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Merged Is ufology a pseudoscience?

Marduk said:
you got it the wrong way round, its not a small part of Ufology bringing the rest into disreputable pseudoscience, its most of it. You need to face reality and deal with it.
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Actually ... Marduk above is just plain wrong. But the point is that even if he was right ( which he's not ) all I need to show to be able to exclude all ufology from the pseudoscience label is that the pseudoscience label doesn't apply everything ufology, and I've done that. All that can be done is to claim there are incidents of pseudoscience in ufology and then present them ... which hasn't even been done using any actual examples or logic.

j.r.
 
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ufology said:
The only reason the poster says I've "stripped the definition of all meaning" is that I've shown how the definition doesn't apply to ufology as a whole and therefore it has no meaning in that context. What would the poster prefer, that we change all the definitions to suit their bias so that they can apply it unfairly and make them feel like they won their argument?

j.r.
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imo his description was accurate, shall we take a vote ?

again, when someone says something and everyone repeatedly tells them that theyre wrong, that says something, when the person refuses or is mentally incapable of admitting he's wrong, that says something else
:p

if this is a win/lose contest, you haven't crossed the starting line yet, while everyone else is in the clubhouse getting a drink
:D
ufology said:
Actually ... Marduk above is just plain wrong. But the point is that even if he was right ( which he's not ) all I need to show to be able to exclude all ufology from the pseudoscience label is that the pseudoscience label doesn't apply everything ufology, and I've done that. All that can be done is to claim there are incidents of pseudoscience in ufology and then present them ... which hasn't even been done using any actual examples or logic.

j.r.
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you haven't done that, you have just deluded yourself that you have, in the same way that you've deluded yourself into thinking that you've seen Aliens, therefore you are important. Do you believe that years fron now your name will be hailed as the father of the science of Ufology, ever had that dream ?
its about time you accepted the reality of your situation
;)

wiki has a section on ufology as a pseudoscience, tell me mr dictionary, why would an encyclopedia have an entry for something you are claiming doesn't exist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology#As_a_pseudoscience
 
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Marduk said:
imo his description was accurate, shall we take a vote ?

again, when someone says something and everyone repeatedly tells them that theyre wrong, that says something, when the person refuses or is mentally incapable of admitting he's wrong, that says something else
:p

if this is a win/lose contest, you haven't crossed the starting line yet, while everyone else is in the clubhouse getting a drink
:D


you haven't done that, you have just deluded yourself that you have, in the same way that you've deluded yourself into thinking that you've seen Aliens, therefore you are important. Do you believe that years fron now your name will be hailed as the father of the science of Ufology, ever had that dream ?
its about time you accepted the reality of your situation
;)

wiki has a section on ufology as a pseudoscience, tell me mr dictionary, why would an encyclopedia have an entry for something you are claiming doesn't exist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufology#As_a_pseudoscience
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The small Wikipedia segment on "Ufology As A Pseudoscience" is a cherry picked segment of a much larger article and cites an even smaller cherry picked part of ufology as a whole and applies a cherry picked opinion as follows:

"Feist thinks that ufology can be categorized as a pseudoscience because, he says, its adherents claim it to be a science while being rejected as being one by the scientific community and because, he says, the field lacks a cumulative scientific progress."

For starters, it has already been shown that not all ufologists claim ufology to be a science. In fact very few claim it to be a science. This innacurate notion has been simply thrust upon ufology by some guy named Gregory Feist, who is a psychologist and who when asked how he would define science responded with:

"The bottom line is that I think that science can be defined in various ways, ranging from the more inclusive to the more exclusive definitions. In the more inclusive definition, I believe the psychological processes of theory and concept formation seen in children, adolescents, adults and even our premodern human ancestors are valid topics for psychologists of science."

What the ? And I'm supposed to take his word that he knows what he's talking about ... there's even more in this article:

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/gregory-feist

And as for progress ... that is completely irrelevant ... people tried to figure out how to fly for centuries. Now we do it regularly. But again ... even setting all the errors in Feist's logic aside, the big one he really missed, like everyone else here, is that there is a whole component of ufology that has nothing to do with science ... and therefore can't be presented as science or misconstrued as science and as a consequence falls outside the definition of pseudoscience ( unless maybe it's one of Feist's convoluted non-definition definitions ).

j.r.
 
ufology said:
But again ... even setting all the errors in Feist's logic aside, the big one he really missed, like everyone else here, is that there is a whole component of ufology that has nothing to do with science ... and therefore can't be presented as science or misconstrued as science and as a consequence falls outside the definition of pseudoscience ( unless maybe it's one of Feist's convoluted non-definition definitions ).

j.r.
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ok, so if its not science and its not pseudoscience, what is it ?
have you invented a term for it yet ?
:confused:
 
Marduk said:
ok, so if its not science and its not pseudoscience, what is it ?
have you invented a term for it yet ?
:confused:
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Ufology is a topic. Not everything in the world has to be defined as either science or pseudoscience.

j.r.
 
ufology said:
Ufology is a topic. Not everything in the world has to be defined as either science or pseudoscience.

j.r.
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ok, are you sure it isn't a pseudotopic ?
see, you have admitted that not all UFO's are Aliens, that some undoubtedly are, satellites, birds, weather balloons, blimps, secret aircraft, etc, so surely, thats not a topic, its several, most of which have nothing to do with aliens, so if its a topic, the majority of it is mundane isn't it
:D
 
Marduk said:
ok, are you sure it isn't a pseudotopic ?
see, you have admitted that not all UFO's are Aliens, that some undoubtedly are, satellites, birds, weather balloons, blimps, secret aircraft, etc, so surely, thats not a topic, its several, most of which have nothing to do with aliens, so if its a topic, the majority of it is mundane isn't it
:D
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Well ... actually I find satellites and birds and aircraft, especially secret ones to be pretty cool. The SR-71 for example was known to have been the cause of a number of UFO on radar reports. That aircraft was anything but "mundane".

j.r.
 
Marduk said:
ok, are you sure it isn't a pseudotopic ?
see, you have admitted that not all UFO's are Aliens, that some undoubtedly are, satellites, birds, weather balloons, blimps, secret aircraft, etc, so surely, thats not a topic, its several, most of which have nothing to do with aliens, so if its a topic, the majority of it is mundane isn't it
:D
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Pseudofaith is more like it.

If you think about it , it present many of the aspect of faith.
 
ufology said:
Well ... actually I find satellites and birds and aircraft, especially secret ones to be pretty cool. The SR-71 for example was known to have been the cause of a number of UFO on radar reports. That aircraft was anything but "mundane".

j.r.
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there was that case in the middle east, the Iranian one, that was an SR71 wasn't it
what are the others ?
:confused:
 
ufology said:
Actually ... Marduk above is just plain wrong. But the point is that even if he was right ( which he's not ) all I need to show to be able to exclude all ufology from the pseudoscience label is that the pseudoscience label doesn't apply everything ufology, and I've done that. All that can be done is to claim there are incidents of pseudoscience in ufology and then present them ... which hasn't even been done using any actual examples or logic.
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As has been pointed out more than once, if we use this bent logic to define what is and what is not a pseudo science, then it is fair to say that pseudo science does not exist at all in any subject because every subject that abuses science can use exactly the same defense. Luckily, it is not the proponents of pseudo science that get to give it the label in the same way that an individual doesn't get to decide if he's credible or not.
 
Stray Cat said:
it is not the proponents of pseudo science that get to give it the label in the same way that an individual doesn't get to decide if he's credible or not.
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thats what the judge told me, the last time I gave evidence
lucky for me he was talking about the police prosecutor
:D
 
ufology said:
Well ... actually I find satellites and birds and aircraft, especially secret ones to be pretty cool. The SR-71 for example was known to have been the cause of a number of UFO on radar reports. That aircraft was anything but "mundane".

j.r.
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In the null hypothesis, we are using mundane in the sense of "pertaining to the physical world" rather than in the colloquial sense of "unexciting". Perhaps some confusion is arising from the different meanings of the word, which can't be used interchangeably.
 
ufology said:
Well ... actually I find satellites and birds and aircraft, especially secret ones to be pretty cool. The SR-71 for example was known to have been the cause of a number of UFO on radar reports. That aircraft was anything but "mundane".
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While the aircraft itself was not mundane, the explanation of UFO sightings was.

Mundane UFO sighting explanation - military aircraft.
 
Stray Cat said:
As has been pointed out more than once, if we use this bent logic to define what is and what is not a pseudo science, then it is fair to say that pseudo science does not exist at all in any subject because every subject that abuses science can use exactly the same defense. Luckily, it is not the proponents of pseudo science that get to give it the label in the same way that an individual doesn't get to decide if he's credible or not.
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This.
 
ufology said:
Actually ... Marduk above is just plain wrong. But the point is that even if he was right ( which he's not ) all I need to show to be able to exclude all ufology from the pseudoscience label is that the pseudoscience label doesn't apply everything ufology, and I've done that. All that can be done is to claim there are incidents of pseudoscience in ufology and then present them ... which hasn't even been done using any actual examples or logic.
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And all I need to show to be able to exclude all Northern Cardinals from the description "red" is a Northern Cardinal that isn't red.

Huh? Nope. Doesn't work in the world of rationality and honesty.
 
ufology said:
Like it or not a large part of ufology culture involves entertainment, just like when Aerosmith played on the Simpsons it became a part of Rock Music culture, the aliens on the Simpsons are a wonderful example of ufology culture. But even if you don't want to deal with the huge part of ufology that is ufology culture, and only deal with the vast majority of published works, we've already covered that as well.

Most published ufology makes no claim to being scientific, and are simply accounts of experiences by people who have seen UFOs or are involved in ufology. So again ... you can't lump that in with pseudoscience either... which again means that ufology as a whole cannot be labeled pseudoscience.

So now not only can ufology culture not be lumped in with pseudoscience, neither can most of its published works. It doesn't matter that a small few might be pseudoscience, like Sagan's UFO's a Scientific Debate, or Klass's UFOs Explained. All we need to show is that ufology isn't all pseudoscience, which is extraordinarily easy if you don't reduce yourself to cherry picking out of context individual examples and try to claim that's all there is to ufology. So why not accept that reality instead of continuing with pointless illogcal off topic rebuttals?

j.r.
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Since you've now gone off topic with your music culture reference, you should be able to answer these questions:

Is reiki a pseudoscience?
Is homeopathy a pseudoscience?
Is astrology a pseudoscience?

You wouldn't want to be seen as a hypocrite by discussing music culture which is off topic but not discussing other purported pseudosciences, would you?
 
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