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Merged Is ufology a pseudoscience?

kblood said:
I guess this is the thread to ask if there ever came any trustworthy explanation of the spiral in the sky in Norway a few years ago? The official story was a Russian missile test was it not?
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Actually, UFOs: The Research, the Evidence would be a better place to ask.

When you get there, you might want to offer any reasons you have for thinking it was anything other than a Russian missile.
 
Pacal said:
The thing is the study of UFO's could actually be a real serious field.
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Actually, I'm not so sure it can. The big problem with the UFO phenomenon is that there is actually no such phenomenon. There are a huge number of completely different phenomena that can all potentially lead to the conclusion "I saw a UFO". It therefore simply doesn't make sense to look at it as a single coherent field. For example, here are some things that are known to have resulted in UFO sightings along with (some of) the relevant fields:

The Moon - astronomy
Hallucinations - neurology
Hoaxes - psychology plus various other fields depending on the form
Aeroplanes - aeronautics
Satellites - astronomy again
Optical illusions - neurology, psychology, physiology
Blimps - blimpology
Marsh gas refracting the light from Venus - conspiriology
Car headlights
Insects
Mass hysteria
Oil rigs
Boats
Meteors
Missiles
Chinese lanterns
Frisbees

There just isn't a field there to study, there are lots of separate phenomena each with their own separate field that, and this part is important, already studies them. Ufology is just a sad attempt by people generally unqualified in any relevant field to try to pretend it's all the same thing.
 
And of course UFOlogy also covers Moviewatchyology as we learned recently. :)
 
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I took a look over at the ufology international website and there is no mention of the recently-aborted "bridge building" exercise vis a vis skeptics.

It's a sad commentary on ufology that the "most recent" entry on that site is a technical write-up on a Korean War-era jet that was involved in a sighting 60 years ago. At some point, they could just call the entire field "mid 20th century mythology" and be done with it.
 
So it would seem that UFOlogy is definitely a pseudoscience. None of the pseudoscientists could mount any kind of effective argument or reasoning for their belief that it isn't. By every definition and by its own actions, UFOlogy keeps itself solidly labeled as pseudoscience.

Until it abandons its pseudoscientific unfalsifiable null hypothesis of "Some UFOs are alien in origin" and adopts an actual falsifiable null hypothesis which is:

"All UFOs are mundane in origin"​
it has no possibility of leaving the ranks or other pseudosciences.
 
Maurice Ledifficile said:
A PHD is not a doctorate in philosophy. That's what the words mean, but that's not what it is. You get a PHD in cellular biology too...
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Interesting ... PHD doesn't mean "Doctorate in Philosophy" eh? Are you suggesting that perhaps it's not just as simple as the literal interpretation of the words that make up the abbreviation? That reminds me of another word ... "UFO" ... which denotes something mysterious and out of this world, not merely an unidentified object in the sky.
 
Maurice Ledifficile says: A PhD is not a doctorate in philosophy, that's what the words mean.

Ufology says: Are you saying a PhD doesn't mean "Doctorate in Philosophy"?

Is it only me that can see that Ufology entirely changed the meaning of Maurice Ledifficile's statement in order to bump this very long dead thread and to try to shoehorn his own pet definition of the acronym (not word) UFO into the thread?

Not just me? Thought not.
 
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Agatha said:
Is it only me that can see that Ufology entirely changed the meaning of Maurice Ledifficile's statement in order to bump this very long dead thread and to try to shoehorn his own pet definition of the acronym (not word) UFO into the thread?
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Acronyms are words:

ac·ro·nym [ákr?nim] (plural ac·ro·nyms) noun

word formed from initials: a word formed from the initials or other parts of several words, for example, “NATO,” from the initial letters of “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”

( Encarta ).

Because acronyms = words what is your point in differentiating between the two?


BTW: No "shoehorning" here. I ran across this completely by accident while doing an unrelated search and found it interesting because of all the insistence by skeptics that we must interpret the word UFO to mean exactly what the literal translation of its constituent words suggest. Here we find evidence that some people recognize that enforcing such a rule as policy isn't always correct and that context is very important.
 
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Agatha said:
Maurice Ledifficile says: A PhD is not a doctorate in philosophy, that's what the words mean.

Ufology says: Are you saying a PhD doesn't mean "Doctorate in Philosophy"?

Is it only me that can see that Ufology entirely changed the meaning of Maurice Ledifficile's statement in order to bump this very long dead thread and to try to shoehorn his own pet definition of the acronym (not word) UFO into the thread?
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Well, technically, isn't an acronym a word, by definition? [/nitpick] Whether UFO is an acronym is another matter; it probably depends whether you spell the letters out (as I do) or say "yoofo".
Not just me? Thought not.
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Nope, not just you. :)
 
I sit corrected on my use of the word acronym; what I should have said is that UFO is not a word in itself, just the abbreviation of Unidentified Flying Object in the same way as PhD remains the abbreviation of Doctor of Philosophy.

I don't think of UFO as a word in the way NATO or RADAR are words, but that may well be because I don't say it as yoo-fo, but as yoo-eff-o. Indeed, I don't know anyone who treats it as a word or pronounces it yoo-fo.
 
Of course, one can get a PhD in philosophy, just as sometimes there is an unidentified object flying in the sky.

Ward
 
ufology said:
Here we find evidence that some people recognize that enforcing such a rule as policy isn't always correct and that context is very important.
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And once again you appear to not understand people's objections to you claiming that something UNIDENTIFIED is any particular thing.

The title PhD is never used to portray someone who has no education.
 
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