudo-scientists. But, with examination and evidence, they were eventually found to still be alive.
The Loch Ness Monster is probably a better example. For awhile, there was sufficient evidence to justify expeditions to prove it's existence. The methods that ultimately proved there really wasn't anything too interesting in the lake were legitimate science. The fact that the whole thing wasn't there and turned out to be mostly hoaxes doesn't mean the legitimate studies were any less scientific.
Religion is a special case. It is deliberately not falsifiable. This makes it not a valid theory and therefore unscientific. I would argue, though, that early religion was the birth of science. It was the first attempts to explain the world and how we function in it. It was immediately after this, though, that it split into two groups. Those that wanted to adapt their ideas to new things they learned, and those that stuck to dogma and tradition.
Perhaps my examples weren't the best before, a better one might be the Sun revolving around the Earth. That is based on observation and even today it's not difficult to understand how somebody can think that. Hell, I remember when I was in first grade or so and learned that the sun was a star and I didn't believe it. To me, that's still science, however outdated or wrong it may be.
Or, to put it another way, if tomorrow we found out Newton was wrong about everything and it was just freak coincidence that his Laws have upheld until now, would every discovery, study, and area of knowledge based on his Laws, now shown to be wrong, still be scientific inquiry? I say yes.
