Quote Originally Posted by holli4pirating View Post
I'm most interested in the last bit you wrote, because it deals with a few different things.

How much is enough? What is the right kind of evidence?

I guess that is decided on a case by case basis, I think many things get accepted as science once that community decides there is enough supporting evidence of a high enough standard. As mentioned, that is quite a formal process so I imagine there is data out there some where RE what is required.

Going with the useful thing, who decides what is useful? If the number of times I blink per day (or something else, if you prefer) is not useful, does that mean it is impossible to form a scientific theory about it?

I think a relationship between the colour of your carpet and the number of times you blink would count as a pseudoscience, for me anyway.

I do like the idea that some sort of cause and effect is necessary - that seems to me to fit with the predictive power requirement we discussed earlier. The real trick is in determining what is the cause and what is the effect - this is what many theories try to do (such as the stars being the cause for our personalities and actions or bodies of mass attracting each other). Each has a cause and effect, yet one is deemed pseudoscience and the other science. How do you know individual stars don't have any effect on you, other than that it seems improbable because you see no causal relation? How do you know there is no causal relation?

Because one has never been established. Until it has, and there is a substantial amount of evidence to prove it, it's a pseudoscience, because there is no evidence.

I don't want to let the psychology part go, though. What if we had machines that could tell us every factor about a human before we collected data from that human. What if we new every factor about every human and took data from every human. With enough data and data analysis, could we ever create a science?

No, I don't think so. The trouble is, as soon as you do an experiment or some kind of test on a human, the results are flawed, if you control the environment, the results are flawed. If you don't control the environment, you can't establish a cause and effect relationship and the results are flawed. Psychoogy is sort of the ultimate pseudoscience.

Psychology basically holds it's hands up and says 'there are flaws, but it's the best we can do' and then a load of people repeat the experiement and get similar results and it's 'good enough'. The unfortunate thing is, that psychology was born out of philosophy, and no one teaches that side of it any more.
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