re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition i think that part of the problem is that i have proposed a definition of science that i intended to be interpreted broadly and that lee lady has interpreted fairly narrowly my definition is this science is the investigation of the empirical that avoids mistakes in reasoning and methodology discovered from previous work lee lady writes i don t think that science should be defined in a way that some of the activities that lead to really important science namely thinking and informal exploration are not recognized as scientific work unless one classifies thinking and informal exploration as a mistake they fall under my definition i hope no one would consider speculation thinking and informal exploration as unscientific in article c nasf mh news hawaii edu lady uhunix uhcc hawaii edu lee lady writes seriously i m not sure whether i misjudged you or not in one respect i still have a major problem though with your insistence that science is mainly about avoiding mistakes here is where i think we are talking at cross purposes it is not clear to me that the kind of definition i have proposed should be taken as describing what science is mainly about consider for example a definition of invertebrates as all animals lacking a backbone this fairly tells what is an invertebrate and what is not an invertebrate but it hardly tells you what invertebrates are all about one can read this definition and still not know that of all animal species are invertebrates that invertebrates possess a remarkably broad range of form that some invertebrate groups such as insects and nematodes are ubiquitous in all ecosystems etc in short knowing the definition of invertebrates does not tell one what they are mainly about the misunderstanding here is my fault i did not give sufficient context for people to understand my proposed definition okay so let s see if we agree on this first of all there are degrees of certainty it might be appropriate for instance to demand carefully controlled trials before we accept as absolute scientific truth to the extent that there is any such thing the effectiveness of a certain treatment on the other hand highly favorable clinical experience even if uncontrolled can be adequate to justify a preliminary judgement that a treatment is useful secondly it makes sense to be more tolerant in our standards of evidence for a pronounced effect than for one that is marginal i agree on both counts as an example of the second it would only take a few cases of curing rabies to convince most veterinarians that a treatment was effective despite a lack of controls as to the first i do not think it is useful to talk about absolute scientific truth i think it is more useful to talk about the kinds of evidence that various claims have and the kinds of evidence in particular fields that in the past have proven faulty or reliable the latter is obviously a matter of degree and in each field practitioners try to discover the relevance of different kinds of evidence one of the primary mistakes that marks the advocacy of an idea as psuedo science is that the advocacy lacks any sense of proportion regarding the kinds of evidence related to the proposed claim the kinds of evidence that are actually relevant to it and the historical reasons in the field that certain kinds of evidence are given more weight than others it is perfectly alright to speculate i have read quite a few refereed papers that speculated left and right but the authors were careful to identify the notions as speculative to list what little evidence was presently available for them and to describe how research could proceed to either put the notion on more firm footing or to uncover its problems often what distinguishes whether a paper of this sort passes muster is the thoughtfulness with which the author sets the context and paves the way for future work it is in this area that many proponents of speculative ideas fail the folks over in sci psychology have a hundred and one excuses not to make this simple test they claim that only an elaborate outcome study will be satisfactory a study of the sort that nlp practitioners many of whom make a barely marginal living from their practice can ill afford to do most of them are also just plain not interested because the whole idea seems frivolous and since they re not part of the scientific establishment they have no tangible rewards to gain from scientific acceptance i think a lot of scientists steer away from things that deserving or not garner a patina of kookiness when proponents of some practice see no value in more careful investigation of that practice that sets alarms ringing in many researchers minds this is unfortunate because there is undoubtedly some intersection between things that are worth investigating and things that are advocated by those who seem careless or unreasonable in their advocacy on the other hand i can understand why many scientists would just as soon select other directions for research as gordon banks has pointed out no one wants to become this generation s rhine one academic in sci psychology said that it would be completely unscientific for him to test the phobia cure since it hasn t been described in a scientific journal i think this is absurd actually at least one fairly careful academic study has been done with favorable results but it s apparently not acceptable because it s a doctoral dissertation and not published in a refereed journal i wonder why the results were not published in my field dissertation results are typically summarized in papers that are submitted to journals often the papers are accepted for publication before the dissertation is finished this certainly eases one s defense finally i hope lee lady will forgive me from commenting either on nlp or the discussion of it in sci psychology i know little about either and so have nothing to offer russell
