re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article lsj gninnl c saltillo cs utexas edu turpin cs utexas edu russell turpin writes i wrote or to use a phrasing that i think is more accurate science is the investigation of phenomena that avoids methods and reasoning that are known to be erroneous from past foul ups in article c iu hbn bunyip cc uq oz au bd psych psy uq oz au writes i can agree with this if you are talking about the less fundamental aspects of scientific method in fact i don t see the alternative as i don t think that the fundamentals are capable of experimental investigation in saying this i am agreeing with the work of people like kuhn feyerabend and lakatos while methodology cannot be subject to the same kind of experimental investigation as that to which it is applied it can be critically appraised methodologies can be compared to each other sometimes by the conflicting results they produce this kind of critical appraisal and comparison together with the inappropriateness of existing methodologies for new fields of study is what drives the evolution of methodologies and how we think about them as usual you are missing the whole point russell because you are not willing to even consider questionning your basic article of faith which is that science is merely a matter of methodology and that the highest purpose of science is to avoid making mistakes this is like saying that the most important aspect of business management is accurate bookkeeping if science were no more than methodology and not making mistakes it would be a poor thing indeed what was the methodology of darwin what was the methodology of einstein what was for that matter the methodology of jenner and pasteur in an earlier article russell turpin writes none of the foregoing should be read as meaning that we should open the door to practitioners of quackery and psuedo science modern advocates of homeopathy chiropracty and traditional chinese medicine receive little respect because for the most part they use methods and reasoning that the kind of research lee lady recommends has shown to be terribly faulty this does not imply that all their treatments are ineffective it does imply that those who rely on faulty methodology and reasoning are incapable of discovering which treatments are effective and which are not first of all i think you are arguing against a straw man because i don t think that anyone here is arguing that quackery pseudo science homeopathy chiropracty and traditional chinese medicine should be accepted as science i in particular think the basic ideas of homeopathy and chiropracty seem extremely flaky what some of us do believe however is that some of these things including some of the flaky ideas are deserving of serious scientific attention if in fact it were true as you have stated above that those who do not use the currently fashionable methodology can have no idea what is effective and what is not then science today would not exist for all of current science is based on the past work of scientists whose methodology by current standards was seriously flawed it is certainly true that as methodology improves we need to re examine those results derived in the past using less perfect methodologies it is also true that the results obtained by people today who still rely on those early methodologies needs to be re examined in a more rigorous fashion by those qualified to do so credibly but to say that nobody who fails to do elaborate double blind studies is capable of knowing their ass from a hole in the ground and to say that no ideas that come from outside the scientific establishment could possibly be worthy of serious investigation this truly marks one s attitude as doctrinaire cultist this attitude is not compatible with a belief in reason in the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists psychology seems less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects lady uhunix uhcc hawaii edu lady uhunix bitnet
