Talk:Protoscience

Contents

1 Accident 2 Rm protoscience 3 How to define a Protoscience? 4 Scientific Method: Yes or No? 5 Memetics, a protoscience?

Accident

Apologies, I am having a weird font problem and may need to reboot - I was simply trying to add "cognitive science of mathematics" as a protoscience, but doing so mangled string theory and I can't fix it.

This may be a Freudian slip but I assure you it isn't intentional...

Rm protoscience

I fixed the link; I also removed "homeopathy" as an example--it's not anything like a legitimate protoscience, or even half-legit. It's total pseudoscientific nonsense, and not taken seriously as many protosciences are. I'm willing to tolerate a sympathetic and historical treatment of it on its own page, but pages about real science shouldn't be littered with frauds. --Lee Daniel Crocker

What's fraudulent about homeopathy (not that I believe in it)? --Anonymous

Ummm... homeopathy is a protoscience in that many traditional remedies of indigenous peoples are later discovered to have real provable medical properties - so it's more proper to say that a constant stream of claims have been passed through a a medical filter, and some have passed... many more than a random sampling would admit.

there are a lot of definitions of "homeopathy" as well... maybe this just needs to be framed a bit?

Based on the homeopathy article alone, I'd have to call it protoscience rather than pseudoscience. I personally strongly disbelieve it, but the article looks okay.

One comment is that homeopathy might work by a means other than that espoused for it, just as aspirin "worked" even when no one knew why. Our task as scientists: to discover the real means by which homeopathy works -- or prove that it doesn't work.

If homeopathy is proven, it will be promoted from protoscience to science. If it is disproven, but its adherents keep promoting it, then the wikipedia will demote it to pseudoscience. Even Lee Crocker would agree to this, I'm sure.

Homeopathy has been tested, hundreds of times, and has utterly failed every test (except for few it passed by barely measureable margins as might be expected by pure chance). We know exactly how homeopathy works: the placebo effect. We've known it for decades. There's no mystery here. There's no unexplanied effects, because there are no effects at all. It's just plain water, and everyone with even a basic medical education knows that. Anyone who wants to support homeopathy has to willfully and dishonestly ignore these decades of failed tests and evade the placebo issue. Real protoscience doesn't demand strong proof, but it does demand the basic personal and scientific integrity that homeopathy utterly lacks.

I left the "accupuncture" example in place, because that's a different story. It deserves to be called protoscience because honest, reputable scientists have shown real results from it that we have yet to explain, so even though we know the "chi" explanation is nonsense, there's still something going on here worth investigating. But homeopathy is different. Homeopathy is well-tested, well-understood, useless, and fraudulent. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I wouldn't have any problems with Lee's comments if he didn't get into fraud and dishonesty. A person who sincerely believes weird things despite strong evidence to the contrary may be deluded, but that doesn't mean he's fraudulent. --Eclecticology

I imagine your small-time health food store homeopath might actually believe in it, and honestly think he's helping people. But even so, it doesn't take an M.D. or Ph.D. to know that testimonials are bad science, and the people producing and selling the stuff continue to use testimonials and pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo to make profits out of people's gullibility and vulnerability. If calling them frauds is rude or uncouth, I'll still take my moral values over theirs any day. Rudeness doesn't kill people. --Lee Daniel Crocker

How to define a Protoscience?

How young does a science need be to be described as a 'protoscience'? Exobiology is at least forty years old, the same age as the study of DNA! Surely that's too old/well-established to be a protoscience? --Dan100 17:35, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

Exobiology (or astrobiology) is a verifiable hypothesis that has not been verified, according to its own article. Are other similar hypotheses considered true science or protoscience? The only ones I can think of are protoscience. I don't think it has anything to do with how old they are... - --Omegatron 21:56, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

I don't think it has to do with how old it is either, maybe this article should be rewritten to get away from a time-based definition. As I understand it, a protoscience is usually used to define the time of a historically developing field before it had developed its methodologies and modes of thought which later defined it as a discipline. For example, early psychology was an offshoot of 19th century philosophy of the mind, and looks very little like the modern variations of it (or even the variations which came 50 years later). The initial ideas were all present but the sensibility of how to set up an experiment, what could/should be tested for, what could/should be quantified, what valid hypotheses were, etc. had not developed. We can compare this with string theory now, which has not yet developed (m)any testable options, but may in the future (or may not). The "proto" in protoscience would thus refer not necessarily to chronological duration but to epistemic space: a protoscience has not yet developed the conceptual tools for becoming a full-fledged science. The demarcation between a protoscience and a pseudoscience might then be that a pseudoscience has claimed to develop said tools, but they are not recognized as valid, or something like that. The question of "establishment" is another one alltogether -- how much does investment by traditional forms of authentication designate the philosophical value of a field of inquiry? Does research on parapsychology done by the CIA/KGB make it any less pseudoscientific? If they practiced iridology at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory would it make it any less suspicious? How much is "status" determined by the spaces in which a field is advocated, communicated with, and practiced? How much is it the other way around (is iridology non-science because scientists don't study it, or do scientists not study it because it is non-science), or both? Anyway obviously these are large questions, my point is just that time and establishment may not necessarily bear down on such things. --Fastfission 02:40, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Let me just add to Fastfission: A protoscience grows up when it gets solid evidence that modifies the theory considerably; ex. evolution grew up when it moved beyond Darwin and started adding things like kin selection and genes, which Darwin had only inklings of (if that.) So exobiology seems to me to be largely where it started, with some changes based solely on advances in other fields; it hasn't really changed much. So on that basis I'd classify it as 'proto-'. --maru 18:17, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Scientific Method: Yes or No?

Paragraph one: "not yet been tested adequately by the scientific method"

Paragrpah two: "its adherence to the scientific method"

Hello? Which is it? --User:Stevenkrivit 2100 PST, 24 Apr 2005

Doesn't seem contradictory to me: One refers to how much it has been tested, and the other graf refers to whether it would be testable. Ex: Theology is not testable, but alchemy is, and so on. One could become a protoscience (though with hindsight we can see that alchemy would not be able to- it would be disproven when it tried), and the other couldn't. --maru 18:17, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Memetics, a protoscience?

It remains up in the air whether memetics is protoscience or a pseudo-science.

On many other pages I have argued that any memetic terminology violates the NPoV as memetics is still hotly debated as both it's accuracy and usefullness is still yet to be seen. For a perfect example of such an exchange see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Meme

For a philosophical discussion regarding meme theory see: http://www.ephilosopher.com/phpBB_14-action-viewforum-forum-4.html

In fact, even Wikipedias page of a list of alternative, speculative and disputed theories correctly places memetics alongside other controversial subjects such as Intelligent Design and Bible codes.

Therefore, as I have argued, any memetic terminology used unnecessarily on pages not directly concerned with memetics contstitute a violation of the NPoV, not to mention the idea of saying memetics is definitely a protoscience.

Wikipedia's theoretically objective articles shouldn't be tainted by this ideological slant which favors one side of a controversial issue. Maprovonsha172 12:50, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Incidentally, that link doesn't even go to a discussion of memes. And you *may* have a point w/r/t to terminology, but that is irrelevant here. --maru 18:04, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Another thing: Protoscience is a term sometimes used to describe a hypothesis which has not yet been tested adequately by the scientific method, but which is otherwise consistent with existing science or which, where inconsistent, offers reasonable account of the inconsistency. Memetics is indeed consistent with known science, and offers explanations that fills gaps. Seems like an excellent protoscience candidate to me. --maru 18:19, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

No, memetics is not a protoscience. It's not falsifiable, and it's not even empirically testable. A key characteristic of a proto-science (as appose to a pseudo-science) is it's "willingness to be disproven by new evidence (if and when it appears), or supplanted by a more-predictive theory." (Protoscience) Memetics is so malleable and vague any anecdotal justification can be shoehorned into to defending the theory. It's not justified scientifically, or logically. And anyway, how are we to believe an article entitled protoscience which includes acupuntcure!?! (see http://www.skepdic.com/acupunc.html) I'm deleting memetics again because it isn't a protoscience.Maprovonsha172 22:49, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Maprovonsha, you yourself said at the top of this discussion "It remains up in the air whether memetics is protoscience or a pseudo-science." Now you're unilaterally declaring it's not. So which is it? Is it up in the air or isn't it? You're contradicting yourself. Reverted, again. --FCYTravis 04:49, 10 May 2005 (UTC)