Scientists don't wait for others to do the research to support or contradict the ideas they propose. They strive to test their ideas, try to come up with counterarguments and ultimately, give up ideas when warranted by the evidence. Astrologers do not seem to examine the astrological ideas they accept. As reflected by the minimal level of research in the field, they try to test their arguments in fair ways. The astrological community largely ignores evidence that contradicts its ideas.
What criteria do we use to assess the reliability of the predictions from astrology? What is the tolerance level for the errors?
There is a reason for this crazy question. Most people would say that astrology is not a science, while astronomy is a science. The objective of this question is to explore the criteria that distinguishes a scientific discipline from a non-scientific discipline. Do you have a criterion or criteria? If yes, please tell us.
For example, would it make sense to define history as a scientific discipline? In many languages, history is a scientific discipline.
How about philosophy?
How about economics?
I distinguish between scientific disciplines, non-scientific disciplines and trans-scientific disciplines.
I have had fierce debates about the proper criterion for distinguishing a scientific discipline from a non-scientific discipline.
If the concept of science is dependent on the words or ideas in a specific language, it raises questions about interpretation and translation.
Would it even make sense to that person to think of astrology other than as a science, if that person viewed astrology as a science because in THAT language, it is!!! Think about the current debates about climate change. I do not have good answers. I am simply identifying some potential problems in communication.
Is there a Western (?) centric bias in the very definition of science? I am not competent to answer this deep question and welcome the opinions of others.
Astrology is not a science because its hypotheses and predictions are either not testable (e.g., by experiment), or if they are testable, they fail those tests. History is not a science either, by the same criteria, and indeed is usually considered a "humanity" subject rather than a scientific one. However, insofar as the scientific method (i.e., testing hypotheses with experiments) can be applied to astrology (or history), they may be considered "sciences". Examples of subjects that straddle the amorphous borders between "science" and "humanity" would be perhaps psychology and economics. Freud might have been a great psychologist, but very little of his work was "scientific", i.e., testable and falsifiable.
The person who comes to my mind as the philosopher of science in this sense is Karl Popper. His main criterion for considering a proposition to be "scientific" was that it be "falsifiable". One classic example was Einstein's theory of the curvature of space-time, which was tested by Eddington in 1919 during an eclipse and actually validated - but it certainly was a "falsifiable" theory. What astrological theory is similarly falsifiable - but can be validated? The answer is: none.
Note: there is no need to bring in cultural biases or differences between "east" and "west". There is no difference between "eastern" and "western" science. Good scientists can (and do) emerge from anywhere.
Enda William O'Brien Thank you for your excellent answer. Science must have testable hypotheses. I agree with you that we must follow the thinking of Karl Popper. However, to my surprise, many languages use a very broad definition of science, in which history counts as science. Many people equate research with science. For me, a researcher is not the same as a scientist.
Astrology, if it is not considered to be a full field of science, can become a fully autonomous scientific field if it is equipped with instrumental research tools for, among others, predicting and predicting phenomena occurring in space. Because for this type of research it is necessary to use research tools based on the collection, processing and analysis of huge amounts of data, a good solution can be the use of Big Data database systems and analytical tools currently developed mainly in the field of multi-criteria Business Intelligence analytics.
Best wishes
Based primally on scientific deduction, the question is not crazy. Very few people can make logical interpretations. It is apparently a science itself. Science needs reasonings, so is astrology. Nevertheless, it not to be followed blindly.
If different languages have broader definitions of "science", that just reflects some of the subtle nuances of language, and I wouldn't get too hung up on such colloquial definitions. We could have a similar debate about sport - we probably all agree that football is a sport, but how about golf? Or chess, or synchronized swimming? E.g., wrestling in the US is now officially "entertainment" rather than "sport". Many universities have colleges of "arts and sciences", that encompass both history and physics. At Univ. College, Dublin, you could study physics for an Arts degree, but not history for a Science degree. Nevertheless, you could take a scientific approach to history, by applying objective methods to quantifiable data (births, marriages, deaths, etc.). However, posing and answering a question like "What were the consequences of the French Revolution?" falls into the domain of "art", not "science". (BTW, chairman Mao famously answered that question by saying "it's too soon to tell").
In the modern world there is more confusion between science and engineering than between science and say, history. Building an instrument like the Hubble telescope or the CERN large Hadron collider is mostly engineering: it's what you do with them afterwards that is science.
B K Sharma Dear Mr. Sharma, are you suggesting that under some circumstances and assumptions, it might be reasonable to think of astrology as a scientific discipline? How do we specify the testable hypotheses in astrology? How do we collect data, and to "reject" such hypotheses? Perhaps you could share some specific examples to help us understand your point of view.
All depends on the definition of science. Many people consider history as a science. So putting astrology in the group of humanities along with history and psychology is reasonable. Astrology is fully based on scientific astronomical observations (unlike numerology which is based on the magic features of a number). Its predictions on psychological portraits and events are continuous in time, but the huge number of outcomes allows to apply statistics only partially. We cannot repeat many histories, only in a movie like "Sliders". But people have demand not only for scientific knowledge, but also for lessons from history and astrological predictions. If science can give none and humanities some, some people choose humanities to be more useful than science.
It is already there!
The theory of probability, Psychoanalysis and reading of body languages the the three chapters of Astrology.
Scientists don't wait for others to do the research to support or contradict the ideas they propose. They strive to test their ideas, try to come up with counterarguments and ultimately, give up ideas when warranted by the evidence. Astrologers do not seem to examine the astrological ideas they accept. As reflected by the minimal level of research in the field, they try to test their arguments in fair ways. The astrological community largely ignores evidence that contradicts its ideas.
I don't think it is. Science should provide facts and proofs, which is not the case with astrology... I know so many Taurus people that are so different from me...
Astrology expects certain elements of the prediction to be taken in faith. It is also muddled with the placebo effect and research reactance effect to some extent. I do not think astrology will muster the rigors of the scientific method
I do not agree that there is no research in astrology. Please look at this site: https://www.astro.com/horoscope . First, you can insert your birth data and get limited forecast for free, and then decide if it is correct or not. Second, you can find there many research articles analyzing some famous people, events or just general principles.
However, I expect that those articles may sound Chinese for many. Astrology needs special knowledge like any science. It is based on real astronomical data (current coordinates of not only Sun but also other planets are provided online), it uses mathematical (calculation of the moment of exact angles between planets) and psychological science for interpretation. Astrologers know the meaning of "Mars in Scorpio" or "Venus in Taurus", why Mars moving in the 8th house can be dangerous and why the quadrature between Uranus and Pluto lasts long and can generate critical social events.
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