Came across a list of pseudosciences and was fun seeing where im woo woo.
Lunar effect – the belief that the full Moon influences human and animal behavior.
Ley Lines
Accupressure/puncture
Ayurveda
Body Memory
Faith healing
Anyway, list too long to read. I guess Im quite the nonscientific woowoomancer. How about you? What pseudoscience do you believe? Also I believe nearly every stone i find was an ancient indian stone. Also manifesting and or prayer to manipulate via subconscious aligning the future. oh and the ability to subconsciously deeply understand animals, know the future, etc
I dunno, man, that doesn’t sound too crazy. I’m in a really bad condition for learning new things right now, and I can’t even figure out what claims this idea would be making. It sounds like it’s just describing a process of advancement and the types of conflicts that arise?
I’m finding this especially hard to grasp because my brain’s on a tangent about how you’d really go about falsifying most stuff in history or sociology. You gonna put a bunch of people in a series of jars with carefully controlled conditions for hundreds of years and observe the results? Like we have this piece of paper from 1700 that says Jimothy won the big game, but our understanding of this guy and his alleged win of this supposed game are totally vibes-based because we don’t have a time machine. I think like the best you can do is try to base your beliefs and claims off things that have been observed repeatedly, but does that make these kinds of topics unscientific? We test what we can and go with our best guess for what we can’t, right? This is going to bother me.
I’m too lazy and tired to go into it at the moment, so I’m just going to paste this infographic explaining the relationship between the material base and ideological superstructure.
To the falsifiability point, while I can’t say a lot without knowing the specifics that Popper argued, historical materialism (and dialectical materialism, the way of understanding the world historical materialism comes from) don’t on the surface make much sense trying to attack from a falsifiability angle. While one could attempt to disprove, say, the extraction of surplus value through profit or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall being properties of capitalism (these are claims about the world that can conceivably be true or false), dialectical/historical materialism is the tool used to analyze the world, attempt to change the world based on the understanding from that analysis, incorporate the lessons learned from those attempts (be they failed or successful) into one’s understanding of the world, and repeat. It’s basically a way of gaining knowledge about the world, as well as an explanation of how people get knowledge.
Again, I’d have to check out Popper’s full argument for the specifics, but I don’t know how one can make assertions about the falsifiability of what is basically an epistemology without committing some kind of category error.