[WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

Thu Dec 22 11:05:03 UTC 2005

Karl A. Krueger wrote:

>It seems to me that the sides of this debate are somewhat talking past
>each other. 
>
I think that I can read that comment as a step forward.  I found the 
article that David Gerrard cited to be mostly quite good.  As Karla 
McLaren says: "It is not merely, as many surmise, a conflict between 
fact-based viewpoints and faith-based viewpoints. Nor is it simply a 
conflict between rationality and credulity. No, it's a full-on clash of 
cultures that makes real communication improbable at best."  To make her 
point she did not once use the term "pseudoscience" in her article. Her 
comments about how the skeptic community uses language are significant:

>     It's vital that a way be found to help people in my culture
>     question, think about, and critically interpret the barrage of
>     information and misinformation they receive on a daily basis.
>     However, it's also vital that the information be culturally
>     sensitive. For instance, the first time I visited the skeptical
>     health care Web site called Quackwatch, it felt as if I were
>     walking into enemy territory. "Quack" is a very loaded word-it's a
>     fighting word! Though site owner Dr. Stephen Barrett has every
>     right to call his excellent Web site anything he likes, I wonder
>     why it couldn't have been called, for instance, HealthWatch,
>     HealingInfo, DocFacts, or something equally nonthreatening. Why do
>     I have to type the word "quack" when I want a skeptical review of
>     the choices I make in medical care? And why do I have to spend so
>     much time translating on the skeptical sites I visit-or just
>     skipping over words like scam, sham, quack, fraud, dupe, and fool?
>     Why do I (the sort of person who actually needs skeptical
>     information) have to see myself described in offensive terms and
>     bow my head in shame before I can truly access the information
>     available in your culture?

If a comfortable accomodation is to be found in this subject area, we 
need to find language that is acceptable.  When you can let go of the 
prejudicial language you will probably find an alternatives community 
that is far more accomodating to your ideas than you might have 
expected.  From reading her article it is evident that the writer had a 
level of insights and skill that her spiritual transformation possible.  
This is not characteristic of the majority who believe as she did.  If 
they feel a need to review their beliefs the kind of welcome that they 
normally get from the skeptical community may effectively drive them 
back into beliefs that are familiar to them, or into an institution for 
the mentally disturbed.

>I take the opposition to the term "pseudoscience" as based
>on the claim that we should not be judging whether particular
>experiments or observations are done scientifically or not.
>
More or less.  It is not just about "particular" experiments and 
observation but about all the experiments and observations, and whether 
there are any where good-faith experiments are carried out, and where a 
failed experiment will simply cause the experimenter to revise his 
hypothesis and plan a new experiment.  That, after all, is what science 
is.  Science does not have a 3RR which says that if you continue 
experimenting after your third failure you are engaging in 
pseudoscience.  Science will take its bad results as a basis for 
experimenting further; true pseudoscience will take bad results, and 
draw premature conclusions, or worse, ignore the results all together.  
As long as there are some practitioners pursuing the scientific method 
you cannot fairly extrapolate those selected outcomes to represent the 
entire field of study.

>In that, I actually agree.  Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic of
>scientific methodology.  In such cases we should report what was done
>and how the world responded to it.
>
I agree there, and the closer our source is to the original source the 
more believable our reporting will be.

>But I've been talking about fields where there _aren't_ any experiments
>or methodology to report on.  There's just speculation, tradition,
>marketing, or religious pronouncement ... and an adherent claiming that
>the noises of same are "scientific".
>
Yes there is.  If we can't find any evidence of scientific 
experimentation we can say exactly that.  If the adherents make the 
kinds of claims that you envision, and there is evidence for that we can 
say that too.  But that's still not enough to draw a conclusion from it all.

>I just don't see what's non-neutral about saying that speculation
>doesn't count as science just because someone says it is.  Or that while
>3000-year-old religious tradition is a fine thing, it isn't a form of
>scientific methodology.
>
At one level "speculation" and "claim" are just synonyms for 
"hypothesis"  The 3000 year old tradition predates what we now call the 
scientific method, hence the term "ancient science".  It obviously does 
not meet today's standards, but they had no way of knowing better.  The 
four traditional elements (5 among the Cninese) was as far as they could 
go with the tools that they had at the time.  Does the fact that 
Aristotle did not supply experimental data with his speculations make 
him wrong, or worse unscientific?

>Is it the "pseudo-" prefix, that some people have taken as an imputation
>of criminal fraud?  We could simply say "nonscience" or "not based on
>experiment" or whatever instead.  But I don't think we should fail to
>report the fact that some fields _do_ claim to be "science" for
>political or marketing reasons, even when there's no science around.
>
It's a matter of fraud and a whole lot of other things that the 
alternative community believes to be demeaning.  Maybe it's the word 
"science" itself that's problematic.  When you use a word, you use all 
its meanings: the ones you intend, the ones you consider to be wrong, 
and the ones you never eve heard about.  You have absolutely no control 
over haw the reader is going to interpret what you say.  Thus in some of 
its older forms, science could be any body of knowledge, not just only a 
body that was defined by certain rigid rules and requirements.  
Traditionally the "seven liberal sciences" were grammar, logic, 
rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.  There are also a 
number of set phrases which include the word science, many of whioh like 
"political science"would not fit a rigid definition of "science".  When 
you consider most set phrases in which "science" is qualified by another 
word most would not be hard sciences.  "Alternative science" carries 
with it the connotation of difference from strict science much better 
than "political science".  Some terms like "creation science" can even 
be oxymorons.

So I agree too that it's important that we make prominent note the fact 
when for whatever reason an area of study deviates from mainstream 
science including marketing.  But we need to do that in a more nuanced 
way than can possibly be stuffed into a single word in a category.  The 
degree to which these topics deviate from mainstream science is just too 
wide. 

Throughout this debate I have never said that I consider any of these 
topics a proven science.  I have always been largely sceptical about 
many of them, but without ever losing my fascination.  I read once that 
the scientific failure of many of these in general, and astrology in 
particular was not in their inability to design and test experimental 
models, but in their inability to develop credible hypotheses, i.e. in a 
different part of the scientific process  than what is generally 
stated.  Even if I believe that there are transient phenomena I do not 
feel compelled to build a whole science around them.  I can accepy that 
there is not enough information upon which to establish an understanding 
of any individual phenomenon.  It would be nice to be able to design an 
experiment that reproduces a transient phenomenon, but we don't have 
enough information upon which to design that experiment.  Some event 
just whooshed by and one is left singing, "Something is happening here 
but you don't know what it is,  Do you, Mr. Jones?"

Ec