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RE: Scientific Evangelism vs. The Esoteric: The Battle Of Culture, B.S. and Evolution... (Part ONE)
The symptoms you've called out on scientism are the same for all belief systems and ideologies.
On the more specific subject of astrology, those practitioners who insist on some kind of natural science explanation for it lead the discussion right into the jaws of scientism. It's confusing the map and the territory. Astrology is a map. Reality, experience, all subject to the discovered "laws" of other disciplines, are the territory.
The math/astronomy aspects of astrology are mechanisms in the construction of the mapping method's models. They are not literally causes, but elements of description.
Otherwise, how could such a variety of mapping methods give good results?
YES.
Excellent articulation/points, through-and-through.
Your argument is a fallacy. Science is not "a belief system" and never has been, never will be. In fact it is the complete absence of a belief system. An absence of belief is not a belief.
If you don't understand the basic axioms of logic, arguments, and reality then you're arguing from a point that is pure make belief and fantasy.
Updat: please see comment below. I misread "Scientism" for "science". My bad
Sorry, you didn't differentiate the word "scientism" which indicates a belief system, from "science", an epistemological discipline. I was not talking about the latter, except to acknowledge its valuable role in the last sentence of the second paragraph.
That's ok - misunderstandings are common in this kind of medium.
Cheers!
Thanks for explaining you were trying to define something different. You were right that I missed that nuance.
Sounds like the OP about astrology which claimed it was (partly) using science as a basis was actually Scientism to me:
Whereas when the claims of astrology can and have been measured, and found to be false, that is not.
Seems like we're pretty nearly on the same page - except that our concepts of what astrology is are quite different. And this is what I was talking about with the map/territory confusion a couple of messages back.
So, let me pose the following question to you. Would you measure the claims of mathematics, or of various other formal systems, like software modeling languages, or hardware ones? Astrologers don't help themselves by insisting that they're dealing with some kind of empirical phenomena called astrology. Because in my view, after 40+ years of studying it, and 35+ years of STEM education and career, what we have here is an abstraction error. Confusion of a map with the territory. That's what I was trying to say in my initial message. But people in our society/culture tend not to be raised to make such distinctions.
Cheers!