Again ... another misrepresentation. The post where I showed my references came from 4 ( four ) independent sources and they all include the same overriding condition.
As we've repeatedly pointed out, you insist on interpreting that one condition in the strictest possible terms, so as to disallow the definition from identifying pretty much anything outside of explicit academic fraud.
At the same time, you've also redefined the word "ufology" (using a
No True Scotsman argument) to refer to anything and everything about the topic of UFOs that
doesn't explicitly purport to be a scientific treatise, including leisure activities that have nothing at all to do with actual study. Whereas the reality of the situation is that
nearly all self-described UFOlogists (even yourself) openly profess and even strive to appear legitimately scientific while promoting ideas than run contrary to accepted science. We've presented numerous examples of that, as well.
As for the "nonscientific" UFOlogy books you refer to, most other pseudosciences publish and market
the exact same kinds of books toward the general public. The quality that makes all such books pseudoscientific is not a profusion of charts, graphs, and figures, but the allegation that the pseudoknowledge contained within their pages is just as real as anything known to science, and the allegation of mysterious physical mechanisms that
defy the actual definition of science.
That is what makes a pseudoscience.
On the other hand you cherry picked alledged examples out of the WIkipedia article after the definition and tried to justify them as part of the definition.
Merely citing an article is
not "cherry picking."
"Cherry-picking" means selecting a small part of a body of information, discarding everything else you don't like, and then misrepresenting the selected part out of context as exemplary of the entire whole. That's precisely what you did to obtain your crippled definition of "pseudoscience."
UFOlogy is plainly listed in that related article, not only as an example, but as an entire heading with other significant examples as subsets within it. The
Wikipedia article on UFOlogy even contains a section devoted to its characterization as a pseudoscience.
I've also shown how the characterization of ufology as a pseudoscience by the people referred to in the Wikipedia article makes no sense, and included a link to the actual writer ( Feist ) who is a psychologist with a completely skewed view of a definition of science in the first place.
In general terms, what aspects of the viewpoint of Feist regarding science (besides the part about UFOlogy being pseudoscientific) do you consider as being "skewed"?
Do you intend to imply by this statement that psychology itself is a pseudoscience, and therefore no psychologist is qualified to speak on any matter pertaining to science or the lack thereof?
Ufology on the whole is simply too wide a field to all fit under the definition of pseudoscience, therefore it can't all be labeled as a pseudoscience
Wollery has already thoroughly addressed the inadequacies of this argument, and you've failed to even take a swing at that particular serve.
consequently saying "ufology is a pseudoscience" is incorrect.
You've reached this conclusion wholly independently of logic, convention, and all expert opinions on the matter. I would be remiss to not point out that your methodology regarding this matter is itself quite pseudoscientific.
This conversation will remain at an impasse until you at least attempt to prove that your highly contested definition of "pseudoscience" is actually valid for defining any field of study or general practice at all.
