Many of my thoughts and hypotheses keep getting hammered for being unscientific, including my poetics (which I consider definitely scientific, which is why so many poets hate it). So, here once again, although newly formed, is my definition of what a scientific account of some aspect of reality is:
An account of some aspect of reality is scientific if it satisfies the following four criteria:
1. It contradicts no law of nature held by the consensus of intelligent, informed observers.
2. Data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to support it.
3. No data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to refute it.
4. It is falsifiable.
Note: satisfying the four criteria only makes an account scientific; it doesn’t necessarily make it valid or of any importance. Moreover, it will always be temporary since new data can always show up.
Because many highly regarded accounts of aspects of nature do not satisfy my four criteria but are accepted by a great deal of experts in the fields they are concerned with, such as physics’s big bang theory, which some facts contradict (the ones requiring the further hypothesis of the existence of unobserved “dark matter”) and which breaks certain laws of nature (the ones requiring such certain laws of nature to be different when the big bang occurred), I also have a definition of what I call “Near-Scientific Accounts.”
An account of some aspect of reality is near-scientific if it satisfies the following four criteria:
1. If it contradicts a law of nature held by the consensus of intelligent, informed observers, the same consensus agrees that some end-around (like dark matter) is plausible.
2. Data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to support it.
3. If some data accepted as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to refute it, experts agree that some end-around is plausible.
4. It is falsifiable.
An account of some aspect of reality that is neither scientific nor near-scientific is unscientific.
Okay, in a few hours I should be an a Greyhound bus on my way to South Carolina. I hope to post at least once from there. If not, expect a new entry around April Fools’ Day.
