Talk:Astrology

Astrology and pseudoscience

Since this conversation has come up again, specifically with edits reverted by User:Cpotisch, I would like to point out that the paragraphs under contention are well-sourced:

• Ruggles, Clive L. N.; Saunders, Nicholas J. (1993), "The Study of Cultural Astronomy", in Ruggles, Clive L. N.; Saunders, Nicholas J. (eds.), Astronomies and Cultures, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, pp. 1–31, ISBN 0-87081-319-6

• Beck, Roger (2006). Beck, Roger (ed.). A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470773772. ISBN 978-1405110747.

• Ruggles, Clive L.N. (16 Aug 2014). Ruggles, Clive L.N (ed.). Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. New York: Springer. pp. 103–117. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8. ISBN 978-1-4614-6140-1.

• Barton, Tamsyn (1994). Ancient Astrology. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-11029-7.

• Barton, Tamsyn (2002). Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine Under the Roman Empire. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08852-1.

• Kidd, Ian James. "Why did Feyerabend defend astrology? Integrity, virtue, and the authority of science." Social Epistemology 30.4 (2016): 464-482.

These sources, save the first Barton reference, were all removed. There were no weasel words (as has been claimed) as specific scholars, in particular Frances Yates, Clive Ruggles, Paul Feyerabend, and Nicholas J. Saunders were mentioned in the article (outside the sources). Similarly, no "false credibility" was lent to astrology, only particular models of astrology as a form of cultural astronomy were described. The "reliable source" which contradicts the page (as it currently is written) is a single paper proposing a new criterion to demarcate science and pseudoscience (see: the demarcation problem). This is a reliable source, but not for defining astrology as a pseudoscience in the lede paragraph.

If anyone has any further gripes, please, let's not start an edit war and discuss them here.

--MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:26, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

The ArbCom case about pseudoscience allows us to call a spade a spade (and astrology is rather clearly pseudoscience, since it claims to make predictions while it in fact does not predict anything). One can trivially find better sources if that's really an issue (from a rapid google search: [1] [2] [3]). In fact, AFAIK, there isn't much of any controversy (except amongst the usual quacks) that astrology is a pseudoscience; and as an encyclopedia we ought to be highlighting what something is now (since that is what is most relevant to modern readers) than what it was centuries ago. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:33, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Also, adding the same stuff back in despite it having been rejected a few months ago does not help anything. Stuff like Historians such as Frances Yates and Tamsyn Barton are similarly critical for what they view as the application of anarchronistic categories to ancient practices. Philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend famously defended astrology as part of his program of epistemological anarchism is also entirely inappropriate for the lead of the article; as the lead of the article is supposed to be a summary of its contents, and yet there is no mention of this anywhere within the article. What you have might be enough for a few sentences somewhere in the article, but not for an obviously UNDUE paragraph in the lead. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:38, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

It is not rather clear that astrology is a pseudoscience, and this idea is not common in anthropology, archaeology, or history. Indeed, The sources listed here give the model of astrology as cultural astronomy, which is the consensus view among cultural anthropologists and archaeologists. This view is discussed in these sources.

I don't really have anything to say as per your second point. I will concede some parts belong farther down in the article. However no edits were outright rejected, as you noted, there was no consensus. I reaffirm that the wholesale reversion of these edits was inappropriate. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:42, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

No, you didn't get consensus for those edits, and yet you still reinstated them, knowing full well they did not have consensus? 'nuff said on that point.

It is not rather clear that astrology is a pseudoscience, and this idea is not common in anthropology, archaeology, or history. Wrong? How to say, Following the end of the 19th century and the wide-scale adoption of the scientific method, researchers have successfully challenged astrology on both theoretical and experimental grounds, and have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power. is indeed "rather clear" that astrology is a pseudoscience. Scientists (astronomers; physicists), i.e., the people actually qualified to deem whether something is a pseudoscience or not; have deemed it a pseudoscience. That people study it for other historical and cultural aspects which are independent of its status as a pseudoscience (and thus that their studies might not mention this aspect, which is not relevant to their studies) does not make it not be a pseudoscience. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:49, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Scientists are not the people who are qualified to deem whether something is a pseudoscience or not. That would be philosophers of science. I would also like to point out that anthropologists and archaeologists are scientists -- not sure why you would imply that astronomers and physicists are scientists but anthropologists and archaeologists are not. Did you read the sources referenced? They don't simply "fail to mention" that astrology is a pseudoscience, they actively argue against it as either an anachronism or as a mischaracterization. In particular, the Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy is particularly clear on this issue. Yes, your position is "obvious" when you go to great lengths to ignore arguments to the contrary. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:55, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I think that User:Mychemicalromanceisrealemo's revision is more neutral. Lord ding dong (talk) 02:59, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

"Neutrality", in the way you're using the word, is actually a false balance, and is something that we do not allow on Wikipedia. WP:UNDUE requires that we not give undue weight to fringe viewpoints, and it has been established over and over again that the claim that astrology is not pseudoscience is indeed fringe. So no, your claim that their revision is "more neutral" has no weight under our policies. Cpotisch (talk) 03:07, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

There was no explicit or authoritative statement that astrology is not a pseudoscience. It contextualized the notion that astrology is a pseudoscience and provided the viewpoint most common in cultural anthropology, especially ethnoastronomy and archaeoastronomy. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 03:12, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

No, it obfuscated everything by, first, missing the point by moving the focus to something else; and two, quite obviously if adroitely removing any mention of the fact it is a pseudoscience from the first paragraph of the lead (the one place where such mention most definitively should be, and prominently). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:25, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Astronomers and (astro-)physicists are the scientists qualified to talk about stuff concerning stars and celestial objects. As to your obvious strawman, no, an archeologist is not qualified to talk about astronomy; in the same way an astronomer is not qualified to talk about archeology. I prefer the word of actual scientists to that of random Wikipedians, and I have no clue whether your selection of sources is accurate. Stuff like this (which was subsequently published in a reputable journal) is rather clear that But most scientists as well as researchers in humanities (sociologists) are strongly opposed to all forms of astrology. In fact, from my own experiences reading music theory in the early modern period at university, there was no hiding that astrology lacks any scientific validity, whatever its cultural significance is. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:32, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Anthropologists are qualified to talk about the cultural strata surrounding astronomy, and anthropologists (along with historians) are most qualified to talk about astrology (as a religious, ritual, divinatory practice). The sources I provided are easily found, doubly so if you have access to JSTOR or other repositories. I do not believe "refusing to read sources" is a proper argument. Also, I recommend reading the source you just listed instead of quote mining it. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 03:48, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

(as a religious, ritual, divinatory practice) Yes. "Making an assessment as to its scientific validity" - no. The same way, an historian might be able to tell you about what historical sources say about, I don't know, SN 1006; but they are obviously not qualified (as reliable sources for Wikipedia) to talk about what a supernova is, or what might have caused that supernova. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:56, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm now discovering the full of extent of @Mychemicalromanceisrealemo's many edits, and it's clear that they were consistently made without consensus and contradicted what ArbCom established. Frankly, if they continue to bludgeon their way through this, I'm going to ask for administrator intervention. Cpotisch (talk) 03:02, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

For other users to reference, here is what I told Mychemical after they posted on my talk page objecting to my reversion of their edits:

Greetings. It is not my opinion that astrology is a pseudoscience, it is the long-standing consensus of Wikipedia. This was established unanimously 16 years ago: astrology is "generally considered pseudoscience" on Wikipedia, and, crucially, that it "may be categorized as pseudoscience". If you would like to change that consensus, I recommend taking your objections there.

I reverted all those edits in part because most (all?) of the reliable sources referenced were inaccessible and thus unverifiable, but also, more importantly, because a large quantity of well-sourced information was inexplicably removed or watered down. For example, the lede sentence, "researchers [...] have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power" was inexplicably removed. Furthermore, it is pure original research to use your profession as an anthropologist as justification for your claim that people in the social sciences "take a much more value-neutral position". Finally, I will note that your most recent edit to Astrology was reverted by another user because you used an incomplete talk page discussion as justification when no consensus was reached. You've asked me to "discuss this further" before making any more "large edits", but the burden is actually on you to ensure that information is easily verifiable. If it's not easily verifiable, or it inexplicably replaces well-established content, then it will be reverted, as I and a number of other editors have done. All the best, Cpotisch (talk) 02:53, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Cpotisch (talk) 03:57, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

• For reference this has been raised at WP:AN. - LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 10:59, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Inasmuch as anything can be labeled a pseudoscience, astrology is well-sourced as one of the leading contenders. Ours is not the place to hash out whether the label is problematic or contextual, etc. We are tasked only to report how the subject is treated in various venues. It is absolutely true that anthropologists and social scientists who study belief have no particular need to classify the predilections of believers into empirical categories, but science educators do. To that extent, astrology and other classic pseudosciences are so classified and that is the epistemic community of merit for deciding matters of WP:ASSERTion in Wikipedia's voice. By saying that "astrology is a pseudoscience" we are not making any declarations as to the correctness or incorrectness of particular claims or historical import. Instead, we are merely reporting how the belief is manifested as a positivistic argument that, for example, there are measurable outcomes that show certain astrological claims to be true and that these outcomes are caused by mechanisms that are either ignored or yet-to-be-described by the WP:MAINSTREAM scientific community. To that end, the claims by those who wish to whitewash the "astrology is pseudoscience" wording in this article are not properly formulated and, thus, are properly rejected. jps (talk) 13:15, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

As discussed elsewhere here, anthropologists and social scientists do have a need to contend with notions of pseudoscience. I agree with the fact that we are tasked with reporting how the subject is treated in various venues: my point is that "Astrology is a pseudoscience" is not a universally accepted notion among scholars, as I have outlined above and below here (I could make a Hermeticism pun here, but I think I shall not.) It is a mischaracterization of astrology to reduce it simply to the positivistic argument that is mentioned: that is not how astrology functions in many, if not most, contexts; especially historical ones (where astrology, arguably, is most relevant.) If we are tasked with reporting how the subject is treated, then it should be fairly contextualized. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:10, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

We are well aware by now that you disagree with the notion that astrology is a pseudoscience and believe that your opinion is shared with social scientists. However, your suggestions do not appear to be gaining traction with any other editor, so there is no consensus to overrule the existing consensus (which, again, was unanimously decided by ArbCom) that it is a pseudoscience. So you have no basis to make sweeping changes on this matter. Cpotisch (talk) 04:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Has there ever been a 'universally accepted notion among scholars'? I've certainly never come across one. Not that it matters here, since we base content on actual verifiable sources, rather than mere assertions of universal alignment or misalignment... AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:17, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

And about the actual, verifiable sources in which the notion of astrology-as-pseudoscience is critiqued or rejected? MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 04:39, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Of the list of sources you gave, I couldn’t find any secondary source questioning astrology’s status as a pseudoscience. Cpotisch (talk) 05:44, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

• About the only improvement in MCRIRE's proposed revision is that it takes the term "pseudoscience" out of the short description and lead sentence, both places where it only functions as a scare-word, and that it assigns the term a much more encyclopedic place, namely at the point where it is contextualized as the common modern view on the subject [I don't understand the insistence on this talk page that "astrology" is nearly always being used to refer to the modern practice of it and that as an encyclopedia we ought to be highlighting what something is now (since that is what is most relevant to modern readers), all while our lead is thoroughly –and rightfully– framing it as mainly a historical phenomenon, just like the great majority of scholarly sources on it are historiographical in nature [4]]. All the other changes seem WP:UNDUE additions at best, and pro-fringe removals at worst (referring to the removal of "and have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power").

As to Doug Weller's suggestion below, yes, anthropological views on astrology deserve to be covered in the article, but this is a GA: someone (not necessarily MCRIRE) should first create a substantial section on it the article body, and then (if there is consensus for the new section) discuss how to include it in the lead. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Part of the problem with writing an encyclopedia without an editorial philosophy is that it is very difficult to decide what the proper framing of an idea should be. I have no doubt that the vast majority of readers who are stumbling upon this article are familiar with astrology in its modern form. Arguably, some of those forms aren't pseudoscience per se as much as they used to be when the practice was less popular as the more sophisticated influencers slyly avoid a lot of the more dramatic mechanistic claims that astrologers 30, 40, or 50 years ago used to make (and the Indian astrologers still argue), namely, that there is some actual measurable influence that astrological orientations have on human personalities, events, and circumstances. Today, the game is much more of vague storytelling and self-help with a lot of hiding behind "it's just for fun!" I got into an argument with Kara Swisher about this over Twitter and was accused of being an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud. So it goes. jps (talk) 20:31, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear about the Twitter argument. I think that in its contemporary form, astrology is still often enough making pseudo-scientific claims to be characterized as such. Given its near-4000-year history as a science (and MCRIRE is very wrong in stating that the Hermetica did not conceive of astrology as science; rather they regarded astrology as the science par excellence, a fact which is also borne out by the earliest Hermetic writings all being astrological in nature), astrology can simply not escape making certain cosmological (and thus scientific) claims without losing its very identity. The very recent, storytelling, just-for-fun form seems to be rather tangential to the topic, and only barely notable from an encyclopedic perspective (though probably deserving of a small place in the article).

To see why, one only has to ask the question: how many of our reliable sources deal with the just-for-fun form? In my estimation, about 60 to 70% of our sources talking about astrology are dealing with the historical phenomenon (in which context it is almost never characterized as a pseudoscience, because to do so would make it impossible to properly understand the way of thinking of most astrologers up until the days of Kepler and Brahe), and the other 30 to 40% are precisely invoking it as the paradigmatic pseudoscience, in the modern context of the demarcation problem, the New Age movement and its propagation of 'occult science', etc. In my view, both the article and the lead should cover both aspects, in that proportion, and in that order. Conveniently, this also aligns with the chronological order. Starting with Astrology is a pseudoscience that... just messes that up entirely, and needlessly prioritizes denunciation over proper encyclopedic treatment. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:09, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, Apaugasma, for a reasoned and nuanced response here. On a minor note, I would like to defend my revision of explanatory power to predicitive capability though: explanatory power is independent of predicitive capability, one does not necessarily entail the other: as per religious studies scholar and historian Naomi Janowitz, cause-and-effect is culturally contingent. Thus astrology retains a certain level of explanatory power, especially when viewed from an anthropological or similar lens. I will concede a substantial section on this particular subject is needed in the article body before it is included in the lede. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:44, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

You may not realize this, but "cause-and-effect is culturally contingent" is what WP:EXCEPTIONAL calls a surprising or apparently important claim that may well be contradicted by the prevailing view within the relevant community and that would for sure significantly alter mainstream assumptions. We cannot just write our articles as per Naomi Janowitz and other scholars arguing for the same view: only if it can be shown that hardly any scholar would contradict that view, would we take it as a legitimate assumption to start from. But I fear it's the other way around: it seems to me that "cause-and-effect is culturally contingent" is very much a minority view among scholars taken as a whole. It may pass some more muster among anthropologists than elsewhere (I'm not familiar enough with anthropological literature to say), but with regard to WP:DUE it's not up for more than a "some scholars have argued that" in the article body. I think you would do well to keep in mind that if it indeed is a minority view, trying to convince the many editors who are watching this article that it is not would be futile and a sorry waste of time. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:09, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

As someone with a little familiarity with anthropological literature, I think I can safely say that anthropologists (or cultural/social anthropologists anyway - biological anthropology doesn't generally concern itself with such questions) are indeed more likely to suggest that at least to some extent "cause-and-effect" may be "culturally contingent" than scholars in general. I would add however that they might in turn be inclined to suggest that taking a single scholar (anthropologist or otherwise) as an authority on the matter would be unwise. Or, as we say around here, 'citation needed': for claims as to what anthropologists as a group have to say, and for that matter for claims as to any authority to speak on their behalf. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:27, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been clearer as to what Naomi Janowitz is actually saying -- she's not arguing that cause-in-effect is culturally contingent as a new development, but as a secondary source referencing the development in anthropology and applying it to her study of magic in the Roman world, as I cited earlier in the conversation. In particular, Janowitz points to the collection of essays Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. by Michael Krausz (1989). The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft by Rebecca and Philip Stein (2005) has a more general, less-technical introduction to models of cause-and-effect in culture. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:04, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Okay, that sounds interesting. If any scholar has applied that approach to astrology it would be nice to write about that in the article body. Just be wary of overestimating it as as universal approach which can be taken as an uncontroversial assumption in WP:WIKIVOICE. It simply is not.

I'd also like to point out that at least in Islamicate and European astrology, there was a conscious effort to apply Aristotelian etiology. This has been explicitly argued with regard to Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (a student of the Aristotelian philosopher al-Kindi, also a strong proponent of astrology) and others by Saif, Liana (2015). The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137399472. ISBN 978-1-137-39947-2. For the other way around (astrological approaches to Aristotle), see also Freudenthal, Gad (2006). "The Medieval Astrologization of the Aristotelian Cosmos: From Alexander of Aphrodisias to Averroes". Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph. 59: 29–68. and Freudenthal, Gad (2009). "The Astrologization of the Aristotelian Cosmos: Celestial Influences on the Sublunar World in Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Averroes". In Bowen, Alan; Wildberg, Christian (eds.). New Perspectives on Aristotle’s De caelo. Leiden: Brill. pp. 239–281. ISBN 978-90-04-17376-7. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 10:30, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I think one of the confusing things here is that causality as applied to astrological claims is very much not the same thing as "cause and effect" when discussed in context of relativistic approaches to anthropology. At least, the vast majority of anthropologists are not trying to say that physicists, for example, are wrong about their approach to the subject. On the other hand, there are explicit claims by astrology enthusiasts that are facilely contradicted by the physics of the claim and, in some cases, causality is the thing that ends up being contradicted. So, I guess, get the epistemic houses in order. jps (talk) 11:31, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Cultural astronomy

Clive Ruggles writes: "To a modern astronomer, astrology is anathema...From the perspective of the archaeologist or anthropologist, whose ultimate interest is in human behavior rather than the laws of the universe, whether such an argument is scientifically verifiable or not is not the point. What interests these scientists is the fact that people throughout the ages have drawn direct connections between the appearance of the sky and events on earth, and that this forms an integral part of their understanding of how the world works."[5]

Does anyone have a problem with the above? Note that we have the articles Cultural astronomy and Astrology and astronomy (not a good article given the fact that there are a number of academic sources not used in it).

This article has nothing I can see from the perspective of either archaeologists or anthropologists. Should it? Doug Weller talk 11:55, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

No problem with the statement above. Archaeologists and anthropologists are discussing human behaviour, astronomers are discussing the stars. When it comes to the intersection of the two, Wikipedia has however, in the case of astrology (or rather 'astrologies' since as any half-competent historian, archaeologist, or anthropologist will know, this covers a very diverse topic), to make it clear that assertions that such belief systems somehow invalidate scientific knowledge are just that: assertions, clearly incapable of being verified through evidence, even in principle. Which is probably why archaeologists, anthropologists etc generally avoid making such assertions, instead doing as Ruggles does and making it clear that they are discussing what people think and do on Earth, not what 'astrological' effects the stars have on them. They certainly don't generally go around saying that because people believe in astrology, the astronomers are wrong to say that astrology doesn't work.

Wikipedia perhaps has a tendency to overuse the word 'pseudoscience', where a more subtle distinction between what people think and the 'objective reality' that science is attempting to discern may need to be explained, but if the alternative is to adopt a Feyerabendism-for-beginners 'anything goes' approach, where the mere fact that people believe stuff is sufficient to make it as valid as anything else, we might as well close Wikipedia down. And then close down university departments of astronomy, anthropology and the rest, since actual knowledge is clearly unobtainable... AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:36, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

At no point did the edits I made (or anyone else made, for that matter) claim that astrology was valid, as keeps being brought up in this discussion. I did (and maintain) that astrology is not considered to be a pseudoscience universally. Pseudoscience is a very particular claim, and it is not synonymous with untruth or falsity or invalidity. As you hopefully understand, astrology is incredibly broad and only a very small fraction of it claims to be scientific, even in a general sense. Indeed the vast majority of astrology, both in the ancient world and now, is tied closely to religion and culture, as can be seen in Late Platonism and Hermeticism, or in Mesoamerica, as with the Nahua Tōnalpōhualli and Xiuhpōhualli, or the Maya Tzolkʼin (See Maya astronomy.) Not to mention the incredibly complex astrologies of India and China. I affirm that describing astrology as "any of various ceremonial, religious, and divinatory practices" is more accurate than describing it as simply "a pseudoscience" since this is not only inaccurate for the vast majority of its history (when it was largely inseparable from astronomy) but inaccurate in many, if not most, contexts today (in which case it does not claim to be a science -- as with religious, ceremonial, and cultural uses of astrology -- by far the most common.) MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:39, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

The problem is when such an argument is used as a reason to nonsensically obfuscate the lead (as done by MCRIRE). To be clear, I have no objection to including a section about this somewhere in the article, so long it doesn't lead to a repeat of the recent shenanigans. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 12:40, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Using Ruggles to say what Ruggles says is fine: anthropologists are not interested in whether astrology is pseudoscience. Only that editor's conclusion that therefore astrology is not a pseudoscience was a problem. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:00, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Whether or not astrology is pseudoscience is pretty much irrelevant to its study by anthropologists, isn’t it? Brunton (talk) 15:01, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Up to a point, though the occasional anthropologist has been known (alongside psychologists etc) to enquire why the people they study can sometimes be so keen to persist in holding on to beliefs in things that empirical evidence freely available to them demonstrates not to be true. Answers to such questions can be illuminating, and reveal things about the human mind that you wouldn't figure out either by dismissing their relationship to available evidence as irrelevant, or by adapting a theoretical approach that apparently denies the existence of a shared reality at all. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:23, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

If well-sourced specifically in the context of astrology, that sounds like a topic that should also be added somewhere in the article. JoelleJay (talk) 16:27, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

This is a mischaracterization of the work anthropologists do, at least, anthropologists of the 21st century. Anthropologists today take a position of complete cultural neutrality in regards to the truth of beliefs -- ala Foucault and Haraway knowledge is considered to be socially and politically situated and culturally-specific. To quote the Indian mythologist and folklorist Devdutt Pattanaik: "Facts are everybody’s truth. Fiction is nobody’s truth. Myths are somebody’s truth." At no point would an anthropologist be interested in "holding on to beliefs in things that empirical evidence freely available to them demonstrates not to be true" -- doing so would take an unacceptable stance which introduces an element of modern Western cultural chauvinism where it frankly doesn't belong. UC Davis religious studies professor Naomi Janowitz writes:

First, in order to begin thinking about why people might believe in notions of cause and effect different from ours we must start with a careful examination of the specific historical context. It is the premise of this study, learned from recent anthropological theories, that notions of cause and effect are culturally based. This is not a claim of radical relativism; some of the basic principals of logic may turn out to be cross-culturally true. Most of the time, however, people are not using strictly logical modes of thought. This leaves us plenty of room for cultural and historical variation in modes of thought about cause and effect.

— Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews, and Christians

In other words, anthropologists are not only interested in pseudoscience, but suspending our own ideas on what is true, false, and causally related is sometimes essential to the anthropological method. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:24, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Facts are everybody’s truth. Fiction is nobody’s truth. Myths are somebody’s truth. It is a fact that astrology is a pseudoscience and holds no scientific validity. That, despite this, people still hold on to it, has nothing to do with "Western cultural chauvinism", in the same way that people holding on to other evidence-less beliefs such as conspiracy theories has nothing to do with "Western cultural chauvinism". RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:44, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Reiterating your point with no substance, here. Yes. I am aware you believe that astrology is a pseudoscience and holds no scientific validity. I do not hold the same stance because I do not believe the vast majority of astrology claims to be a science or scientific, indeed, most ancient astrologers of the Late Platonic and Hermetic schools would be explicitly opposed to this notion (not because they are opposed to astrology, but because they are opposed to the notion that nature is anything but a pale reflection of the Absolute.) Philosopher of science Larry Laudan writes: "If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science' and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us." This is not the sort of objective, right-or-wrong discussion you are proposing it is. And as such, it should not be presented as a right-or-wrong discussion on the page. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:03, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

1. Does astrology claim to be able to make predictions? Yes
2. Have such claims been refuted by modern scientists? Yes

Ergo, astrology does not have any scientific validity. Whether you personally believe this or something else is irrelevant, Wikipedia is not written based on what its editors believe, but from a mainstream, contemporary viewpoint as evidenced in high-quality sources. And the mainstream contemporary viewpoint is that astrology indeed is a pseudoscience. Whether it was not at some point in the fact, or whether we can apply contemporary terms to objects of study in the past, is another question, and not one that warrants misleading contemporary readers who will most likely be searching about the contemporary practice. A "history of astrology" or "cultural astrology" section would be the appropriate section to showcase this additional material. Obfuscating the lead with it, is not. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:10, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Your first point is, once again, a mischaracterization: it reduces astrology to contemporary Western horoscopic astrology, that is, a very particular discursive formation. Further, as per WP:MAINSTREAM: "This means that writers and editors on Wikipedia should strive for articles that would be appreciated as being of the highest quality by a consensus of experts in any field of science or scholarship...Crucially, this means that Wikipedia content is not based on a popularity contest. In many debates, the most popular view is different from the scholarly or scientific view." There is no reason, therefore, to discount the arguments of anthropologists and historians (who are, arguably, more qualified to talk about astrology than other scholars -- since they are most familiar with it) who are indeed experts in this field. Lastly, the vast majority of astrology practiced even today is religious, ceremonial, and ritual in context, not horoscopic or judicial astrology. You are confusing, once again, contemporary Western horoscopic astrology for a vast and varied discipline. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:33, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

This is not true, Tamsyn Barton for example has went to great lengths to problematize the notion of pseudoscience within the study of astrology and physiognomy more broadly. Anthropologists absolutely are interested in pseudoscience, in particular, the way pseudoscience is deployed as a rhetorical strategy in order to marginalize the knowledges of the Other. It was the historian Frances Yates who considered the appellation of pseudoscience to astrology to be anachronistic and the application of modern sensibilities backwards in time.

There is this tendency here to collapse astrology into contemporary Western horoscopic astrology whereas astrology is a much, much broader field -- as described by Clive Ruggles, astrology is largely the cultural astronomy of non-Western societies, like as seen in South and East Asia (where astrology remains prominent, even as an academic field) and the Americas (where astrology has a prominent place in the cosmologies of say, the Nahua peoples.) Or, for that matter, large parts of Western non-horoscopic astrology -- things found in the Greek Magical Papyri, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Late Platonist texts like De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, where astrology is largely connected to religious and ritual workings. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:06, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

It was the historian Frances Yates who considered the appellation of pseudoscience to astrology to be anachronistic and the application of modern sensibilities backwards in time. I guess Frances_Yates#Scholarly_critiques would be instructive reading. There is this tendency here to collapse astrology into contemporary Western horoscopic astrology whereas astrology is a much, much broader field Any system which "claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects" is inherently pseudoscientific (as it claims to be able to predict stuff, a claim which has been thoroughly refuted by qualified scientists), no matter whether it comes from Western Europe or from the planet Mars. None of this prevents us discussing astrology as a religious and cultural phenomenon, but suggesting this means it isn't a pseudoscience is really taking the cake. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:41, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I am (well) aware Yates has been critiqued. She was born in 1899. There is plenty to be critiqued for such scholars, and in the ensuing century-and-a-quarter of her life, it would be inane to think she would not be critiqued. It does not mean however that she has been discredited or debunked: she is a seminal historian. Tamsyn Barton writes on Yates:

Most famously, Frances Yates led the attack against a history of science which carried back categories from the modern world to the ancient one, seeing the same clear division between science and pseudo-science as is generally accepted now. She proclaimed the importance of ‘Hermetic’ magic, Neoplatonism, alchemy and astrology in contributing to the development of what became modern science. The debate continues, with her opponents still arguing that what was science then is science now, and the same goes for pseudoscience. But though not all of Yates’s points have been accepted, it is now much more common to write histories which set sciences in their social and intellectual context.

— Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology (1994)

To reiterate, for Barton and Yates, as much as for myself, to apply pseudoscience to astrology is a gross anachronism for the vast majority of astrology's existence. This does not mean that astrology is not a pseudoscience, only that it is not universally held by scholars to be one, as the current lede implies and keeps being reiterated here in the face of anthropological and historical literature to the contrary. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:52, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

To take an example from something I know (being a musician much interested in early music); the concept of the harmony of the spheres can very much be discussed (the article here might not be perfect, but nvm) for its historical significance without anybody having any second thoughts about it's lack of actual empirical grounding, or writing verbose verbiage to distract from this fact. Astrology is no different in this aspect. In fact, astrology being pretty much the poster-child "pseudoscience", there's really no valid reason for us as writers of a mainstream encyclopedia to be attempting to obfuscate this fact. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:52, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Notice that the page so linked has no mention of pseudoscience anywhere. Like astrology, considering the harmony of the spheres to be pseudoscience would be horribly anachronistic. Further my edits preserved the stance of skeptics and some philosophers of science, and described how the predictive capability of astrology had been successfully challenged by empirical means: however, to reduce astrology to simply horoscopic and divinatory practices is to ignore the vast majority of astrological practices, both in history and as practiced today. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:56, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Further my edits preserved the stance of skeptics and some philosophers of science, and described how the predictive capability of astrology had been successfully challenged by empirical means: where to start? [6]

1. You removed a citation to Thagard, Paul R. (1978). "Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience". Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. 1: 223–234. (a paper cited by over 200 others, showing it is indeed significant) - seemingly because you disagree with his viewpoint (but have no problem replacing it with another set of sources which agree with yours)
2. You crucially removed the identification of it as a pseudoscience (one of the defining characteristics of the subject) from the very first sentence, instead burying it deep at the end of another paragraph.
3. You removed and have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power.

And yet somehow I'm supposed to believe that your edits did not represent a fundamental WP:NPOV violation? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I did not remove the citation, that is blatantly false: I moved it from one place to another, as can be seen in the very edit revision you linked. In doing so, I contextualized it by describing the particulars of the argument, in particular, the stances of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. As for your second point, yes, I removed the identification of astrology as a pseudoscience as the fourth word in the entire article and I stand by this edit: the description of astrology as "any of several ritual, religious, or divinatory practices" is more accurate than a reductionist, pejorative labeling as pseudoscience. As for your last point, this is also blatantly false: I revised the sentence to read:

researchers in the natural sciences have successfully challenged the predictive capability of astrology on both theoretical and experimental grounds.

That is, I moved "explanatory power" to "predicitive capability" (slightly more accurate) and did, indeed, revised the first part of the sentence because astrology (as I have explained and cited elsewhere) is not reducible to predictive or positivistic theories.

I would like to point out that while I did not remove any references, as you have claimed, I did add 4 or 5 new academic references. And once again: I am not an astrologer, I am an anthropologist specializing in historical archaeology (...of the Tulare Basin, but I digress). Once again, I have not said -- here or anywhere else -- that astrology, horoscopic or otherwise, is valid. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:24, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Most sources, when talking about "astrology"; do not seem to have in mind the wider definition you have. "Astrology" is nearly always being used to refer to the modern practice of it, and as such, per NPOV, our article should not give undue; out of proportion prominence to minor aspects of the subject (WP:PROPORTION). This includes correctly identifying the most prominent feature of astrology - that is, its modern practice - as indeed being a pseudoscience. That is why a description of astrology's historical significance is in order, but is not a valid reason to overwrite what is in the lead, since the lead is supposed to summarise the most important points of an article's subject. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:30, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

"Most sources"? Most sources talking about astrology (do a quick search for "astrology" on Scholar and JSTOR) are, indeed, talking about the historical and cultural practices of astrology. In fact, the very first source mentioned is Barton's Ancient Astrology which I have referenced heavily here and in my revisions of the article. JSTOR is slightly more concerned with contemporary, Western horoscopic astrology but the majority of sources are discussing it in historical and cultural capacities, e.g., Astrology and Cosmology in the Worlds Religions (NYU Press), the very first source listed on a search for "astrology" for JSTOR. I imagine if you did a search for "astrology pseudoscience" it would be different, but the page is entitled Astrology, not Astrology and pseudoscience or Astrology and astronomy. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:39, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Anthropologists today take a position of complete cultural neutrality in regards to the truth of beliefs Yes, that is the postmodern approach. So, those postmodern anthropologists cling to the dogma that such questions must be answered with "don't know, don't care". But that is their problem, not ours.

Postmodern anthropologists are not the dictators of science, otherwise real scientists could as well close shop since they would not be allowed to answer any questions by following the evidence.

Those who refuse to answer a question obviously have no say in what the answer is. You will not force your dogma on Wikipedia. --Hob Gadling (talk) 08:31, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Damn. This might have been a useful discussion had it not been derailed by the same editor. I'm beginning to think WP:BLUDGEON. Doug Weller talk 08:50, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that is the postmodern approach. Kind of? I'm guessing you're using postmodern as a pejorative here. It's a very basic principle of undertaking anthropological research: one must at least try to suspend judgement in regards to the subject of research. So, those postmodern anthropologists cling to the dogma Postmodern dogma is an oxymoron. Postmodern anthropologists are not the dictators of science, otherwise real scientists "Postmodern" anthropologists, whatever that means, are real scientists. Those who refuse to answer a question obviously have no say in what the answer is. Genuine question, what do you think postmodernism is? MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 10:16, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Unfalsifiable, and therefore not science? AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:29, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

'Postmodernism,' as you and User:Hob Gadling use it, is nothing more than a buzzword: it has no relation to the of 'postmodernism' that is used in scholarly discussion. You're using it to imply relativism or trivialism, in other words, some boogieman conspiracy that aims to undermine Truth^TM and Rationality^TM -- similar to the way it's deployed by far-right conspiracy theorists -- but that's, obviously, a mischaracterization. Am I a Cultural Marxist too? Once again: postmodernism is a historical condition, as per Lyotard -- the condition which responds and grows out of modernism -- it is not an ideology, or even a "philosophy." Those who are generally called postmodernists -- Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, et al -- never adopted the term themselves and most of them were critical, if not outright opposed to it. With all that being said: 'postmodernism,' as applied to anthropology, just refers to a particular interpretative method that has developed over recent decades to respond to (1) the legacy of ethnocentric 'classical' anthropology and race science and (2) critiques provided by Indigenous scholars. In this pursuit, Foucault and Haraway are indispensable for providing an epistemology that is properly attuned to political dynamics and the social construction of knowledge. Quite ironically, Sokal and Bricmont charge falsificationism as bringing about postmodern relativism which they view as a reaction to Popper's criterion. That's beside the point though -- social sciences and natural sciences, of course, have different epistemologies; just as the formal sciences and the natural sciences have different epistemologies. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:31, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

So you do not like it when people call that bullshit "postmodernism"? We could call it "bullshit" instead. --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:39, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Ironic dogmatism from one who decries dogmatism, no? That's not exactly an argument. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:54, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Nothing dogmatic here. You talk bullshit, I call it bullshit. I have no problem with you disagreeing with that assessment. For me, it is alright when people have stances. The attempt to force it on others is the problem. Returning to the subject: Anthropologists are allowed to have no position on the astrology-as-pseudoscience question, but we summarize the positions people have, not those people do not have. --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:18, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Postmodern dogma is an oxymoron. Wrong. Dogmatism means trying to force your own position on others. That is what you are trying to do here: your position is that we should not take a position, and you are trying to force your position into the article. "Having no stance" does not exist; "having no stance" is just a description of another stance. Every stance, including the no-stance stance, can be a source of error. Of course that fact is in your blind spot.

Can we please go back to improving the article? We were at the point where you had no reliable sources that say astrology is not pseudoscience, and therefore no leg to stand on except your no-stance dogma. --Hob Gadling (talk) 12:39, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Ignoring the moralizing: That is what you are trying to do here: your position is that we should not take a position Once again, kind of? The 'position' being forwarded here is reductive and isn't neutral by any means. As for reliable sources: I have given four, but yes, none of them are sources that definitively state that astrology is not a pseudoscience. They are sources, on the other hand, which show that at least some scholars (Barton in particular) are critical of astrology-as-pseudoscience. And that is my original, and current, point. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:52, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

isn't neutral by any means On Wikipedia, we try to be neutral, but not in the sense of the word you are using. See WP:NPOV.

I have given four, but yes, none of them are sources that definitively state that astrology is not a pseudoscience The sentence "I have given four" does not make sense in this context. You can give us two billion sources, but if none of them say what you need them to say to achieve your goal, they do not count.

some scholars [..] are critical of astrology-as-pseudoscience Is there anyone who rejects astrology-as-pseudoscience without rejecting the concept of pseudoscience itself? If not, then their gripes have nothing to do with astrology itself, and then those people are relevant only in the pseudoscience article, not here. --Hob Gadling (talk) 13:18, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Is there anyone who rejects astrology-as-pseudoscience without rejecting the concept of pseudoscience itself? Yes. The argument is not that astrology isn't a pseudoscience because pseudoscience isn't a thing (or something similiar) -- though some have levied that argument -- but that the notion of astrology-as-pseudoscience (1) projects contemporary sensibilities about, i.e., science, backwards in time; (2) implies that astrology indeed claims to be a science which is not accurate for anything other than Western horoscopic astrology; and (3) that one cannot claim that astrology is both falsified (debunked) and unfalsifiable. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:24, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

To drive this point home, e.g. homeopathy cannot be defended on similar grounds. It genuinely does claim to be a science, it has a very particular, strict, and narrow cultural context, and does not operate on scientific principles. Same goes for creation science. The same does not go for, i.e., alchemy. Which, now that I notice it: lede paragraph for alchemy is much, much different than the lede paragraph for astrology despite being incredibly similar disciplines. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:31, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

1. projects contemporary sensibilities about, i.e., science, backwards in time But the people who say astrology is pseudoscience are not saying astrology was pseudoscience back then. They are saying it is pseudoscience right now. Because the people who do it now are projecting obsolete ideas forward in time. How can we use that strawman in the article without blushing?
2. is not accurate for anything other than Western horoscopic astrology So, any pseudoscience can immunize itself against being called pseudoscience by having people who do not claim it is science? That is not how it works. Pseudoscience is defined as something which is wrongly called science, not something which is wrongly called science by everybody who endorses it. Again, embarrassing strawman.
3. one cannot claim that astrology is both falsified (debunked) and unfalsifiable Third embarrassing strawman. Astrology has general, unfalsifiable parts (the stars are synchronized with us) and specific, falsifiable parts (someon with sun sign X will tend to work as a Y).

Those people are not very familiar with serious criticism of astrology, are they? Those reasons are on par with creationist "criticisms" of evolution. --Hob Gadling (talk) 14:06, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

If people who say astrology is pseudoscience are not saying astrology was pseudoscience back then then why should astrology be described as a pseudoscience in the very first sentence of the article? The vast majority of astrological literature is regarding astrology as a particular cultural practice that is historically and socially contextualized. If what Ptolemy was doing was astrology, but it wasn't pseudoscience, why jump the gun? So, any pseudoscience can immunize itself against being called pseudoscience by having people who do not claim it is science? This is circular reasoning. You've already defined it as pseudoscience, so of course the fact that astrology largely does not portray itself as science is irrelevant. Astrology has general, unfalsifiable parts (the stars are synchronized with us) and specific, falsifiable parts (someon with sun sign X will tend to work as a Y) This only applies for a very specific and narrow subset of astrology, i.e. Western horoscopic and judicial astrology which was already being critiqued by neoplatonists in the Late Antique period -- who were, I might add, astrologers themselves. An opening sentence for an article which describes astrology -- not just a subset of astrology -- ought to stress that it is a ceremonial, religious, and/or ritual system based on the position of celestial bodies before any mention of pseudoscience is brought up. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 14:20, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

This is circular reasoning. Of course it is not. Pseudoscience has a definition, and astrology fulfils it. Changing the definition of pseudoscience so that astrology stops fulfilling it is not a valid method. But this is fruitless. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:45, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

If a pseudoscience has to claim to be scientific to be a pseudoscience, then astrology is not (in all cases) a pseudoscience. But what you said that if this were the case, pseudosciences could immunize themselves against being called pseudoscience by not calling themselves science. The circular reasoning is that if you already assume that they are pseudosciences, of course this notion is ridiculous.

With that being said, pseudoscience doesn't have "a" definition. It has many definitions. Apologies, but I don't believe you have solved the demarcation problem. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 10:55, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

not (in all cases) a pseudoscience At least you admit you are cherry-picking by mentioning the non-cherries in parentheses.

The "claims to be science but is not" part is pretty uncontroversial. The controversies are about what the word "science" means.

The demarcation problem is about finding the exact line between the areas of science and pseudoscience. About the areas far away from that line, everybody (except for a few weirdos at the fringe) agrees that e.g. physics and biology are sciences and astrology and homeopathy are pseudosciences.

But all this is not relevant here. We have reliable sources saying it is pseudoscience, and that is enough. Your personal beliefs and the reasoning you use to justify them do not come into it. --Hob Gadling (talk) 04:16, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

We have plenty of reliable sources saying astrology is a pseudoscience and that its claims to be able to predict stuff (whether it's the western variant; the insert-random-place-here variant; or any other variant - they're all essentially based on the same principle) have been found to be untrue. We have no sources which say that it is not a pseudoscience. People being critical of "astrology-as-pseudoscience" does not make it not be pseudoscience; particularly if these are people who (as Hob says) reject the whole concept of pseudoscience (which is definitively not a position we need to give equal weight to). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:21, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Only a very narrow subset of astrology claims any sort of predictive power. This has been pointed out before. The vast majority of astrological practices are primarily ceremonial, religious, or ritual in context, divinatory practices are a minority. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:34, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

And yet astrology, even in the version of the article you edited, attempts to "discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects". I think by this point people have figured what your stance is. You're the only one defending it. I'm done here. Stop bludgeoning the debate. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 13:37, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

"Discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events" is not the same as being able to "predict stuff." But whatever -- if you are done then so am I. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:42, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

If discerning information about human affairs and terrestrial events is not a prediction, I'm not sure what it is, then. jps (talk) 20:34, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

If to predict is to presage or otherwise forecast events in the future, then astrology provides a much larger range of cultural, religious, and ceremonial strata. In Mesoamerican astrology, days and months are generally assigned ritual importance, as with much of Hellenistic and Renaissance astrology, it would be a stretch to consider these predictions because while they discern information (or causality) about terrestrial affairs, they don't necessarily do so by projecting into the future. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:33, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

But they do project into the future: if one can say that now is not a good time to carry out such or such a ritual, because it will be much more (or even only) effective on such and such a time given the position of the stars, one is predicting the most propitious time for the ritual. This lay at the heart of medical astrology (and its little brother, chemical astrology), as well as meteorological astrology, astrological botany, etc. Sure, if such propitious times are 'fixed' into a calendar, some of its 'predictive' aspect disappears, but then there would also be no more need for any astrologers to be involved. As far as someone is doing astrology, also for example when establishing or emending an astrological calendar, one is establishing propitious times projecting in the future.

At the very least, the main use of astronomy throughout history was to predict the movements of the stars for calendrical purposes, and the main use of astrology was to interpret what effects such predicted movements might have on terrestrial events. Perhaps some other phenomena that are less predictive in nature may also be called astrological, but the real stretch would be to infer from those secondary phenomena that astrology is mainly concerned with non-predictive, ceremonial-religious practices (as would appear from your proposed lead sentence). Again, yes, anthropological approaches to astrology deserve to be covered in this article, but not directly into the lead sentence, please (see WP:LEAD). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:09, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Fair points, I'll concede to this. Not wanting to instill another incident, might I suggest that you add to and/or revise the page? Based on your user page I think you are perhaps best suited to the job. On an unrelated note, very appropriate username for the discussion. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 15:51, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm rather more the 'selfish' kind of WP editor who only edits on a topic if and when they want to learn more about it. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in reading up on astrology at this time. As an intellectual historian, I don't have a clue about its anthropological aspects anyway (though the history section here is not at all worthy of a GA either, but that's another story). Sorry. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:29, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

All good, just thought I'd try before taking another whack at editing the page again. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 23:22, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Whoa!

Lots of text and arguments have been added... and I won't read it all.

But let me say this: Astrology is, in various contexts and at various times, a proto science, a pseudoscience, and a cultural phenomenon. If, in the end, the article denies any of these, it will diminish my faith in Wikipedia as a project of reason.

There will be published die-hard pseudoscientists or academic apologists who deny it is a pseudoscience. There will be one-eyed positivist who deny it is anything but a pseudoscience.

I hope a consensus can be reached not falling into any of those two absurdities (while both may have to be covered by the article).--Nø (talk) 16:05, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

A protoscience is something that will turn into science. Unless we have a WP:CRYSTALBALL, we cannot say astrology is a protoscience. But we can say it was one. --Hob Gadling (talk) 05:45, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology is, in various contexts and at various times, a proto science. Completely irrelevant comment. In one particular context at a particular time, astrology is (or was) a protoscience. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 10:56, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

User:Hob Gadling, I believe the relationship between astrology and astronomy much as the relationship between alchemy and chemistry. Some of the roots of the modern science lie in the ancient or medieval esoteric practice.

I do not understand what point User:Mychemicalromanceisrealemo is trying to make.--Nø (talk) 21:36, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

I was backing you up -- their comment was irrelevant because you already noted the particular context in which astrology is (or was) a protoscience. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 23:20, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, of course that is their relationship. My point was the difference between "is" and "was". Today, astrology is not a protoscience anymore. Today, it is a pseudoscience. --Hob Gadling (talk) 04:22, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

User:Mychemicalromanceisrealemo, thanks. Frankly, User:Hob Gadling, one could say nothing is a protoscience today -- at least, we wouldn't know that it is. I think one could say that ancient astrology is a protoscience from today's point of view, where as modern astrology isn't.

Another point: It's not necessarily either protoscience or pseudoscience. There may - even today - be cultural practices that that may be considered religion, for instance, rather than a pseudoscience. (As a provisional atheist, I'd say the distinctions between religion, superstition and pseudoscience are s somewhat blurred, but we have to accept that they are distinctions many people find meaningful.)--Nø (talk) 08:28, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

one could say nothing is a protoscience today Of course one can't. Please stop pinging me, I have a watchlist. --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:55, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Funnily enough, in the Thagard paper that keeps being referenced here -- he brings up the hypothetical in which an uncontacted Amazonian people practice astrology: is it scientific "to them"? MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 07:20, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I am unsure how much we can say it is a proto-science, unlike alchemy I am unsure a real science really developed from it. It seems (as far as I can recall) that even from the earliest time the use of Astronomy for "scientific" purposes (dating, navigation, etc) was always separate (and to a degree even carries out by different classes of person) from astrology. Astrology uses astronomy, I am unsure there was much traffic the other way. Slatersteven (talk) 10:34, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

It's probably helpful to keep in mind that contemporary historians of science generally do not use the term 'protoscience' anymore, just like they don't use the term 'pseudoscience'. See Presentism (literary and historical analysis). The problem with these terms in historiographical contexts is that, being dependent on present-day scientific knowledge (what we can appropriately call protoscientific or pseudoscientific depends on what we know to be valid science today), they cannot be used to analyze the past without shaping that past according to what are essentially modern categories. But to do so is to hopelessly distort it, and to make any proper understanding of it impossible.

Sure, alchemy was early chemistry, while astrology wasn't early astronomy. But both were, in the context of their own times, regarded as scientific endeavors, even by most of their detractors. To imagine their practitioners to be either driven by the same motivations and considerations as modern scientists (for what we would call 'protoscience') or as modern quacks (for what we would call 'pseudoscience') would be to completely misunderstand them. Yes, there are some trans-historical universals, and some alchemists or astrologers were in fact rigorous and conscientious seekers of knowledge, while others were driven by greed and a desire for self-aggrandizement. But which one of the two characterizations would fit was not determined by whether what they were doing would deserve the label 'protoscience' or the label 'pseudoscience' today. Consider, to take a famous example, Newton's researches into alchemy: by today's standards what he was doing was doubtlessly pseudoscience (looking into ancient Hermetic texts such as the Emerald Tablet –the source of the modern as above, so below phrase– to try and advance chemistry), and since none of it had any impact whatsoever on the later development of chemistry, to call it 'protoscience' would be equally wrong. Yet Newton was as rigorous and conscientious in his alchemical researches as he was in his physics and mathematics. What he was doing, in the context of his own time, was simply science. See Newman 2018, p. 6:

It is now well known that such luminaries of the scientific revolution as Robert Boyle, G. W. Leibniz, and John Locke were all seriously involved in alchemy; Newton was no anomaly. All of these figures engaged in the broad spectrum of chymical practice, seeing it as a fruitful source of pharmaceutical and technological products and yet hoping as well that it might reveal the secret of metallic transmutation. Chymistry was a natural and normal part of the progressive agenda of seventeenth-century science. Hence the need that Dobbs and others felt to locate Newton’s motives for studying alchemy in extrascientific areas such as soteriology and the quest for a more primitive Christianity has lost its force. We are now free to study Newton’s alchemy on its own terms and to arrive at a much clearer picture of the field’s relationship to his other scientific pursuits.

I'm not as familiar with the literature on astrology as I am with alchemy, but I do not believe that contemporary historians of science would take any other approach to the astrological pursuits of such luminaries of astronomy as Tycho Brahe or Johannes Kepler: it wasn't 'pseudoscience', it certainly wasn't 'protoscience', it was simply 16th/17th-century 'science'. To see it in the context of the science of its day is the only way to avoid distorting it and to get a proper understanding of it, and this is something that most historians have been aware of for some time now. Of course one will find a relapse into whiggish approaches even among some historians today, but at least since the 1980s that has become rarer and rarer. Non-historians, and especially the general public, have been rather slow to pick up on this, but the non-presentist approach to history of science has been established long enough now among scholars for Wikipedia to also follow it. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:11, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

• Newman, William R. (2018). Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire". Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17487-7.

Coming late to this discussion, but I was quite involved with this and related pages some years ago. While I think the article should make it very clear right at the beginning that astrology today is entirely pseudoscientific, the majority of the article is, and should be, about the history of ideas/thought/science. The body of lore that we can identify as "astrology" for a long time included on the one hand, observations of celestial bodies ("astronomy"), and on the other predictions of future events ("astrology"). The split is there in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church has no problem with using the astrological signs as a calendar (in the stained glass at Chartres Cathedral), but does not approve of divination or forecasting. As the heliocentric model gains ground, "astronomy" splits from "astrology". Building up our description of these changes in attitude from good sources is the correct route for the article, while "is it proto-science, yes or no", is not going to lead anywhere. Itsmejudith (talk) 17:24, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Fully agreed. However, by starting the lead sentence with "Astrology is a pseudoscience that ...", it isn't at all clear that we mean astrology today, especially since from the second sentence on we are in fact describing historical astrology.

I believe the lead should be re-written so as to start a second paragraph with something like "Today astrology is considered a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience." It should still be prominent, just not in the lead sentence where we introduce what astrology is, which is largely historically defined: an ancient field of study that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects.

The short description (now "Pseudoscience claiming celestial objects influence human affairs") could also do with an update: what about "Study of purported celestial influences on terrestrial events"? I believe that description fits both the historical field of study and the contemporary pseudoscience. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:22, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I support your proposals. The word "pseudoscience" need not be clumsily shoehorned into the first sentence, yet it should appear in the lead. --Animalparty! (talk) 23:01, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

ARBCOM has stated that Wikipedia is to call Astrology a pseudoscience, so no, that will not work and nor will the majority of editors allow those changed to go through. 5.151.22.143 (talk) 23:03, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Please provide a link to this ARBCOM content ruling. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:42, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

I believe it's this: Theories which have a following, such as astrology, but which are generally considered pseudoscience by the scientific community may properly contain that information and may be categorized as pseudoscience. Passed 8-0 at 02:28, 3 December 2006 (UTC) Needless to say, this isn't in any way under discussion here... ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 09:24, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Yup. ArbCom's 'ruling' back in 2006 in no way attempts to impose any specific wording in this article, or in any other. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I never said Astrology should not be called a pseudoscience, but there are more elegant ways to say so in the opening paragraph. Tiger for instance does not begin: "A tiger is a mammal...", nor does Abraham Lincoln begin with "Abe Lincoln was an assassinated politician...". True statements can be added to the lead in a manner that more accurately reflects the weight and structure of the article (which doesn't mention "pseudoscience" until roughly halfway through). A fondness for the word pseudoscience, or a desire to prominently identify such, does not mean the word should be used as often and as early as possible. --Animalparty! (talk) 00:31, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Abe Lincoln is close: Abraham Lincoln was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865.... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, there's sometimes a small difference between elegant and inelegant prose. All salient facts are still delivered, without anything that could be considered front-loading or pedantic or over-emphasis. I agree astrology is a pseudoscience, and the article should call it such, but the word is often used or received as a pejorative, and so should be used with care. --Animalparty! (talk) 01:04, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I am entirely fine with beginning the article Astrology is a pseudoscience. We're here to be accurate, not to spare feelings. It's the salient point about the modern status of the subject, which is an eminently fine place for the article to begin. There's nothing clumsy or pedantic about it. The first section of the article notes the distinction between astrology and the science of astronomy; the first sentence of the lede should likewise present the status in a clear and direct manner.

The tiger article mentioned above begins, The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the largest living cat species. If we take this as a model to follow, then Astrology is a pseudoscience is the analogous construction: it immediately provides the classification of the topic and locates it in the world of ideas. I could see a case for editing the second sentence of the lede to something like, Astrology predates the scientific study of celestial objects, astronomy, having been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE. XOR'easter (talk) 01:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

it immediately provides the classification of the topic and locates it in the world of ideas It really fails on the second point, though, and the classification is not really useful or entirely accurate -- at least for the vast majority of astrology's existence. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 03:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

↑ This. The point is that, unlike 'mammal' for tiger or 'lawyer and statesman' for Lincoln, 'pseudoscience' is not an accurate description of the subject as a whole: for most of its history astrology wasn't pseudoscience. If the modern status of the subject is considered the salient point to begin the article with (a view which I don't necessarily agree with, but do find reasonable enough), it should be made clear as such:

Today astrology, the field of study claiming to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by observing the movements and relative positions of celestial objects, is a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience. However, astrology has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in ...

What about that? Or is there a better way to word this? Alternatively, we could use my proposed lead sentence above, and start the second sentence with "Though widely considered a pseudoscience today, astrology has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in ...". Perhaps this too is clumsy, but the point is to find a way to make it clear that what we're calling pseudoscience is the contemporary form. Please also comment on my proposal for the short description, "Study of purported celestial influences on terrestrial events". ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 09:24, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

As is to be expected, I am 100% behind your proposal here. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 09:43, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Sorrty but today implies at some point is was not hokum. We are writing for the modern reader, so we should put the modern view as fact first. Slatersteven (talk) 10:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

The 'modern view' (and the postmodern view for that matter) is that the beliefs of those in the past need to be taken in proper historical context, rather than simply dismissed as 'hokum' because scientific knowledge acquired subsequently appears to contradict such beliefs. Accordingly, I'd suggest that Apaugasma's proposed text seems fine, as a summary for the lede. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:51, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

The historical perspective is important: I agree with what Itsmejudith, Apaugasma and AndyTheGrump have suggested (once tweaked). Mathsci (talk) 10:59, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I am not saying do not include it, I am saying that it is a pseudoscience, and the historical belief in it needs to be put in that context. Something like.

astrology', the field of study claiming to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by observing the movements and relative positions of celestial objects, is a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience. However, astrology has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in ...

See it still includes the historical context. Slatersteven (talk) 11:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology wasn't 'pseudoscience' at the time. Neither 'science' nor 'pseudoscience' existed as meaningful concepts. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:22, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

So? We are not writing about it then, we are writing about it now, now we know what it was and what hokum it was. It write based on our outstanding, not that of 1000 years ago. We are writing for a modern audience, not that of 100o years ago. Our article must give the greatest weight to what modern science says, not the out-of-date science of our ancestors. Slatersteven (talk) 11:33, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I'd recommend actually reading what someone has just written before responding to it. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I did, my reply was it does not matter what they thought 1000 years ago, we base our articles on what modern scholarship says. Astrology is a fringe pseudoscience, that is what qualified experts say. So that is what we say. We do not caveat modern scholarship with weasel-worded platitudes to imply "but this is only what MODERN science thinks" (as if in some why astrology worked until science proved it did not), which is the clear implication of including the word "today". Slatersteven (talk) 11:41, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Having a more respectable past, or a history interwoven with traditions that later became straight-up science, is not uncommon for pseudoscience. Indeed, that is one of the ways in which astrology is "a paradigmatic example". (Think also of alchemy and chemistry, gematria and number theory, the divergence of both biology and geology from creationism...) Calling astrology a pseudoscience, whether near the beginning of the first sentence or the end, in no way excludes these considerations. Inserting "Today", on the other hand, merely waters down the point. XOR'easter (talk) 15:41, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Pseudoscience is not equivalent with false or, as you colorfully put it, hokum. Astrology was not pseudoscience in the 1300s, regardless of whether or not the modern practice of astrology is pseudoscience. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 11:52, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

"Well qualified experts" include modern scholars writing material on the history of science in WP:RSs. Mathsci (talk) 11:54, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology was not pseudoscience in the 1300s, regardless of whether or not the modern practice of astrology is pseudoscience Nothing was "pseudoscience" in the 1300s. Routinized identification of scientific fields was not a thing at that time and therefore any attempt to demarcate science from pseudoscience in the 1300s is straight-up anachronism. But no one in this conversation is arguing that solving the demarcation problem prior to the scientific revolution is the task at hand, so it seems misleading to keep bringing that up. As I think is clear, there are multiple aspects to this idea and it is perfectly fair to include all of them in this article without necessarily preferring one or another. I think it reasonable to look at the science education perspective on the subject and the anthropological perspective on the subject and think it is possible to write an article that accommodates both. The current article does not seem to do a particularly bad job at that, in fact. So what's the edit we're trying to consider here? jps (talk) 12:03, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Nothing was "pseudoscience" in the 1300s. Yes. What User:Slatersteven said was it does not matter what they thought 1000 years ago, we base our articles on what modern scholarship says. Astrology is a fringe pseudoscience, that is what qualified experts say. So, my response is that (as qualified experts will attest to) that astrology was not pseudoscience in, say, the 1300s as Slatersteven seems to imply. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:15, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

But saying that astrology is not a pseudoscience in the 1300s is just as anachronistic an argument as someone who is arguing that astrology was a pseudoscience in the 1300s. "Pseudoscience" is not a meaningful framework for use in that context. Slatersteven's point, as I read him, is that the claims of astrology as they are described today are claims which are necessarily pseudoscientific in the current sense. That these claims may have been made in empirical contexts in the past is rather not the issue. jps (talk) 12:21, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I would also argue it was, it did not suddenly stop being scientifically accurate when science disproved its basic tenants. Just because people believed it worked did not mean it did, and by adding the weasle wording we are implying it did work, it was in fact based on valid concepts, but it was not. We can't undermine the claim it is a pseudoscience based upon outmoded concepts of reality. Slatersteven (talk) 12:28, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

it did not suddenly stop being scientifically accurate when science disproved its basic tenants Genuine question, what do you think pseudoscience is? MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I won't speak for Slatersteven, but I think there is a problem with certain implications in the wording coming out of contextual treatments of beliefs where some students (and perhaps even some professionals(!?)) think that relativism implies that as time has gone on, the literal content of the world has changed. Thus, the idea that we no longer believe in the Greek pantheon means that the Greek pantheon went from being "real" to being "fantasy" as time went on and cultures change. This is something of a strawman argument because it is not really a view that people who are arguing for a relativistic treatment are making (I don't think). But it is easy to write text that allows for this interpretation to flourish and there are quite a few people who bristle at using that kind of rhetoric. I think we just need to thread the needle to make sure that this kind of argument is not promoted even if only implicitly. jps (talk) 12:51, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

pseudoscience is something that pretends to be (or pretends it is based on the principles of) a science but is not. Something RS calls a pseudoscience, even if (at one time) it was not. Slatersteven (talk) 13:08, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

According to your definition, with which I largely agree, what is pseudoscience depends on what is science. But what is science depends on historical context: what is being called science today can be called hokum tomorrow, and vice versa (though admittedly it largely goes one way only). That's why RS generally do not call astrology pseudoscience in broad historical contexts (just like they do not call humoral theory pseudoscience, even though Yunani medicine certainly is pseudoscience; therapies based on humoral theory never worked, but historians still treat it as science in the context of its own time). Since in fact a majority of RS deal with astrology in historical contexts,[7] astrology is not 'something RS call a pseudoscience' without further ado. Only contemporary astrology is generally called pseudoscience by RS, and our lead could reflect that better. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:29, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

And if this article was only about the past you might have a point. It's not, it is also about the current pseudoscientific present nature of it. Slatersteven (talk) 15:37, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I guess that's a fair assessment, I'll concede to that reasoning. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:31, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

How about

"Astrology is the pseudoscience belief that information about human affairs and terrestrial events can be determined by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects, which developed from various ancient systems of astrology dating back thousands of years"

We are discussing its past, without implying ts is in any way a valid discipline. Slatersteven (talk) 15:52, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

It's practically a worse version of the lede we have now. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 16:03, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Hmmm. What about flipping the order of the second sentence? E.g., It has its roots in in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications, practices that date back at least to the 2nd millennium BCE. This is kind of bikeshedding, but it brings to the forefront the idea that the ancient practices were detailed and systematic. XOR'easter (talk) 16:03, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

"Astrology is the pseudoscience belief that information about human affairs and terrestrial events can be determined by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects, which has its roots in in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications, practices that date back at least to the 2nd millennium BCE"

Something like that? Slatersteven (talk) 16:18, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

It's a bit overlong for an opening line, I think. The more important point is the "naval observatory" example mentioned below: there are ways to study "the movements and relative positions of celestial objects" that do provide "information about human affairs and terrestrial events". (For another example, predicting that people will gather in a certain spot to watch a solar eclipse is a prediction about "human affairs". Likewise, observing solar weather could give information about impending difficulties with radio communication or the power grid.) These aren't astrology, because they're not divinatory. XOR'easter (talk) 16:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

It's still equivalent in meaning to the current revision. We are already discussing astrology's past from the start without implying that it's a valid discipline. Note how except for the word 'pseudoscience', almost the entire first paragraph is about historical astrology. The problem is with how the label 'pseudoscience' doesn't fit historical astrology very well, creating a tension that comes of as 'front-loading', as Animalparty! has called it above. XOR'easter has said that calling it pseudoscience this way doesn't exclude more nuanced considerations, but in my view it does: beginning with astrology is a pseudoscience that ... brings the historical practices under the same label normally reserved for modern quackery, and tends to reduce them to such unconscientious practices.

The whole point of this exercise is to try and avoid that. Here's another attempt, taking into account some of the keen observations in the sections below:

Astrology is a divinatory practise that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Widely considered a pseudoscience today, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:53, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

And this is just why I opposed any change "Widely considered a pseudoscience today", no it is a pseudoscience. So yes this is all about just watering that down to imply its not. Slatersteven (talk) 16:55, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I'm afraid this reads a bit too much like the typical Flat Earther gambit of playing off modern science against "the wisdom on the ancients". I'm sure that's not the intent, but that's how it reads. "Widely considered" feeds into that somewhat by being rather unspecific. I do like bringing "divinatory" into the mix, but I don't think we've hit upon the magic formula quite yet.

I wonder if it might be helpful, as an exercise, to try rewriting the lede completely from scratch: take the rest of the article as mostly satisfactory, open a subpage, and craft a new introduction to go with it. I find that such an approach can sometimes avoid getting hung up on details of the "does this word go in the first or second sentence" variety. XOR'easter (talk) 17:45, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I guess that how one reads things strongly depends on what light one reads it in (I'll confess that the lead sentence of the current revision mainly hurts to my historian's eyes), but really, "widely considered a pseudoscience today" as implying that 'it's not a pseudoscience', or as implying that 'modern scientists say this, but the ancients say such-as-such? My feeling is that this is being read into it. However that may be, it surely isn't the intent, as you say.

The problem is indeed the already existing structure of the lead. The second sentence stresses astrology's antiquity, which kind of invites a contrast with 'today' when the issue is how to convey that it's considered a pseudoscience today. Maybe A paradigmatic example of pseudoscience in its contemporary form, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, ...?

I think that rewriting the whole lead may be a bit overkill, it's quite good as it is. If the 'it's a pseudoscience today, but it really is quite old' contrast must absolutely be avoided, I'd rather consider writing a new first paragraph, which introduces what astrology is as proposed above (a divinatory practice etc.) and then deals with contemporary astrology's status as pseudoscience, perhaps also explaining the difference between astrology and astronomy, as suggested by jps. The historical stuff can then start in the second paragraph. I don't think I'm up to writing this at this time though. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:49, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Or

Astrology is a divinatory practise that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Recognized as a pseudoscience today, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

Does this work, as it only changes one thing, the implication it is anything but pseudoscience. Slatersteven (talk) 18:53, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Sure, that looks great to me! More concise, and to the point. Sure, 'recognized' implies that it was already a pseudoscience when Ptolemy, al-Battani, or Tycho Brahe were doing it, which is a little 'of' from a historical perspective, but such implications are a minor quibble. I think it's a good compromise. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:03, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Could be tweaked slightly to avoid repetition: e.g. "motions of the heavenly bodies" instead of "celestial cycles". Mathsci (talk) 20:36, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm mostly happy with this formulation, though tweaks are doubtless possible and possibly beneficial. XOR'easter (talk) 01:37, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I'll just add my voice to the chorus of "mostly happy with this version". jps (talk) 01:39, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I would revise the second line to read While the modern practice of astrology is recognized as emblematic of pseudoscience today, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE or something similar. Thoughts, User:Apaugasma / User:Mathsci / User:Slatersteven? MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:12, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

That seems to add length without adding a corresponding amount of clarity, at least to me; if a reader didn't have the benefit of going through this whole Talk page to see distinctions being argued over and hashed out, modern would read as redundant with today (is there a different time when a modern idea could be evaluated?). Perhaps the second line could begin, Recognized as a pseudoscience today, versions have been practiced.... I've no strong opinions about rephrasing to avoid the repetition of "celestial", but I wouldn't object to "motions of the heavenly bodies" or the like. XOR'easter (talk) 00:27, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Ah yes, good points. How about While the modern practice of astrology is recognized as emblematic of pseudoscience, it has been practiced in various forms since at least the 2nd millennium BCE. Although modern does have a specific meaning -- the 18th century was modern -- I agree it would be read as redundant by most readers. One could also revise it to While the practice of horoscopic astrology is recognized today as emblematic of pseudoscience, astrology more generally has been practiced in various forms since at least the 2nd millennium BCE or something to that tune. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 01:01, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

That seems to run into some of the same difficulties. I don't think emblematic of is necessary (and in this part of the article, concision is particularly important). I'd bet that a vast swath of likely readers would find horoscopic astrology redundant. The latter phrase (astrology more generally has...) seems to suggest that there are other, non-horoscopic varieties that continue to be practiced and which are scientific. I see the distinction that you're angling at, but that presentation doesn't make clear what's in the past and what has persisted through to the present. For comparison, if I wrote that Fortran has been used in scientific computation since the 1950s, the natural take-away would be that some people still use it today (which they do). Likewise, writing that Hamlet by William Shakespeare has been performed many times since the beginning of the 17th century indicates correctly that the performances keep coming. XOR'easter (talk) 01:28, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

There are non-horoscopic varieties of astrology that are practiced today, and while they are not scientific, they are also not pseudoscientific (they do not claim to be a science) and are more relegated to the realm of religion. With that being said, I don't think it implies that scientific astrology is still being practiced, the sorts of astrology that were practiced in ancient times can't really be called pseudoscience. While many readers may find horoscopic astrology redundant, it really isn't, though perhaps there is a better way to go about this. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:40, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Considering that "non-horoscopic" astrology according to our definition of horoscopic astrology could apply to horoscopes in the newspaper, it might help to clarify what you mean by "non-horoscopic astrology". There is no credentialing body or enforced rule that requires an astrologer to actually create a visual representation of the orientation of planets and stars in order to write a newspaper's horoscope, thus they are practicing non-horoscopic astrology when they compose their predictions for each of the signs of the zodiac. In fact, many of the more famous media astrologers just "intuited" what the prediction was supposed to be (much to the chagrin of some of the more "hard astrology" advocates -- the irony being that this is just as effective a technique as any other). jps (talk) 19:57, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology versus astronomy

A proposal above is:

astrology', the field of study claiming to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by observing the movements and relative positions of celestial objects, is a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience. However, astrology has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in ...

The problem with this proposal is two-fold:

1) I don't think we can call it a "field of study". It is a practice, belief, and even a method to create complicated narratives, but it is not universally accepted as a "field of study" in a proper fashion. Most WP:MAINSTREAM universities lack departments of astrology or astrologers studying the subject and thus wording that even implies that there are people seriously treating astrology as a "field of study" runs afoul of WP:ASTONISH, in my opinion.

2) "claiming to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by observing the movements and relative positions of celestial objects" is part of astrology, but there are practices (even entire fields of study proper) which claim to do the same which are not astrology. A naval observatory predicting the tides by observing the lunar ephemerides is "discerning information about human affairs and terrestrial events by observing the movements and relative positions of celestial objects". Such a person is not doing astrology. Astrology is distinguished today by being a prediction that is explicitly pseudoscientific or, if you prefer, a prediction that is not accepted as being rational, causal, relational, or mechanistically plausible by the natural sciences. Was it always considered such? Absolutely not. But that it is properly considered this way today, I argue, is an important point to get across right away. It is probably best to do this in a way that doesn't wave the pseudoscientific flag as the definitional argument to boot (which is what the current lede does). That's just not very useful as a definition since most people don't have models of pseudoscience that work very well and clicking on pseudoscience is not a particularly enlightening rabbit hole. Instead, we should be clear about what the particular claims of astrology are and how they are not astronomical claims. Doing that will solve a lot of problems. You can then even talk about history of astronomy matters and how the word has changed meaning over the centuries.

jps (talk) 12:15, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the bulk of your comment here. I would like to point out that the particular claims of astrology are impossible to delimit. Astrology is not any single discipline, but a whole mess of many different discourses that vary across time and culture. My original proposal for the first half of the lede sentence was Astrology is any of various ceremonial, religious, and divinatory practices. Perhaps a more encompassing lede, integrating some of User:Apaugasma's idea, would read something like: Astrology is any of various ceremonial, religious, divinatory, or pseudoscientific practices which ascribe celestial influences on terrestrial events possibly continuing outside the causality of contemporary astronomy or something to that tune. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:29, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that the particular claims of astrology are impossible to delimit today. There doesn't seem to be much controversy over what claims are properly astrological and which ones are astronomical. I think your identification of these claims being part of ceremonial, religious, and divinatory practices is an improvement, but there are still certain astronomical claims that fall into those categories which are not astrological. For example, careful calendar making according to the lunar cycle is a "religious practice" but it is not astrological. This means that the adjective "various" is holding a lot of power in the sentence and is therefore not allowing us to be precise. The idea you have to add "pseudoscientific" to the list tacitly implies that pseudoscience is separate from these other points, but I continue to maintain that it is the pseudoscience-ness of the claims which keep them in the astrology camp today. "Outside the [...] of [...] astronomy." (I omit two words there that are problematic as causality is only one problem with astrology and the idea that it is only "contemporary" astronomy which makes the distinction could imply that astronomers in the eighteenth century, for example, did not make the distinction similarly which is, in my estimation, not correct) may be a way of wrapping in the "astronomy" distinction which I think is a much better way of demarcating, perhaps. jps (talk) 12:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology isn't a precise discipline, is my point. Indian astrology, Mesoamerican astrology, Hellenistic astrology, Babylonian astrology, and contemporary astrology are all very different and only sometimes related. In Mesoamerica, in particular, {{careful calendar making [...] is a "religious practice"}} and it is astrological. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:47, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree that "field of study" is a bad description of what astrology is now. I suspect it is also a poor description of what astrology was, historically. The modern connotations of the phrase "field of study" aren't a good fit for the whole range of ancient practices. XOR'easter (talk) 15:53, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Who says that the Mayan calendar is "astrological"? Certainly it can be used for astrological purposes, but its precision is something I teach in my classes as a properly astronomical work. Now, surely, things can be both astronomical and astrological at the same time, but if we're going to claim that Mesoamerican calendar making is astrological, then current calendar making (up to and including the use of leap seconds) is astrological. I hardly think that is the way anyone uses the term. See below, however, for my idea that what we are really talking about when we identify astrological claims is divination and nothing else. jps (talk) 12:56, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

As a side remark, perhaps it's worth remembering that the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768) states:

"ASTROLOGY, a conjectural science, which teaches to judge of the effects and influences of the stars, and to foretel future events by the situation and different aspects of the heavenly bodies. This science has long ago become a just subject of contempt and ridicule."

The words "polemical" and "discredited" are used in modern commentaries. Mathsci (talk) 13:18, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

As for the Maya calendar -- "Mayan" calendar is a misnomer, Mayan should only be used when referring to the languages -- it is certainly 'astrological' in the sense that it is divinatory, ceremonial, and religious. Divorcing it from these aspects is to completely mischaracterize Maya timekeeping: it is intimately tied to Maya spiritual practices. There is no Maya astronomy that is not also ritual, spiritual, and deeply embedded in Maya religion -- that is, astrology. Mesoamerican astrology, though it encompasses Maya practices, also encompasses the Aztec (Mexica, or Nahua) system (and others) which, for example, provide horoscopes for every day. Today is 13-Ocelotl (jaguar) in the week of Ehecatl (wind) in the Nahua calendar: the lord Tlazolteotl rules over this day, and it is good for doing battle. It is for these reasons that both of these systems are preserved today alongside the Western Gregorian calendar. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:16, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Divorcing it from these aspects is to completely mischaracterize Maya timekeeping: it is intimately tied to Maya spiritual practices. There is no Maya astronomy that is not also ritual, spiritual, and deeply embedded in Maya religion -- that is, astrology. Incorrect. First of all, no one is "divorcing" anything. But secondly, to contend that there is "no Maya astronomy that is not..." is arguing a very strong claim of nonexistence that I think is probably completely wrong. In fact, let me say that having worked with astronomers who are indigenous from that part of the world, I think they would not be okay with such a sweeping categorical declaration and might contend that the claim you are making is actually false. Further, if I strain magnanimity as far as I can, it seems to me that your argument is one that could, in principle, be made about literally all of astronomy. If I am to take the most generous interpretation of your meaning, as I said above, we would end up calling "leap seconds" astrology. This is completely without precedence, as far as I know, but I don't see any way around this kind of game if we are to adopt your argument. jps (talk) 14:57, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

But secondly, to contend that there is "no Maya astronomy that is not..." is arguing a very strong claim of nonexistence that I think is probably completely wrong For the pre-contact Maya, as much as for Hellenistic magicians, there was no division between astrology and astronomy. A study of Maya astronomy must necessarily include the deep religious, cultural, and indeed divinatory aspects of their calendarical system. That is what I mean by there is no Maya astronomy that is not also ritual, spiritual, and deeply embedded in Maya religion: and a ritual, spiritual, and religious system based on celestial bodies is clearly astrological. The Tzolkʼin has explicit divinatory properties, for example -- it's called the Sacred Count for a reason. I'm sure if you, a non-Indigenous person, were to call it astrology without qualifying what you meant you could get some blowback -- because it could be interpreted that you were denigrating it and applying a pejorative. But I am of Indigenous descent, and by chance, also from that part of the world. I also happen to be an anthropologist -- some of my earliest (published) research was on Indigenous astrologies. I do not use the term pejoratively, and I take astrology seriously as a cultural practice -- and also, simultaneously, a part of my own heritage. The point about leap seconds is a misinterpretation of my argument: every aspect of the Mesoamerican calendar is dripping with spiritual meaning. Even the name of each day is, in essence, a prediction of its numinous properties and subtle influences on terrestrial matters. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 15:52, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think we can say with any strong authority what constituted "astrology" or "astronomy" when it comes to pre-contact Maya. These terms, after all, are not terms used by the pre-contact Maya. They are imposed upon them by outside researchers. To the extent that these things have been studied, there are absolutely aspects which are wholly astronomical in their accounting. Maya had a keen understanding of the cycle of the planet Venus, for example, which is rather pedantically and, without comment, present in the alignment of El Caracol. To say that this is necessarily astrological is to assume a kind of meaning on the accounting which is just not present in the data. You may think this alignment is dripping with spirituality and it may inform your praxis, but this is by no means the only interpretation. To go one step further and declare that the only means to describe such accounting is by using the term "astrology", I would argue, is to be guilty of the very same post hoc argumentation you seem to be accusing others of using. I see no solid argument here that it is somehow a misapprehension to study calendars without attaching anything spiritual to the study. We are not equipped to say what is the right or the wrong way to approach such subjects, we can only go by how such studies have proceeded and archaeoastronomy as a discipline seems to exist without requiring that someone say all this is necessarily "astrology". So to approach these ideas as necessarily "spiritual" or "astrological" is to shoehorn them into Western categories that are just as, if not moreso, problematic than shoehorning them into a "disenchanted" (scare quotes mine) scientific practice, for example. jps (talk) 17:29, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Maya had a keen understanding of the cycle of the planet Venus, for example, which is rather pedantically and, without comment, present in the alignment of El Caracol. To say that this is necessarily astrological is to assume a kind of meaning on the accounting which is just not present in the data. You may think this alignment is dripping with spirituality and it may inform your praxis, but this is by no means the only interpretation. It is only "wholly astronomical" if you ignore the reasons the Maya are (not just were) interested in Venus in the first place:

[A]strology was the driving force behind ancient astronomy in the New World. The Maya exhibited a compelling need to link celestial occurrences with every facet of human activity. Like ancient Westerners, they viewed the planets as divinities who interacted with their terrestrial realm to create a cosmic unity. The stars were to be worshiped and attended to, for they alone represented the natural forces that so profoundly affected earthly pursuits. The appearance of the gods foretold the rainy season, the most propitious time to plant, and the size of the harvest that would result.

— Anthony F. Aveni, "Venus and the Maya: Interdisciplinary studies of Maya myth, building orientations, and written records indicate that astronomers of the pre-Columbian world developed a sophisticated, if distinctive, cosmology", American Scientist Vol. 67, No. 3, p. 274

It absolutely is present in the data, by the way. First-hand ethnographic accounts of Maya astrological practices from the conquest and early colonial period, rightfully, do not separate the spiritual and technical aspects. Roman y Zamora, Toribio Motolina, and Sahagun all provide accounts of the Venus calendar inside their proper cultural context -- ritual (in particular sacrifice) and divination. As per Aveni, "[M]aya astronomy and astrology are tightly bound." In fact, they were so tightly bound, S. L. Gibbs and Floyd Lounsbury have shown that the Maya "deliberately fixed" certain parts of the Venus calendar:

What had been passed off as chronological slovenliness by earlier investigators now begins to be viewed as purposeful, if somewhat peculiar, design. [...] Still, the goals of the Maya astronomers seem contradictory to us. How could they be concerned about accurate prediction and still get away with grossly distorting the Venus dates for religious purposes?

— Anthony F. Aveni, "Venus and the Maya: Interdisciplinary studies of Maya myth, building orientations, and written records indicate that astronomers of the pre-Columbian world developed a sophisticated, if distinctive, cosmology", American Scientist Vol. 67, No. 3, p. 278

So, quite literally, the Maya calendar is dripping with spiritual meaning. It's so dripping with meaning that they fudged the numbers in order to fit celestial cycles with religious, mystical, and divinatory ones. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 21:27, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

No one said you had to look at a subject as being "wholly astronomical", but there is still no work you can point to which argues we cannot interpret the orientation of El Caracol with just reference to its orientation. You failed to address that point substantively. It is clear you like the "astrological" lens. But you cannot claim it is the only lens. I'm not interested in the questions of whether variations in the calendar (which is another matter) have spiritual import. They may or may not. Aveni is also not clear on this matter, but it is also irrelevant to the question of whether there is an astronomical lens through which we can consider these matters. What is clear is that claiming that the only lens through which you can look at these matters is an astrological one is presumptuous and vaguely chauvinist -- it's just as culturally imposing as any other lens you were to force everyone to look through. Astrology and spirituality are not value-free characterizations. They are inexact and clumsy molds forged out of Western ideologies that do little to enlighten us as to what the knowledge or empirical facts are about, say, the orbit of Venus or indigenous knowledge. jps (talk) 21:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

No one said you had to look at a subject as being "wholly astronomical", but there is still no work you can point to which argues we cannot interpret the orientation of El Caracol with just reference to its orientation. More precisely, what I was arguing against was divorcing the "astronomical" aspects of the Mesoamerican calendar with the "astrological" aspects: the Mesoamerican calendar is as astrological as it is astronomical. You said, originally, that you teach the (precision of the) Maya calendar as astronomical work, specifically, not astrological work: I argue that this is a mischaracterization of Maya time-keeping practices for the reasons above. Yes, you can interpret el Caracol with just reference to its orientation. But that would be ignoring huge tracts of Indigenous knowledge and major parts of the primary sources. It is especially mischaracterized because it is not "precise" but rather attuned to fit with a particular ritual round and cosmovision, as Gibbs and Lounsbury have shown. If astrology is the divination by the celestial bodies, then the Maya calendar is astrological. If astronomy is the measurement of the celestial bodies, then it is astronomical. Since it is both divinatory and makes use of acute measurements of celestial bodies -- it is both astrological and astronomical, as Aveni says, "tightly bound." To return to the original point: the Mesoamerican calendar is astrological. It is also astronomical, certainly, but if the word 'astrology' has any meaning at all, it is astrological. As for archaeoastronomy: see "Astrology as cultural astronomy" in Ruggles, Clive L.N. (16 Aug 2014). Ruggles, Clive L.N (ed.). Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. New York: Springer. pp. 103–117. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8. ISBN 978-1-4614-6140-1.. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 22:27, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

That you think my teaching, which is something you have never experienced, is a mischaracterization is perhaps one of the more bold and arrogant attacks I've seen on this website. Which tract of Indigenous knowledge precisely are you accusing me of ignoring? Is there some edict that determines what must be discussed when describing the structure at El Caracol? jps (talk) 22:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm only basing this off of what you've said:

Who says that the Mayan calendar is "astrological"? Certainly it can be used for astrological purposes, but its precision is something I teach in my classes as a properly astronomical work.

If you do indeed hold that the Maya calendar is not astrological, even if it can be used for astrological purposes, and you teach that it is properly astronomical work as opposed to astrological work -- in the sense that astrology is the divination by the stars -- then yes, you are mischaracterizing Maya timekeeping practices by cleansing of its religious, ritual, ceremonial, and indeed divinatory practices which are at the very heart of the discipline. Once again, the precision of Venus is fixed to coincide with a particular ritual round. This isn't a bug, it's a feature. It was done deliberately. So to talk about Venus in any capacity within the Maya calendar means you must also talk about the divinatory and ritual aspects of the calendar. Pre-contact Maya astrologers-astronomers knew what they were doing. The tract of Indigenous knowledge (thank you for capitalizing this time -- really) you are ignoring, I would say, is the ceremonial and divinatory knowledge, without which, one cannot even begin to understand the practice of star-gazing in Mesoamerica, past or present. The Maya priesthood pre-1492 were not secular. They were the Maya priesthood and one of their key responsibilities was divination, sometimes by the stars, sometimes by casting lots, sometimes by bloodletting. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 22:49, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Calendars exist regardless of their religious, ritual, ceremonial, or divinatory practice. It is not my job to teach those practices. When I teach different calendars, I teach how they relate to the observations of the sky. This includes calendars from all across the world. Of course the orientation of El Caracol is deliberate. It deliberately aligns with Venus. That's what I teach and that you think this is somehow problematic is perhaps the heart of the issue. You use words like "ceremony" and "divination" which are part-and-parcel to the anthropological zeitgeist, but they are not "Indigenous knowledge". They are anthropological frames. They may even be useful, but they are not the only ways to look at things. Your use of the word "secular" for example is rather indicative of a narrow classification that was popular in clumsy colonialist conceits. Who are we to say that the pre-contact Maya were "secular" or "religious"? These categories are not the ones they used! They are the ones the colonialists imposed. jps (talk) 22:56, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Calendars exist regardless of their religious, ritual, ceremonial, or divinatory practice. They clearly don't, though: for the Maya calendar in particular, it exists in regard to its religious, ritual, ceremonial, and divinatory practice. The former exists because of the latter, not the latter because of the former. If you seperate them, you are mischaracterizing it. Also, you're confused about the Venus point -- there are "errors" in the Maya records about the cycle of Venus. For a long time archaeologists considered these to be just that -- errors, hiding behind an otherwise "accurate" astronomy -- but as it turns out, those "errors" are deliberate. It is, quite literally, not based on observation -- it is not "precise." It is for this reason that I pointed out that it is literally dripping in "spiritual" meaning -- ignoring this is to mischaracterize it. If you take umbrage to this term, then it is dripping with tonalli, with k'a'ay u sak, with ik' . If you do not like "divination", then it is pajooneem. You can't talk about Maya star-gazing without talking about Maya religion, to do so would be to mischaracterize it. If it is not your job to teach those practices, then you cannot precisely talk about Maya star-gazing without mischaracterizing it. Everything else you've argued here is purely semantic. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 23:20, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Sigh. You seem to either be willfully or ignorantly missing the point that calendars are markers of the passage of time and use references to keep track. That's not really a point that anyone disagrees with. It simply is not necessary to delve into devotional practices of the calendar makers to explain them. That's just not how calendars work. I know that Easter controversies inspired the Gregorian calendar reform, in part, but I don't teach about them. My class is not about the rationale for how the calendar was developed. My class is descriptive of what calendars do. As for the rest of your comments, they are likewise blinkered by a weird ideological conceit. I don't know why you seem to be so enamored with the ideas of the "spirituality" promoters, but they don't have the chops to argue that the base points of how movement in the sky works are somehow so spiritual as to be indescribable in any other fashion. Such an argument is one that I've really only ever seen made by religious fanatics. jps (talk) 00:46, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Even the name of each day is, in essence, a prediction of its numinous properties and subtle influences on terrestrial matters. I think this rather proves my point quite beautifully. The names of days in all calendars have implied "prediction[s] of [their] numinous properties." I don't see how we can say that they are somehow more entwined with one culture than another culture even as we live in a world that does not admit much in the way of empirical evidence that these properties can be measured independent of the cultural beliefs of those who hold them. Again, such a work to ascribe this kind of meaning is something that can happen in any venue thus making the distinction between something that is "astrological" and something that is "astronomical" impossible to make. This is why this doesn't really work for us. We need to be able to distinguish between that which can be measured and verified about the heavens and their connection to terrestrial events and that which cannot. I see no other context for this other than basic science education. That's also what I see reflected in the sources which consider this matter carefully. (And, fairly, anthropological sources of these topics tend to avoid this question entirely or spend almost no time on it other than to mention that the consideration exists out of a concern over genre.) jps (talk) 17:46, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

The names of days in all calendars have implied "prediction[s] of [their] numinous properties" As it to be expected if the origin of astronomy and calendar-making is inseparable with astrology! Which, of course, it is: the earliest astronomical works are astrological and vice-versa. Days of the week, in practically all European languages, retain ancient references to gods and their properties and this is tied innately to the Greco-Roman practice of astrology: the very same practice of astrology that leads to contemporary Western horoscopic astrology. Again, such a work to ascribe this kind of meaning is something that can happen in any venue thus making the distinction between something that is "astrological" and something that is "astronomical" impossible to make. As has been discussed here at great length, for most of history throughout most cultures, it is impossible to delimit what is astrological and what is astronomical. Hence why we're arguing about the lede: calling astrology a pseudoscience as the fourth word in the article mischaracterizes the discipline which has an ancient history and indeed was inseparable from astronomy until the Renaissance. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 21:34, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm glad we're in agreement on these matters. This is precisely why we need to rely on a demarcation of empirical fact as provided by scientific education. It allows us to determine what is astrology and what is astronomy according to those sources which distinguish between the two. jps (talk) 21:42, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

By the way, when it comes to calendars, "Mayan calendar" seems to have "Maya calendar" beat both in book results: [8] and on the scholarly side: [9],[10]. I understand the preference for talking about the people and culture as Maya and the languages as Mayan, but it seems that the literature about calendars may be an exception to that rule according to actual practice. jps (talk) 15:12, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

There are plenty of reasons to ignore "actual practice" within the academic study of Indigenous cultures -- plenty of people still talk about the Anasazi or Eskimo–Aleut languages. I have made 100+ edits here on Wikipedia changing singular mentions of "Yokut" to "Yokuts" -- the former is certainly more common for a singular, even in academic contexts, but it's also wrong and is a sure sign that someone has not done their due diligence in their research, which is sadly common for Californian Native topics. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 15:57, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

True, there are plenty of places where the terminology in academic literature hasn't caught up (not just on this topic...). The hazard is that, without at least a few sources explicitly pointing out how and why the terminology is wrong, we as Wikipedia editors don't have grounds to lead the charge against the more common usage. Someone else has to point out that the practitioners in the field haven't been doing their due diligence. It's a thorny issue I've run into more than once, and for having to deal with it in your corner of research, you have my definite sympathies. XOR'easter (talk) 16:24, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

I just refer you to right great wrongs. Until we have a strong source that explains the use of "Maya calendar" is preferred over "Mayan calendar", I don't think it is helpful to argue this point any further. I would encourage you to go out and create such a source if you would like to effect that change here in Wikipedia. jps (talk) 17:29, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

It simply is not necessary to delve into devotional practices of the calendar makers to explain them If you are comfortable mischaracterizing it to your students by divorcing it from its function -- which is to mark the passage of time, yes, in order to act as a ritual and divinatory calendar -- then sure. I have had plenty of teachers and professors who have done just as bad or worse. As previously noted, the devotional practices of the calendar are absolutely essential to explaining how the calendar works because it is specifically attuned to match in spite of the observed behavior of celestial bodies. So, if you want to explain how it works in a way that's supported by textual and ethnographic evidence -- you had better talk about Maya spirituality and religion, too. If not, well, you're fumbling the ball. Such an argument is one that I've really only ever seen made by religious fanatics This means practically nothing to me. Yes, I am a postmodernist extreme relativist neo-Marxist religious fanatic pseudoscience apologist science-denier, whatever scare-words you want to apply to me for wanting to accurately portray the heritage of the continent I live on am trace my ancestry to. Cleansing the Maya calendar of its divinatory practices is to mischaracterize it. Period. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 00:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You keep applying motivations where there is none, putting words in my mouth when I explicitly explain otherwise, and generally are acting the fool here. Have you taught a class on calendars? I am being totally honest with you about which direction your rhetoric seems to be coming from. If you don't like that this is what people are seeing, then maybe think about what you could do to fix the situation instead of doubling down in outrage. jps (talk) 01:17, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

What words am I putting in your mouth? I'm explicitly quoting you. You're also ignoring the points here: that the Maya calendar is divinatory and ritual at its core, even effecting the actual astronomical predictions e.g. of the cycles of Venus in spite of its observed behavior. Ignoring the divinatory and ritual aspects -- the astrological aspects, that is -- is mischaracterizing the Maya calendar, and there's literally no way around this. If you ignore these aspects in your teaching, even if it is not your job to teach those practices, you are mischaracterizing the Maya calendar. Once again, I am a postmodernist extreme relativist neo-Marxist New Age religious fanatic pseudoscience apologist science-denier anti-vaxxer babyeater cannibal. If that's what you are seeing, then whatever. I won't deny it -- it doesn't upset me in the slightest, I have been called much worse by the much more adept. Chalk up reverse-racist and colonialist there too. Maybe throw up misandrist for good measure. Got any more? Oh, outraged, that's right. Yes, I am very outraged, you have led perhaps one of the more bold and arrogant attacks I've seen on this website and generally are acting the fool here! MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:36, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Look, even 18th-century first-edition Encyclopedia Britannica correctly describes astrology as bollocks: "ASTROLOGY, a conjectural science, which teaches to judge of the effects and influences of the stars, and to foretel future events by the situation and different aspects of the heavenly bodies. This science has long ago become a just subject of contempt and ridicule." Ok, a bit of an extreme example, but it shows how this "Astrology as pseudoscience" is not merely some 21st-century invention which can be dismissed with wish-wash verbiage about historical context or whatever other obtuse reason can be found to attempt to water this down. It's not the purpose of Wikipedia to right great wrongs; or to engage in revisionism because some things often modern hyper-sensibilities in some contexts. Modern sources, written by modern scholars, for a modern audience (like Wikipedia), don't hide the status of astrology behind such verbiage. As a WP:MAINSTREAM encyclopedia, we follow that path. Don't like it? None of my or Wikipedia's effing problem. You refusing to get the point and continuing to argue well past the point of reasonable disagreement (swooping as low as rather thinly veiled personal attacks in your last past) is becoming borderline tendentious and disruptive. Stop attempting to bludgeon the debate. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:39, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

That's not even what we were discussing. Did you even read the thread? We're talking about whether the Maya calendar is astrological or not and whether considering it as a purely astronomical system is a mischaracterization. Yes, it's only tangentially related -- but did you seriously just see the long thread and decide to jump in without reading it? I guess I'm not surprised given the behavior you showed on my talk page which included vaguely threatening behavior regarding my personal information. Apologies, got you confused with someone else. Regardless, we are working towards a consensus above -- as can be seen at Talk:Astrology#Whoa!. Please read discussions before participating in them. No one is even talking about pseudoscience here. If you would have argued this was unrelated and not the forum for it -- then yeah, can't argue with that. But you made it incredibly obvious you did not read what was being said. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 03:50, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

It would be easier keeping track of the discussion if you weren't constantly overwhelming it. AFAICS, the Maya stuff (whether the astronomical phenomena it is based upon make it be "astrological") is clearly a proxy for the existing debate. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:58, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Both jps and I agree on the same revision of the lede sentence. Once again, please read discussions before participating in them -- it seems like a proxy for the other debate because you didn't read it. I was only responding to jps here, and it was separate from the other conversation. To quote from WP:BLUD: To falsely accuse someone of bludgeoning is considered incivil, and should be avoided. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 04:10, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand why you want to keep this discussion open. You have basically said that my description of the way I teach about calendars is "fumbling the ball". It seems to me that this predilection is related to someone who can only see one way to talk about a subject and that is to assume that spirituality and astrology are so integral to one particular calendar that it is impossible to teach about that calendar without making reference to it. But this just seems like a lot of sound and fury at this point. jps (talk) 11:09, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with RandomCanadian that it would help if MCRIRE would post a little less often to this talk page, so it would be easier for other editors with less time to keep up. Also, both MCRIRE & jps, please remember that this is a text-only medium and that when others' posts come over as an attack, it probably wasn't meant quite as aggressive as it seems. I'm sure that in real life you wouldn't be saying these things to each other. Better to AGF and de-escalate.

@RandomCanadian: have you ever read something by Voltaire? In the period that 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica was written, contempt and ridicule for the conjectural philosophies of pre-modern times was at an all-time high. But we don't follow the point of view of Enlightenment writers around here. Modern sources, written by modern scholars, have realized since quite some time now that ridiculing and dismissing something from a presentist perspective is a surefire way to remain wholly ignorant about it. Sure, enlightenment polemics still loom large in modern debates, especially when it comes to such subjects as the status of religion and science, but I can assure you that historians and other scholars in the humanities have long since abandoned this type of attitude. Since in fact a majority of RS on this subject deal with it from this more disinterested perspective (they are trying to understand astrology, not to promote it or to fight it),[11] we should give their due in the way we introduce the subject. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:27, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Identifying the problems with ways certain approaches were handled in the past, that does not necessarily imply ridicule. When I grade an assignment with a low grade, that does not imply ridicule. It just implies that certain claims are incorrect. It also does not imply that such critique is a "surefire way to remain wholly ignorant about" the claim. I know that it is fashionable within certain fields to avoid question of empirical claim because of interest in other aspects of a topic. That doesn't mean the evaluation of the empirical claim is necessarily biased or not "disinterested". The citation itself from 1768 is actually disinterested. It is not instructing the reader to heap contempt and ridicule on the subject. It's just reporting that astrology has been the subject of contempt and ridicule. Surely whether this is true or not is not up for debate. jps (talk) 15:09, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

That being dismissive about a historical subject leads to ignorance about it is the common position taken by historians of science. Ironically, they often invoke the need to base our analysis on empirical evidence as an argument for that: 'let's not be distracted by 18th-century polemics, let's look into the actual texts written by historical astrologers, and let's see whether what they say really is ridiculous'. The general conclusion has been that it is not. The conclusion, furthermore, has been that 18th-century authors had their own agendas when claiming it was ridiculous. If some editors here would prefer the dismissive attitude of 18th-century Britannica over what historians today are saying, again quite ironically, it's them who are rejecting the conclusions and accepted methodologies of historical science. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You're confusing dismissing the topic with dismissing the worth of its precepts. Like may types of pseudoscience (acupuncture, alchemy, homeopathy, etc. etc.), astrology is a worthy topic for study and encyclopedic coverage. Still nonsense on toast though. Alexbrn (talk) 15:52, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Are you saying that Astrology used to work? Slatersteven (talk) 15:53, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

let's see whether what they say really is ridiculous'. The general conclusion has been that it is not I'm going to need to see a source that maintains this. Let's look at Johannes Kepler's 1601 treatise: On the more certain foundations of astrology. It's just plain incorrect in most of its assertions. Try as I may, I have found no "rehabilitation" of Kepler on these points. Which historian is arguing that Kepler was correct in his defense? I have actually had the pleasure to read "On the more certain foundations" and, in it, Kepler went to great lengths to maintain that astrology could predict the weather and portend human personalities even as he acknowledged astrology's critics (many very much in line with critics today, though some critics took issue as part of a more general critique of the occult and socercy as a basis for their condemnation). In perhaps Kepler's most famous astrological portent argument, he argued that the 1604 supernova meant that the inhabitants of the New World would be converted to Christianity, that Islam would collapse, and that Jesus Christ would return within the next few years. Are we to assume that these astrological claims were "not" ridiculous in light of what we understand about mechanisms, etc? If so, which historians exactly are arguing that? jps (talk) 16:05, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

@Slatersteven: no, I (and historians of science generally) are not saying that astrology used to work, we're saying that it used to be widely accepted to work, and that this was not in any way an irrational or ridiculous position to take within the framework of knowledge that existed at the time. They are saying that it was fully coherent with the prevailing cosmological theories of the pre-modern period, and that neither these theories nor the astrological practices based on them are appropriately characterized as 'nonsense' when seen in their historical context. It's only when looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight and a 20th-century science education that it appears to be nonsense, but that's not unlike chiding Newton for not knowing about relativity, or chiding Galen for not knowing about the germ theory of disease. No one would do it if it were not for the fact that astrology is still being defended and practiced today, in which context it patently is nonsense.

@jps: just above you were still saying that pointing out that something is incorrect is not the same as ridicule. Of course most assertions historically made in the context of astrology were incorrect. All historians will strongly affirm this. Make no mistake: taking astrology seriously as a historical subject does never involve, not in one instance I've seen among the many papers and books that I've read in the general field of the history of science, taking astrological claims themselves seriously in any way. They were wrong. But they were not ridiculous for being wrong. They were not, in the great majority of cases, making claims that their contemporaries would have found ridiculous. To laugh down at them from our own advanced position of knowledge is easy, but ultimately foolish. Not rarely it's small minds laughing at great minds, merely showcasing their lack of historical imagination. Sure, it's hard to read Kepler et al. (there's worse!) without bursting out in laughter from time to time, but you've got to recognize that this is not rational behavior, just an incapability to completely escape the cultural conditioning of our own time. You can't really understand him, because you can never even remotely be in his position. To think him a fool for believing things which appear strange to us today is intellectually dishonest, and yes, a surefire way to ensure one remains wholly ignorant about him and his times. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:33, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Well, it depends on what you define as "ridiculous", I suppose. There is "correct" and then there is "worthy of disdainful scorn". We, at Wikipedia, are not supposed to engage in scorn. But identifying an argument as pseudoscientific is not to disdainfully scorn it. It's to identify its position within the epistemology of empirical claims. Yes, here at Wikipedia we are around a lot of people who disdain pseudoscience. Yes, many people are insulted when they find a particular idea they subscribe to being identified as a pseudoscience. They may even say that such a label is "ridicule". But, at its basic, it is just identifying the kind and matter of claims that are being made. When I say "astrology is pseudoscience" that is not the same thing as saying "only dimwits believe in astrology". You see? jps (talk) 18:43, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Well, apart from not being ridiculous for being wrong, which kinda was the subject above re the 1768 Britannica entry, pre-modern astrologers were also not pseudoscientific for being wrong. But you know this. I also think the jump you made here from contempt and ridicule to calling something pseudoscience says a lot about how there's hardly a distinction anymore between them these days. What can be called scientific is normative, even (and self-contradictingly) for the enemies of science. But you probably know this too. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:14, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Right. We're not going to solve the acrimony that surrounds a topic being identified as pseudoscience given the context of our world as is. But I don't see any way around it -- just because there is controversy over a subject doesn't mean we have to handle it with kid gloves or accommodate the feelings of those who feel slighted. I do think, however, that this is a primary motivation of the approaches that avoid using "pseudoscience". That's perfectly fine, but it's not Wikipedia's approach. In fact, it is rather antithetical to WP:NPOV/WP:NOTCENSORED as these ideas are practiced here. jps (talk) 19:44, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree that we should not shy away from using the term 'pseudoscience' when it's applicable. We disagree over whether it's applicable to the whole topic of astrology, or only to a part of it, but not over whether we should use it at all. We are, moreover, in closer agreement with each other than with some others, since unlike some other people out there we both believe that pseudoscience is the most appropriate category for understanding contemporary forms of astrology. I just strongly object to applying that modern category to historical topics, and with me most historians, believe me. I find it pitiful that a subject with such an illustrious history is framed entirely from the perspective of what a few modern quacks have made of it. It's deplorable. Cometh the day that there are no more astrologers, so the subject may finally receive the sympathetic treatment that it rightfully deserves. On that too, I suspect we may in fact agree. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:51, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

An easy out would be to start source that do this careful demarcation and distinguishing. But more than a few of the popular astrology accounts have been dreadful. One, written by an intelligent design apologist, I will let you look for yourself. The problem is that what historians are interested in is not the "astrological" claims per se (as they are currently summarized) of the astrologers of the past, but rather the context in which these claims were made. I think that Kepler may have parlayed his general erudition and observational prowess in the context of astrological nonsense so that the courts of Europe would pay heed to some of his warnings (the ones fo 1595 in particular which were all predictions one could have made knowing absolutely nothing of astrology). But we're stuck with the Kepler Colleges of the world, so I think this will have to await publication of your brilliant treatise that does proper demarcation. jps (talk) 21:40, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology as divination

Above, MCRIRE included the idea of astrology being a divinatory practice in a list. I think this may be the actual contemporary definition of astrology. If the claim about the planets or the stars is one that is properly divination, then the claim is astrology. Otherwise it isn't. I have been wracking my brain to think of a counter-example, but I cannot. Could divination, then, serve as a decent definitional category for astrology?

jps (talk) 12:41, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Well "astrology /əˈstrɒlədʒi/ noun the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world." so yes, that seems to be what astrology is, divination. Slatersteven (talk) 13:10, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

It seems the most decent suggestion so far, at least. And it avoids the "naval observatory" counterexample you mentioned above. XOR'easter (talk) 16:28, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

Lede revision

Since the discussion has been spread over various conversations, and is getting harder to follow for everyone involved, to summarize the current conversation: User:Slatersteven has suggested

Astrology is a divinatory practise that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Recognized as a pseudoscience today, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

Along with User:Slatersteven, User:Apaugasma, User:Mathsci, User:XOR'easter, jps, and myself are in favor of this general schema with varying levels of tweaking. Of the users involved in the discussion, User:Cpotisch, User:Animalparty, User:RandomCanadian, User:AndyTheGrump, User:Nø, and User:Hob Gadling (asked not to be pinged) have not given any input. Some minor revisions that have been floated:

• Could be tweaked slightly to avoid repetition: e.g. "motions of the heavenly bodies" instead of "celestial cycles" (User:Mathsci)
• I would revise the second line to read "While the modern practice of astrology is recognized as emblematic of pseudoscience today, it has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE" or something similar. (myself)
  • In response: That seems to add length without adding a corresponding amount of clarity, at least to me [...] Perhaps the second line could begin, "Recognized as a pseudoscience today, versions have been practiced..." (User:XOR'easter)

User:Apaugasma, User:XOR'easter, and jps have either minor quibbles or simply recognize the capacity for improvement.

--MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 04:20, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I strongly oppose this proposal, not only because I vehemently object to the content, but also because your “summarization” clearly and willfully ignores the viewpoints of users you claim “have not given any input”. That is patently untrue. I have given multiple extensive explanations of why the “pseudoscience” label should not be watered down, as has @RandomCanadian, and you’re literally lying about the conversation to bend the consensus in your favor. This is absolutely absurd. Cpotisch (talk) 05:04, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Clearly, I meant not given any input on the particular proposal provided by Slatersteven. I pinged both you, RandomCandian, and several other users -- who I explicitly mentioned were involved in the conversation, but had not commented on it. I was specifically asking you to give your opinion on this because it seems roughly half of those here now support the revision, assuming those I pinged as "not giving input" would be expressly opposed. I never claimed to have consensus, in fact, I went the extra mile to ask for input from everyone. You are welcome to disagree with the proposed revision. That's the whole point of pinging you. Calm yourself. Oh, and further, User:Slatersteven is on your side -- prefering a stronger mention of pseudoscience. As it turns out, the current proposal is a compromise.MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 05:27, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with the first idea, not with the second, as said it is a pseudoscience and we can't water that down. Slatersteven (talk) 11:05, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

In his chapter on "Astrology" by Darrell Rutkin, has been quoted here out of context. There is a 1728 Cyclopedia entry by Ephraim Chambers. In the chapter, Chambers gives the definition: "the Art of foretelling future Events, from the Aspects, Positions, and Influences of the Heavenly Bodies"; he contrasts that with, "Judiciary, or Judicial ASTROLOGY, which is what we commonly call Astrology, is that which pretends to foretell moral Events; i.e. such as have a Dependence on the Will and Agency of Man; as if they were directed by the Stars ... the chief Province now remaining to the modern Professors, is the making of Calendars or Almanacks." In her chapter "Marginalized Practices" in Vol. 4 of the Cambridge History of Science (ed. Roy Porter), Patricia Fara writes that, "astrology has no fixed definition, but the term broadly refers to systems that focus on interpreting the human or terrestrial significance of the stars." She explains this in the cultural context of eighteenth-century England, demarcating three strands: popular beliefs on the predictions of the stars within "rural laborers urban artisans," rooted in superstition; judicial astrology involving the use of horoscopes and astral lines, promoted by antiquarian practitioners that gained popularity amongst the Victorian middle class; and philosophical astrology, combining astronomy with theology, so that knowledge could be used to avoid impending disasters. Mathsci (talk) 11:52, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Reading the objections, I think the main issue with the text is that it does adequately provide the framing for why astrology is pseudoscience. Just declaring that it is "recognized as pseudoscience today", while true, doesn't explain what makes it such. I take the criticisms on board. We need to do better than this. jps (talk) 11:13, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I am unsure that is something for the lede to do. Slatersteven (talk) 11:21, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I think that the reason that is is pseudoscience is contained in its definition. See below. jps (talk) 11:31, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Workshop first sentence

Below is a possible modification that I think makes the first sentence a bit clearer:

Astrology is a form of divination and a pseudoscience that believers claim can discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events through studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects.

References

jps (talk) 11:18, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

And we already know (whatever I may think of it) that some will disagree with it. 11:22, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Maybe? But if we can get consensus, we don't need everyone to agree. jps (talk) 11:31, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

true. maybe we need an RFC. Slatersteven (talk) 11:36, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Jps, it seems that this suggestion ignores my whole rationale for proposing a change to the lead sentence in the first place. The problem with the current version is that it characterizes all astrology as essentially pseudoscience, which is just not accurate given the historical forms (which are very notable from an encyclopedic perspective, and in fact form the main subject of this article) to which this label is extraneous. Your suggestion here does just the same. What is needed is an introduction that clearly marks modern astrology as pseudoscience, without extending the same to astrology tout court.

The proposal above at the start of this section, which I still support, does make that crucial distinction between contemporary pseudoscience and historical forms of astrology, which were in fact perfectly legitimate branches of the science of their day. It succeeds at this because it does not use the word 'pseudoscience' in the general description of astrology given in the lead sentence, instead framing this as the subject's modern status in the second sentence.

If astrology is divination by observing the stars, it's distinct from astronomical predictions that do not give a providential, god-like role to the stars (as in your example of observing the lunar ephemerides to predict the tides), but still not 'pseudoscientific' in most historical contexts: astrology as divination perfectly fits within the broader cosmological view that was widely accepted from antiquity until the early modern period, a view perhaps best described by Cicero in his De natura deorum and his De divinatione, in which the celestial bodies were regarded as endowed with the responsibility to administer the lower parts of the cosmos. The idea that the stars somehow regulate life on earth was universally abandoned by the scientific community in the 18th century, not before that. It only makes sense to call this type of view pseudoscience when practiced in the modern context, where it willfully and explicitly contravenes accepted science. It is therefore wrong to include the label pseudoscience in a general definition of the subject. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:27, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Having slept on the matter, I'm even more solid on the point I raised before: Being pseudoscience today is fully consistent with having been science in the past. That's just the progress of knowledge. It doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, but it certainly does in some quite prominent ones, and ignoring this does the history of science an injustice. There were scientific objections to heliocentrism in Galileo's time; Newton's alchemy influenced his optics; Pythagorean mathematics was of a piece with their mysticism. So, while I don't wholly dislike the proposal in the green box above, I think jps is right that we need to take criticisms of it on board, and I reject the idea that we need to implement it in order to draw a distinction that, in fact, is already encompassed by the very word pseudoscience.

The sentence starts Astrology is, not Astrology was or Astrology originated as. XOR'easter (talk) 14:23, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Certainly, being pseudoscience today is fully consistent with having been science in the past. But it doesn't imply having been science in the past. Most pseudosciences have always been pseudoscience. The word pseudoscience does not in any way encompass having a long history of being accepted science. The injustice to the history of science is wholly in pretending that astrology being pseudoscience is a trans-historical given. According to historians of science, astrology is not pseudoscience, it became pseudoscience by the combination of scientific progress and the emergence of a new class of people who were prepared to reject that progress in order to continue doing astrology. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

We don't need to imply "having been science in the past" in the very first sentence, provided that the rest of the intro makes the historical trajectory clear enough. XOR'easter (talk) 16:05, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Arguably, astrology is one of the things that has "always been pseudoscience". This is definitely post hoc rationalization and No True Scotsman as a matter of rhetoric, but it is the practical matter of how the subject is distinguished from astronomy today. If the idea being promoted was pseudoscientific then it is "astrology". If not, it is "astronomy". Sure, the words meant something different in the past and there is a mash-mash in the primary sources, but this has been teased out at this point.

A counterexample I cannot think of. The closest I can get is the subject of meteorites which were taken to be fantasy through the eighteenth century though they were not. However, the "claims of rocks from space" were never described as "astrology" as far as I'm aware. Literally all the "astrological" identifiers as they are applied today are attached to claims which have been shown to be empirically incorrect. We can mention the fact that in the past other claims were thought part of "astrology", but are now considered not to be astrology, but that doesn't mean that we are helpless in identifying the "always pseudoscientific" nature of what is now termed "astrology".

jps (talk) 16:30, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes. The argument against fails basic logic, it's like arguing you can't say somebody is dead because they were once alive. Per WP:PSCI the description of this stuff as pseudoscience must be prominent - in the first few words I'd say. Alexbrn (talk) 14:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

We can and should say that astrology has the status pseudoscience now, preferably in the second sentence. It's 'dead' now, but being 'dead' doesn't define it. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

In English the word "is" is the present tense so we don't need wordy cruft added. We say "Malone is dead", not "Malone now has the status of being dead". Pseudoscience is definitional for astrology, yes. Alexbrn (talk) 15:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Wordy cruft? The proposal above which I support says Recognized as a pseudoscience today, That's not even a whole sentence! It does, however, imply that pseudoscience is not definitional for astrology, which I have argued at length above and below. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:14, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

characterizes all astrology as essentially pseudoscience I don't see the problem. Yes, astrology has been recast today as pseudoscientific. Yes, in the past, there were people practicing astrology who did not see it that way (as the idea of pseudoscience did not exist). We aren't arguing that one needs to look into the past with the pseudoscience lens. We are saying that the practice of astrology as it is demarcated today is one that is pseudoscientific. That's practically one of its defining characteristics (see "astronomy versus astrology"). The only problem with this is that that there may be some practitioners who somehow claim their astrological practice is "outside" the realm of science. Maybe they claim they aren't making empirical claims. But I think that this is not what the vast majority of sources describe as astrology. jps (talk) 14:59, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree that those proponents of astrology who claim being 'outside' of science are marginal in our sources. In today's context, it best fits the pseudoscience label, nothing else. But what is not marginal in our sources is the historical position of astrology. The largest part of our article is about that. Starting our article as you suggest is not saying that the practice of astrology as it is demarcated today is one that is pseudoscientific: it says that astrology is pseudoscientific, without distinction, and then immediately goes on to talk about historical forms of astrology, as if it's talking about the same thing. If you agree that we shouldn't promote looking into the past with the pseudoscience lens, then we need to word things differently. As I suggested above, perhaps the entire first paragraph should strictly and explicitly be about the modern, pseudoscientific practice. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:45, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

That use of the first paragraph would make sense, I think. The current introduction follows a somewhat strange, non-chronological path (present day, ancient Mesopotamia, back to the supermarket tabloids, Dante Alighieri, ...). My guess it was developed piecemeal, without an overall plan in mind, as much wiki-text is. XOR'easter (talk) 16:11, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

But the problem here is that there are two astrologies. There is the one that people used in context (and, at times, was difficult to demarcate) and then there is the precise definition which is to say the current one. When historians examine "astrology" as a historical subject, they are often tasked with looking at primary source documents which use the term in a different fashion than we currently do. I can understand that they do not find it as a necessary or even fruitful part of their job to try to make the "astronomy vs. astrology" distinction that science educators do (and that you agree can be made). But the thing is that this is not a historical encyclopedia trying to document with care to the primary sources what historical approaches to astrology/astronomy/etc. looked like. This is an article about "astrology". To the extent that astrology in the past was empirically verified (as, when, for example, certain geometrical tricks perfected in the casting of horoscopes were used to predict eclipses), these aspects have been separated out into astronomy and, I might add, astrologers today, even the self-described ones, do not take it upon themselves to make ephemerides calculations. So we have a way of distinguishing between "astrology" and "astronomy" today which is perhaps presentist, but it is the most common way to discuss the subjects. I was looking through the sources you linked to above and they all basically make this point as well. Yes, "astrology" meant something different in the past. It's confusing. It's now much more clear what astrology is. I don't see anything wrong with making that statement plain for the reader. jps (talk) 16:13, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Hmmm. If, as you seem to do above, you take the 'precise' definition of astrology to be that part of historical astronomy which is always pseudoscientific according to today's standards, then for sure it will be useless as a historical category: it will be a sort of waste bucket for anything any astronomer-astrologer ever posited that happens to be incongruous with the prevailing scientific paradigms of today (or for that matter, those of tomorrow). It will have no identity of its own, only serving as the 'other' by which astronomy identifies itself.

Philosophers of science also won't have much use for it, since something that has pseudoscience in its very definition is not helpful for trying to define pseudoscience without getting trapped in circles. To be useful to philosophers of science, astrology needs to be a set of definite claims whose (pseudo)scientific status is not yet predefined, but which can be ascertained as an attribute of that set of claims.

I guess that, in the end, defining astrology as the ever-pseudoscientific 'other' of astronomy is mainly useful to astronomers. But the thing is, astronomers hardly ever write about astrology, and history and philosophy of science are the two fields in which astrology is most often discussed. It's on sources from these two fields that our article draws. I submit that the approach of these sources is being ignored here in favor of an editorial policy proper to Wikipedia. You know my view on this matter. But as always, I will also respect that editorial policy, if it retains consensus. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:33, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Astronomers write a lot about astrology. They just don't bother to publish it in academic journals. It's in textbooks, mostly. But that's a perfectly reasonable venue and set of source material. I understand your concern about the ultimate uselessness of astrology as a historical category, but I can only shrug and say, "oh well." Pseudoscience as a topic is fraught. We've been over that. However, that really just underscores the point that the proper demarcation happens in venues that are properly science education rather than anthropology, philosophy, history, or sociology. The fact is that even these historical sources use the term in reference to this "pop" understanding. They just dig a bit deeper into context, as I am reading them. jps (talk) 19:40, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Damn, we were so close to a consensus!

Okay, let's start from the beginning here.

Astrology is any of various ancient systems of divination by celestial bodies.

I don't think literally any of us disagree with this description. I think this is the simplest, and most accurate, way to introduce the subject. If someone had never heard of astrology before, it would make the most sense: it applies to Babylonian astrology as much as it does TikTok horoscopy and sun sign astrology. Speaking of horoscopes: that page doesn't mention pseudoscience until the fourth paragraph. Chinese astrology doesn't mention pseudoscience at all. Western astrology doesn't mention pseudoscience until the very end of the lede. Sun sign astrology, which has the strongest case for pseudoscience, doesn't mention pseudoscience until the second paragraph. Astrology and science doesn't mention pseudoscience until the third paragraph! There doesn't really seem to be a reason to include pseudoscience in the first sentence on the page, since it seems to be the only page on this subject that does so, and moving it lower in the lede will allow a more substantial explanation of the discipline and its historical trajectory. In fact, adapting a sentence of two from these other pages might do us some of the heavy-lifting:

By the end of the 17th century, emerging scientific concepts in astronomy, such as heliocentrism, undermined the theoretical basis of astrology, which subsequently lost its academic standing. The contemporary practice of astrology, such as the sun sign astrology most commonly found in many newspaper and magazine columns, has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity, and is thus regarded as pseudoscience. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 17:49, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't think literally any of us disagree with this description. I disagree. Astrology is not "ancient". jps (talk) 17:53, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I also disagree, it's a poor & evasive opening description. Alexbrn (talk) 17:57, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes. We could make up a divination scheme based entirely on celestial bodies unknown in the ancient world (say, Kuiper belt objects). It would not be ancient, but it would be astrology. Heck, in the modern world, we could sell it as an NFT. Who's up for a rug-pull? XOR'easter (talk) 18:20, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

The fact that many astrologers are fairly obsessed with Pluto (and REJECT its demotion) is another example of this. jps (talk) 18:23, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You don't think that astrology is ancient? I don't know how you could substantiate this. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 18:18, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Because most of what people term astrology today is not ancient in spite of antecedents that may have ancient provenance. It's rather like refusing to define writing as an "ancient system of symbolic communication" even though it was invented in ancient times, as it is still being practiced today it does not help to highlight the ancient practice. jps (talk)

Because most of what people term astrology today is referring to the historical (and indeed ancient) practice. The vast majority of reliable sources on astrology are not referring to sun sign astrology or any other contemporary practices. Searching for astrology on JSTOR or Scholar will bring up, invariably, reams of studies of astrology grounded in the historical sciences. With that being said: even modern practices of astrology are ancient or have their roots in ancient practices.--MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 18:52, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Eh, repeating something over and over again doesn't make it so. I looked through a lot of these Google Scholar searches. They all acknowledge the modern, or presentist if you prefer, definition either explicitly or implicitly. jps (talk) 18:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Maybe my results are different because, you know, the algorithm, but the first 10 results for "astrology" on Google Scholar as they appear to me are:

• Barton, Tamysn. Ancient astrology. Routledge, 2002.
• Tester, S. Jim. A history of western astrology. Boydell & Brewer, 1987.
• Holden, James H. A history of horoscopic astrology. American Federation of Astr, 2006.
• Beck, Roger. A brief history of ancient astrology. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
• Wuthnow, Robert. "Astrology and marginality." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (1976): 157-168.
• Pingree, David. "Astronomy and astrology in India and Iran." Isis 54.2 (1963): 229-246.
• Pingree, David. "Astrology." Encyclopedia of Astronomy & Astrophysics. CRC Press, 2001. 1-3.
• Thagard, Paul R. "Why astrology is a pseudoscience." PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Vol. 1978. No. 1. Philosophy of Science Association, 1978.
• Thorndike, Lynn. "The true place of astrology in the history of science." Isis 46.3 (1955): 273-278.
• Barnes, Robin B. Astrology and reformation. Oxford University Press, 2015.

I think this substantiates my claim that [s]earching for astrology on JSTOR or Scholar will bring up, invariably, reams of studies of astrology grounded in the historical sciences. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 19:02, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

The fact is that all these sources identify the present practice of astrology as existing. So it doesn't really substantiate your argument that the context is always historical or ancient. In fact, more than one of these sources identifies present practice of astrology as having both differences and similarities to the historical practice, so it seems particularly unfair to identify astrology as an ancient practice when it is not just that. jps (talk) 19:26, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Wuthnow's paper is a study of 1,000 residents of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976, which found widespread openness to the claims of astrology, interest in horoscopes, and knowledge of astrological signs. The location was chosen explicitly because counterculture was expected to be prevalent there. It mentions the musical Hair but not Kepler, Ptolemy, ancient Mesopotamia, etc. XOR'easter (talk) 19:30, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I was giving the first ten results, whatever they are, not only results that give a historical treatment. There is also a paper by Thaggard that similarly concerns the modern practice. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 19:32, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I did not say any of those sources would deny the present practice of astrology. I was responding to your first particular claim: Because most of what people term astrology today is not ancient in spite of antecedents that may have ancient provenance. Contemporary astrology is astrology. But most of what people term astrology today is indeed the ancient and historical practice, not simply or exclusively the modern practice -- to reiterate, [s]earching for astrology on JSTOR or Scholar will bring up, invariably, reams of studies of astrology grounded in the historical sciences. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 19:31, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You suggested the wording "astrology is any of various ancient systems". I pointed out that it is not just ancient systems. You concede that contemporary systems exist and are astrology. Therefore, I think my point is decently made. jps (talk) 19:36, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Contemporary systems exist, are astrology, and are also ancient. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 19:41, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

??? "Today is happening, is a moment in time, and is in the past." That's what that reads to me like what you are writing. jps (talk) 19:48, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Jainism is a contemporary religion. It's also an ancient religion: Jainism, also known as Jain Dharma, is an ancient Indian religion. Saying that Jainism is ancient doesn't imply anything about contemporary Jainism and how it relates to ancient Jainism. Astrology, similarly, is an ancient practice. It's also a contemporary practice. (WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS doesn't apply here: While comparing with other articles is not, in general, a convincing argument, comparing with articles that have been through some kind of quality review such as Featured article, Good article, or have achieved a WikiProject A class rating, make a much more credible case, and Jainism is a WP:GA.) MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 20:12, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

The practice of astrology today is not that of an organized religion. It is popularized and bursts out of "ancient" molds. Pretending that it is "ancient" is one of the hooks that proponents use to claim substance to their ideas, but, as many of the sources you identify above attest!, these ideas are often of fairly recent provenance. This is actually in stark contrast to something like Jainism which tries desperately to follow edicts and practices from their ancient scriptures and traditions. Astrology is rather more like Wicca which is a modern religion that claims connection to ancient practices. jps (talk) 20:22, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

This is actually in stark contrast to something like Jainism which tries desperately to follow edicts and practices from their ancient scriptures and traditions This is a very elementary view of Jainism that ignores how different contemporary Jainism (or Buddhism, or Hinduism) is from its predecessors in ancient India. It is not like Wicca because Wicca is a wholesale fabrication on the part of Gardner: contemporary astrology is based on, but not synonymous with, Hellenistic astrology of the Antique era. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 20:34, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You think contemporary astrology isn't a wholesale fabrication of Blavatsky et al? As with Wicca, its revival is all out of the same spiritualist movements of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. jps (talk) 21:49, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

McDonald's offering a special on the McChicken because Mercury is in retrograde [12] is not ancient. Nor are automobile air fresheners themed to the zodiac [13]. Or star-sign-based dating apps [14]. XOR'easter (talk) 19:53, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Irrelevant. Both the notion of Mercury being in retrograde, sun signs, and the Zodiac are ancient. Doing things based on them is similarly an ancient practice. Yes, McChickens didn't exist in Late Antique Egypt. And automobile air fresheners didn't exist in the post-Classic Maya city states. And dating apps didn't exist in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. They all had astrology, though. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 20:15, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Mercury being in retrograde isn't "ancient". It's just a fact of the relative motion of the planets around the Sun. The argument that you should have a discount on chicken when Mercury is in retrograde is not an ancient argument either, as far as I can tell. It looks extremely recent as a belief system, as far as I can tell. jps (talk) 20:24, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

As for your other points about spin-out articles, I agree that WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but I rather think that this may be a poor reflection on the style of those articles rather than a strong argument that this article should conform to their style. jps (talk) 18:05, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, FWIW this article is a WP:GA which suggests it's a model of sorts. Alexbrn (talk) 18:06, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology and science is also a WP:GA. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 18:19, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Its second sentence is Astrology has been rejected by the scientific community as having no explanatory power for describing the universe. If that article is a model to follow, it's a case for calling the subject pseudoscience as quickly as possible. XOR'easter (talk) 18:22, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I have no strong objections to this sentence, actually. Just to note: 'pseudoscience' isn't synonymous with 'false.' An idea being disproved doesn't make it pseudoscience: that's a very particular claim. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 18:48, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Me neither. Also note that Astrology and science says Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity, and is thus regarded as pseudoscience. (my bolding) Being pseudoscience is presented as an attribute, the subject's modern status. I wholeheartedly agree with that. It doesn't try to define astrology as inherently pseudoscientific, which is the problem with the lead of our article here. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:51, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

What precisely do you think are the parts of astrology that are not inherently pseudosicentific? jps (talk) 21:52, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Ptolemy is the one to introduce retrograde and prograde to describe the movement of the planets in relation to the stars, and as previously discussed, Ptolemy was an astrologer. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 20:37, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Just because The Almagest survives doesn't mean Ptolemy was the one to "introduce" descriptions of the movement of the planets. You can track them on your own just by looking night after night. Indeed, people all over the world did that and do that. So Ptolemy is not why chicken is on sale. jps (talk) 21:52, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Another revision based on User:Slatersteven and User:Apaugasma's input, adapted partially from Astrology and science which User:XOR'easter brought up, with "ancient" omitted as per User:ඞඕඩ / jps in the favor of compromise:

Astrology is a divinatory practise that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. It has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, having its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Astrology not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity, and is thus rejected by the scientific community as pseudoscience.

I will also back any order of these sentences, the one here is roughly chronological. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 21:08, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't see how this will please anyone, unfortunately. In the given ordering, it pushes "pseudoscience" later, which will dissatisfy many; even shuffling the sentences around, it still treats the ancient and the contemporary as synonymous, unless one accepts that "pseudoscience" can encompass the formerly scientific. It also inherits from the current opening line a tendency to underplay the variety of activities that have gone under this label. One might instead say, for example, Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, now recognized as pseudoscientific, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. (I think we can get by without saying both movements and positions for the sake of brevity.) Then one could follow up with, e.g., Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. XOR'easter (talk) 21:31, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I guess I could back

Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, now recognized [by the scientific community] as pseudoscientific, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

With bracketed text preferred imo but I'm okay without it, as well. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 21:46, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I like XOR'easter's proposal here very much. It's very quick to point to the pseudoscientific nature of the subject, yet succeeds in framing this as a modern attribute rather than as an inherent trait, all while pointing to the diversity in practices from the very beginning. It's just great! The bracketed text proposed by MCRIRE feels like unnecessary bloat to me. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:51, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

I think the "now" is unnecessary. Astrology is a range of pseudoscientific divinatory practices that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. As noted earlier, this has been recognised as pseudoscience (or "become a just subject of contempt and ridicule") for centuries. Qualifying this using "now" or "today" would be misleading, as it would imply criticism of astrology's validity is merely a modern attitude when, in fact, it is not so. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Now is necessary because it was not always recognized as pseudoscience, or indeed, anything other than science until relatively recently. By the way: the whole "become a just subject of contempt and ridicule" source you keep bringing up is from the Early Modern Period. And once again: pseudoscience is not synonymous with invalid. It's a very particular claim. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 21:59, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

What definition of science are you using? Properly, immediately after the scientific revolution astrology was one of the first things to be dismissed and ridiculed. I don't think was ever considered "science" in the sense that we consider things to be scientific. It was considered to be "knowledge" and perhaps "wise practice", but that's not the definition most people use for "science" any more. jps (talk) 22:12, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

See history of science in early cultures. See Thaggard:

One interesting consequence of the above criterion is that a theory can be scientific at one time but pseudoscientific at another. In the time of Ptolemy or even Kepler, astrology had few alternatives in the explanation of human personality and behavior. Existing alternatives were scarcely more sophisticated or corroborated than astrology. Hence astrology should be judged as not pseudoscientific in classical or Renaissance times, even though it is pseudoscientific today. Astrology was not simply a perverse sideline of Ptolemy and Kepler, but part of their scientific activity, even if a physicist involved with astrology today should be looked at askance. Only when the historical and social aspects of science are neglected does it become plausible that pseudoscience is an unchanging category. Rationality is not a property of ideas eternally: ideas, like actions, can be raional at [one] time but irrational at others. Hence relativizing the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods is a desirable result.

— Paul R. Thaggard, "Why astrology is a pseudoscience." Introductory readings in the philosophy of science (1998): 49.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 22:23, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

This is not a very good source because what he is considering "science" is not defined. In fact, the idea that science and pseudoscience are not unchanging categories runs up against a problem of universalism. Did balls not roll down ramps with constant velocity until Galileo? I doubt anyone would say that. But if Aristotle argued that objects fell at rates proportional to their mass, was that a scientific claim up until then? There is a fundamental disconnect with the "science" that Thaagard is talking about and the one that I am trying to describe when I say that certain claims are "scientific". jps (talk) 02:21, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

is from the Early Modern Period, which further reinforces my point that astrology's lack of validity is not something that is merely true "now". RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 22:36, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

You stated that it would imply criticism of astrology's validity is merely a modern attitude when, in fact, it is not so. As it happens, it is indeed a modern attitude. The source is from the Early Modern Period. Lucretius and Cicero of course criticized astrology, but not exactly along scientific lines. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 22:44, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

"modern" has multiple meanings; something from 2 centuries ago is not quite the "modern" I had in mind (and the emphasis I put on "now" should have made this clear, no?). I still maintain that stating that astrology is now recognized as pseudoscientific would require a very substantial stretching of the meaning of the time period usually covered by the word "now"; since astrology has not just been "now" recognised as pseudoscientific (well, of course, unless you're speaking on astronomical timescales, but these are obviously not meaningful ways to measure human history) but has been for quite a while... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:20, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

What about saying for centuries instead of now? XOR'easter (talk) 01:23, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

"for centuries" is unnecessarily ambiguous, "since the Scientific Revolution" might be more precise. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:03, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

"Now" is a concise counterpart of the "2nd millenium BCE" that follows. To be really precise, we should say recognized as pseudoscientific since at least the 18th century, though that would all seem a bit unduly precise to me. Turning it into Astrology is a range of pseudoscientific divinatory practices, however, would again characterize all astrology, including the 2nd millenium BCE variant of which we immediately start talking, as pseudoscientific. But according to David Pingree, ancient Greek astrology in its strictest interpretation was the most comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity. And as Thagard says, relativizing the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods is a desirable result. Any reason why you would think that not desirable? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 02:43, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

As mentioned below, the literature has not agreed upon the point of whether intellectual activity in antiquity can meaningfully be called "science". The series introduction in the Barton volume (by Roger French of Cambridge) goes as far as saying that there was no such thing as science in the ancient world, and argues that claims otherwise are due to Whiggishness and a drive to legitimize new disciplines by asserting an illustrious past. G. E. R. Lloyd kicked off his Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections (Oxford UP, 2004) by saying that the very question Is there science in the ancient world? has been the subject of much heated debate; his own answer seems to have been a book-length "it's complicated". One can emphasize commonalities in types of evidence considered (e.g., positions of the naked-eye planets) or one can emphasize differences in goals and methods. So, the most comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity business can't be presented as a firm conclusion.

Using "the Scientific Revolution" as a time frame is not very precise; depending on who you ask, it could be confined to the 17th century or stretch from the 14th through the 18th. XOR'easter (talk) 05:42, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Sure, 'it's complicated' is the only right answer (and Lloyd is a great scholar!). But if the hard view is maintained that there was no science in antiquity, there also was no pseudoscience. It will then remain imperative to relativize the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods. Only some scholars will go as far as to say that science is a purely modern phenomenon, but almost all scholars will agree that pseudoscience is primarily a modern phenomenon, because it is actually largely driven by anti-modernism. Including ancient astrology under the pseudoscience umbrella is to export an essentially modern polemics into the distant past. Almost all historians these days are strongly opposed to that. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 10:05, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

In the hard view, there was no "astrology" either. jps (talk) 11:09, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I do think it's the best proposal put forward yet, and as I mentioned, I'm okay without the unnecessary bloat, as well -- though I retain the attitude a more comprehensive treatment of astrological history is necessary, at least somewhere in the page. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 22:01, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Let me quote y'all from Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (2012). Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-19621-5. p. 171:

Astrology and alchemy were central to this development of medieval science, and, as will be seen, these two traditional disciplines are the supreme examples of how thoroughly mainstream academic scholarship can be led astray by an anachronistic use of basic concepts. Reacting to the standard post-eighteenth-century image of astrology as “pseudoscience,” Lynn Thorndike pointed out as early as 1955 that modern historians of science have been “strangely blind” to the fact that classical astrology was grounded in a concept of universal, immutable natural law. As formulated more recently by the leading contemporary specialist David Pingree, the union of some aspects of advanced Babylonian celestial divination with aristotelian physics and Hellenistic astronomy had resulted, in Egypt by the second century BCE, in

the supreme attempt made in antiquity to create in a rigorous form a causal model of the kosmos, one in which the eternally repeating rotations of the celestial bodies, together with their varying but periodically recurring interrelationships, produce all changes in the sublunar world of the four elements that, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary effects, constitute the generation and decay of material bodies and the modifications of the parts or functions of the rational and irrational souls of men, animals and plants. In other words, ancient Greek astrology in its strictest interpretation was the most comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity, providing through the application of the mathematical models appropriate to it predictions of all changes that take place in the world of cause and effect [...]

Obviously, Pingree's comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity has little or nothing to do with the astrology of today, which is not in any way rigorous and comprehensive, but rather cherry-picking only those claims which remain useful in the schemes of modern quacks. Nor could it be comprehensive, of course, since real science has evolved. That's what turned astrology into pseudoscience from the 18th century onward.

In the context of what we were discussing above about Enlightenment polemics and 1786's Britannica finding astrology a subject only worthy of contempt and ridicule, let me also quote from Hanegraaff 2012, pp. 163–164:

Although highly innovative in defining superstition as an intellectual error and opposing it to science, Enlightenment constructs of superstition remained firmly rooted in traditional theological concepts of paganism as fear of demons, idolatry, and ritual excess. It is no exaggeration to say that the basic error Enlightenment ideologues tried to remove from Christian culture was paganism, but now redefined as its long-standing weakness for imagining the presence of spiritual realities in nature (the very same concept that would famously be labeled “animism” by Tylor at the end of the nineteenth century). For thinkers with Christian commitments, and Protestants in particular, this was an extremely attractive perspective, for it allowed them to align themselves with scientific progress in a joint campaign to finish the job of purifying Christianity from its ancient nemesis.

Although we have learned to think of the Enlightenment crusade against superstition as a battle of science against nonsensical “pseudo-science,” this perception is therefore misleading. Rather, it was a straight continuation of the old battle of Christian theology against paganism, but now fought with a potent new weapon. This weapon was not, as usually assumed, that of scientific and rational argument, for even the decline of astrology cannot be convincingly attributed to those factors, and Enlightenment thinkers hardly bothered to refute “superstitious” beliefs. They had discovered a simpler and much more effective tool to rid the world of invisible spirits: ridicule.

What Hanegraaff writes summarizes contemporary historians' views on astrology, and how it evolved from a comprehensive scientific theory to a pseudoscience, through a period where it was still perceived as a science but one that reeked of idolatry and spiritualism, and that therefore should properly be the subject of contempt and ridicule. Combined with Thagard's (a non-historian) astrology should be judged as not pseudoscientific in classical or Renaissance times, even though it is pseudoscientific today and relativizing the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods is a desirable result as quoted above, it should be entirely clear that we must not ignore these scholars' views by insisting on a definition where astrology is inherently pseudoscientific. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:21, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, this merely elaborates upon a point already discussed above. Being pseudoscience today doesn't exclude having been the best people could do at the time. Today's pseudoscience could have been yesterday's science, or yesterday's "love of wisdom" in a broader sense that does not presume everything that science implies in our time.

Interestingly, Tester History of Ancient Astrology cited above argues that Thorndike did too much in one man's working life to get it all right, saw astrologers where there weren't any, and trusted gossips like Simon de Phares. For Tester, astrology per se could not exist before an accurate, or fairly accurate, mathematical system was devised which enabled men to plot [...] the relative position of earth and planets against the background of the fixed stars; vaguely prophesying from stellar omens without such a system is proto-astrology at most. Barton's Ancient Astrology, also cited above, is part of a series that argues that casting the term science back into the past is an anachronism — the modern world gives it intrinsic baggage that is simply inapplicable, even to those activities that have been called "science in the ancient world". Barton says of a 20th-century newspaper horoscope, This is about as distant from the astrology discussed in the following pages as you could find. It is not only that the prominence of the Sunsign, abstracted from its context, is a modern phenomenon, but that the whole style of the piece would have been quite alien to ancient astrologers. Whether any intellectual work of ancient Greece should be designated a "comprehensive scientific theory" is an unresolved matter, perhaps because classification is intrinsically difficult or because historians just like to argue; resolving that is above my pay grade. XOR'easter (talk) 01:14, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the quote, but it makes me more convinced than ever that there isn't anything in astrology that isn't pseudoscientific in the sense of actual empirical content. It's great that astrology invoked a rehabilitation or combination of different ideas, but it still based them on conceits that were not empirically founded. That's fine, but it isn't "science". Well, maybe it's "science" for those who think that science is whatever the smart people do, but I'm not particularly enthused by that approach. The problem is that an argument that science/pseudoscience is relative vis-a-vis the actual claims themselves fails at kind of the Samuel Johnson kick of the stone. Either the planets have the influences or they don't. Either human affairs can be predicted or they cannot. The unholy alliance between heresy chasers and Enlightenment atheists is a wonderful morality play but it also doesn't really deal with the substance of my question. What in astrology in the past was explicitly not pseudoscientific? What particular claim was made which was empirically grounded and subject to testing? That's my real question. jps (talk) 02:14, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

If you construct an ahistorical idea of science that is based on modern notions, then of course astrology was pseudoscientific in the past as well as the present.

I think you should ask yourself: What in any science in the past was explicitly not pseudoscientific? Astrology was not alone in being "not empirically founded." Or, do you believe that there was simply no science before the Early Modern? And if that is so: how can astrology be pseudoscientific without a proper scientific other? This is one reason Thagard argues against a notion of pseudoscience that is ahistorical or transhistorical. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 02:39, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I got excited for a second that you might have picked up on something that was bugging me about the pseudoscience epithet when it comes to "ancient astrology", but then you skipped past it. No matter, your actual point is pretty blah and, sadly, kinda misses my point that the antecedents to everything that is scientific now is scientific! Talk about "ahistorical"... yeah, it's universalist. But since you don't provide a definition for science either except to say that it's not an ahistorical one, I'm fairly nonplussed. jps (talk) 03:40, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@XOR'easter: yes, this is merely to show that RS are saying what I was saying above, so it's necessarily a bit repetitive. Now of course the demarcation problem is a notorious issue in the history of science. To an extent it's unsolvable, given that historians of science by definition are dealing with the coming-into-being of science, meaning that actual demarcations were constantly shifting. It's intrinsically difficult, as you say.

But that also means that quibbles over whether ancient Greek astrology should be called 'science' or 'natural philosophy' or something else yet are besides the point. Two things are sure: it was a comprehensive system that was widely accepted and used as a theoretical framework by other natural philosophers/scientists/physicians/etc., and it was therefore not something that claimed to be natural philosophy/science but wasn't: it wasn't pseudo-philosophy/science at least in that sense, not even remotely. Now the point is very much that though RS quite univocally affirm this, readers generally don't know about it, believing either that astrology has always been pseudoscience, or that it never was. If we are going to start our article with Astrology is a pseudoscience that or Astrology is a range of pseudoscientific divinatory practices, we are perpetuating that essentialist take, which the RS explicitly warn us against.

@jps: you may belittle David Pingree and other RS because they don't share your views on the proper criteria for calling something science (empirically grounded and subject to testing). Above you say about Paul Thagard that There is a fundamental disconnect with the "science" that Thaagard is talking about and the one that I am trying to describe when I say that certain claims are "scientific". But what you may not do here, as you well know, is to reject the POV of RS and put your own POV above it. What sources have you that state that astrology is and has always been, by definition, pseudoscientific? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 02:43, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

There are plenty of sources above that do this explicitly by naming the conceits of astrology which are empirically grounded and subject to testing. That's kinda what the whole point about "science education" is all about. Read the sources. They may run afoul of the concern trolling over whether something was pseudoscience at a time when the term "pseudoscience" iteslf hadn't even been invented, but the warning wouldn't be made if the idea wasn't out there, right? My point is the idea is properly ascendent even as it may be heartbreakingly simplistic for the historian who wants us to consider the context of astrological beliefs or the philosopher who is worried about how the social facts of scientific knowledge change over the years. Our concern is much simpler: "What is astrology and has the practice of astrology ever made a prediction that stands up to the evaluation and critique in the context of the scientific method?"jps (talk) 03:40, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

We're not "perpetuating" an "essentialist take" by making a factual statement about the present truth. XOR'easter (talk) 04:59, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

If it's the present truth, that needs to be made clear. If it's deemed unnecessary to make that clear, that's at least in jps' case wholly due to the fact that they do not regard it as a statement about the present truth only, but rather a universal statement defining astrology's essence.

Hanegraaff (historian), Pingree (historian), and Thagard (philosophers) are all arguing against the ahistorical/transhistorical, universalist/essentialist POV. On WP you can't counter that by 'your point is pretty blah' or 'read the sources'. You need to present sources that defend the ahistorical/transhistorical, universalist/essentialist POV. Yes, historians and philosophers want us to consider certain things, and historians and philosophers happen to make up 90% of our sources on this subject. If you're going to say we should not consider it because science education, then you need to point to the science education sources (with page numbers, or preferably quotes) maintaining that we should not consider the historians' and philosophers' POV. And then you need to show that this POV is actually the most WP:DUE one in terms of WP's policy to represent significant POVs proportionately. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 10:05, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I think you are confusing a historical lens with a practical one. Universalism is something that is part-and-parcel to scientific knowledge. This is across the board. If something is true today it needs to be true yesterday. I'm not talking about human cultural norms: I'm talking about specific claims. The problem with arguing that there was somehow a transition in astrological claims when new formulations were invented for how to understand ideas is that it doesn't deal substantively with the actual claims. But our sources which distinguish between science and pseudoscience do that. They look at the actual claims to decide when something is science or pseudoscience and, crucially, astrology itself. This is rather in line with the eighteenth century critiques of astrology which did much the same, keeping the Kepler they accepted and rejecting the Kepler they rejected. Scholars who talk about astronomy and astrology as different things necessarily play that game as well. We are playing that game by having an article on just astrology. That is why the pseudoscience epithet works. It's not because there is an ahistorical lens. It's because the demarcation of astrology and astronomy took place over the course of some hundred years and what is left is a list of claims that even practitioners accept as "astrological" and another set of claims that are "astronomical". What distinguishes those claims? Their pseudoscientific nature. Those claims were also made in the past and while they may have been made in good faith or in the context of a world that didn't try to make demarcation a thing, the substance of those claims can still be evaluated in the venue of looking at the evidence and deciding what evidence exists. Astrology makes no claims about Newtonian gravity. It makes no claims about Kepler's Laws. It makes no claims about the precession of the equinoxes. It only makes claims about human personalities, world events, winning lottery numbers, etc. The binding thing that makes these things "astrology" and not "astronomy" is their pseudoscientific nature. And while that distinction gets muddied to further away you get from considering the games played during the scientific revolution, even the historians who argue most vociferously in favor of astrology being considered part of "science" in the past are acknowledging a list of ideas that is astrology which are now known to be incorrect as being the defining feature of what makes something "astrology". jps (talk) 10:29, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

What is astrology?

Lest you think I'm being cheeky here, I'll provide some sources of people who define astrology and explain why this necessarily causes us to distinguish it from astronomy by means of the incorectness of its empirical claims:

• Thagard argues that astrology is what is done by considering dividing up the Zodiac into Sun Signs and ascribing additional meaning (beyond the coincidence of alignments) to the location of nearby celestial objects. In this formulation, portents of comets or guest stars are not astrology but instead a different brand of fortune telling.
• Tamysn Barton does much the same as Thagard.
• David Pingree wrote Brittanica's entry and and I refer you to their YouTube video distinguishing astronomy and astrology much the same way I am doing.
• Gustav-Adolf Shoener defines it with a surprising acceptance of the conflict thesis:

Long quote

“ What is astrology? If astrology is a tightrope walk between religion and scientific astronomy, then we already have a first definition. First of all: insofar as it views cosmos, humans, and nature as being reigned over and guided by powers and forces from beyond, astrology is religion. All the events in the cosmos and on earth are linked together by an invisible magic bond. Only on the basis of this mysterious magical connection can astrology assume that the stars have something to do with the course of our lives, with our talents and weaknesses. In this regard, astrology is related to the nature religions. These also assume that nature is inhabited and governed by magical powers, demons, and gods. Like the nature religions, astrology believes in a multitude of gods; it is polytheistic at its core. Each planet and sign of the zodiac is the expression of a particular god or demon. But astrology is also sometimes accepted by religions which know only one creator-god, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Then the many star-gods become angels and demons which are subordinated to the one God and, as such, understood as "instruments" of God. But in its scientific side, astrology is also very sober. It divides the heavens into geometrically exact sectors, calculates—like every astronomer—the orbits of the planets, and employs complicated calculations to obtain from the manifold movements of the earth and the heavenly bodies the horoscope. The word horoscope goes back to the Greek and means roughly: "looking into the hour." By this it is meant that the astrologer, in accordance with the exact time a person is born, observes the heavens and calculates all the planets, as well as the sign of the zodiac rising over the eastern horizon—which is then identified as "ascendant." He then prepares a chart which indicates the astronomically exact positions of the stars in relation to the place of birth. Astrology is thus also quite simply astronomy, or better: its religious understanding of the cosmos is based on exact scientific calculations. This double nature has long been known to scholars of religion concerned with the history and meaning of astrology. The classical philologist Franz Boll said it concisely: "Astrology wants to be religion and science at the same time; that marks its essence." ”

I think the problem here is one of definition. Astrology is the idea that first pops into someone's head when they hear the term. Just about everyone acknowledges that these ideas are ones that are of old provenance, but, crucially, "astrology" as a separate term only dates to the 14th Century or so and it wasn't clearly defined as an "on the other hand" with respect to astronomy until the beginning of those halcyon days of "ridicule" in the 17th Century. [15] We are chasing ghosts and ahistorically(!) forcing categories on ideas if we try to force astrology as a concept onto earlier works than this.

So was "astrology" practiced prior to the thirteenth century? Only if you accept the conceit of what astrology has been defined as. It's not an "old" idea. It's a latecoming term that was invented almost precisely as a means to distinguish it from routinized astronomy.

jps (talk) 10:48, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that it is rejected by modern science may be regarded as a defining feature of astrology. This is precisely the central thesis of Hanegraaff 2012's book (cf. the title). But that it is rejected, that it has found to be wrong, is not the same as being pseudoscientific, as that term is usually construed: something which claims to adhere to the standards of science but in fact doesn't. We can look back in history and tease out what today's science would reject and call it 'astrology' (a questionable methodology according to many other historians, but let's leave that aside). That will not all of a sudden make historical astrology into something that claimed to adhere to the standards of modern science. Yes, it claimed to be "science" (it used that word for itself), and it was accepted as "science" by its contemporaries, but it also adhered to the standards of what it itself called "science". So either that's not true science, and so it wasn't claiming to be, or it was true science, and it adhered to it. Either way, the label 'pseudoscience', as a claim to be something one isn't, an essentially deceptive and unconscientious strategy, just doesn't fit pre-modern astrology.

Yes, astrology is commonly distinguished from astronomy by the incorrectness of its claims. But it seems to be you who is inferring from this that we should not apply it to pre-13th century practices, which flies in the face of most of our sources who do exactly that. I'm still waiting for you to provide page numbers or quotes of sources which explicitly claim that all the historians talking about astrology are unduly forcing an ahistorical category on early ideas, and/or that contrary to what historians insist it is okay to force the modern concept of pseudoscience on these early ideas. At this point, it looks a lot like WP:SYNTH; we need precise statements that verify the existence and indeed preponderance in RS of the exact claims you are making here. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 11:26, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm rather agnostic about whether it should be applied to pre-13th century practices. What I am saying is that even if you do apply it to pre-13th Century practices that doesn't then erase the way it was invented as a term to contrast with ideas that are accepted by "modern science". Right now, we have a lot of proposals for wording which describe it as divination and pseudoscience, etc., but what I'm saying is that astrology is defined as those ideas that relate to divination and that are rejected by modern science. As far as I'm concerned, with such a definition you can leave the "pseudoscience" for later discussion as it no longer serves as a definitional matter. Which solves the problem that "pseudoscience" really only applies to how astrology has been practiced after it was defined to be those ideas which are rejected by modern science. This also solves one of the trickier matters: "what is divination"? Was it divination when the astrologers(wink) of Ancient Egypt predicted precisely when the Nile would flood using their sky tracking? By certain broad definitions... sure! But we don't call it "astrology" generally because such "divination" is not rejected by modern science. The more I sit with this framing, the more I like it. jps (talk) 11:44, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

I have to admit, I'm pretty close to saying that we should just keep the article as is. The counterarguments are all pretty weak and the counterproposals have some fatal flaws that are not present in the current draft. Y'all can keep talking about this, but I think that we may be at an impasse as it concerns this particular belief. We all agree it is a pseudoscience (at least as it is practiced by the majority of readers of Wikipedia who practice it, let's say). We also all agree that certain astrological claims are of interest to historical inquiry. Beyond that, I'm not sure we have anything else that there is any consensus on. jps (talk) 22:16, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Since there's neither a consensus to change the status quo nor a clamoring of support for any proposed alternative, I'm about ready to pack it in, too. XOR'easter (talk) 06:07, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

The excellent is the enemy of the good. Current version is pretty good. Alexbrn (talk) 06:12, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I've been playing along at home, but the result is inevitable. -Roxy the grumpy dog. wooF 09:07, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Written in the stars, you might say? Alexbrn (talk) 09:55, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I believe there's also a consensus here that, for various reasons, the term 'pseudoscience' cannot be properly applied in most cases to pre-modern subjects. Jps agrees with that, but their solution is to simply write off the use of the term astrology in pre-modern historical contexts, insisting that the precise definition of 'astrology' is the current one, based on a popular understanding of the term rather than that of historians, philosophers, anthropologists, or sociologists.[16][17] That flies in the face of almost all our sources, which either are writing from a purely historiographical perspective, or at least recognize the gap between ancient and modern astrology, but keep the term 'astrology' and write off the term pseudoscience in pre-modern historical contexts. Sources have been provided which explicitly say that we should relativize the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods. In the absence of sources arguing against that, jps' editorial POV carries little weight.

I also believe that XOR'easter's most recent proposal, building as it does on earlier proposals which received some support, has a good chance to find consensus. Only jps and RandomCanadian have put forward substantive arguments against it, but as I just said, jps is making strong claims against RS which they did not themselves back up with RS. RandomCanadian's objection to the word "now" is not a deal breaker, as I'm fairly sure we can wordsmith our way out of it, if the word itself really is the substance of RC's objection. We should probably at least work on the proposal a little more, and then perhaps RfC it. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 10:05, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Further/final wordsmithing

The following is a slightly revised version of the last proposal put forward by XOR'easter, taking on board RandomCanadian's remark that in the previous now recognized as pseudoscientific, "now" referred to a too long stretch of time (the recognition dating back several centuries). It's based on several previous proposals that each found some support. I propose that we put up a version closely based on this one for a RfC. The source for "since the 18th century" is Hanegraaff 2012, p. 171. Please comment on further possible tweaks, preferably addressing issues of clarity and style rather than of substance.

Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 10:31, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Seems good to me, but a formal RfC is probably a good idea. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:33, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm a little concerned about the claims that cultures have employed astrology since the 2nd millennium BCE as this is perhaps a bit anachronistic according to the history of thought on what astrology actually is. I think it would be better to just say that "what is now called astrology has been practiced at least since the 2nd millennium BCE...." jps (talk) 10:51, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I have some ideas. I don't like them all, but I'm trying to capture my evolving understanding of the issues surrounding this page to some extent. Wordsmithing greatly appreciated:

Astrology is a form of divination that is rejected by modern science where practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. To the extent that astrologers claim to have empirical evidence that astrology works, astrology has been identified by science educators and skeptics as a quintessential example of pseudoscience. Records of astrological practices have been documented as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

jps (talk) 12:05, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Though this obviously does change the substance, I quite like it. It convincingly present rejection by modern science as a defining feature of astrology. The major difficulty now is that "a form of divination that is rejected by modern science" reads as a bit redundant. I believe the point is to intuitively distinguish the practice from astronomical predictions by defining astrology as the type of celestial observation-based predictions that are rejected by modern science, but then 'divination' does not really work ('divination' does not exactly make one think of something that might be scientific). Perhaps is a type of forecasting that is rejected by modern science where practitioners claim to discern ...?

Some more minor quibbles. In the second sentence, we may need some specific sourcing which says precisely what we are saying, though I do think it's the most accurate representation of the facts. The word "quintessential" is perhaps somewhat unfortunate in this context, given that quintessence refers to the 'fifth essence' or aether, which according to Stoicizing interpretations of Aristotle was the material but invisible, spiritual force pervading all things, both forming and driving them while connecting them into a cosmic whole. Being concentrated in the stars and planets, subtle or light-like matter of this type was sometimes also conceived of as the material force responsible for astrological interactions (e.g., in the Sirr al-khaliqa, or in al-Kindi's De radiis). We might want to avoid an underhand reference to this type of concept here. Perhaps paradigmatic example?

Maybe also add "in different cultures": Records of astrological practices have been documented in different cultures as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:00, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Fortune telling is another possibility here. While it is true that "divination" typically implies "not scientific", I think your sources convincingly show that certain ideas which historians or anthropologists might categorize fairly under "divination" could have actual scientific rigor behind them. I'm thinking of that flooding Nile again. "Forecasting" suffers rather from the opposite problem: it's used almost exclusively in the context of scientific predictions these days (modulo the professionalism of your local meteorologist)! jps (talk) 14:46, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree about forecasting suffering from the opposite problem. Fortune telling is no good though, because it wouldn't at all cover significant forms like medical astrology or meteorological astrology, and would only very remotely fit political astrology (predicting the rise and fall of empires, astrological justifications for a certain dynasty's rule, etc.). Perhaps a type of prognostication? I'm okay with keeping divination too if there's nothing better, I'm just trying to keep readers in mind who won't have gone through the same thought processes as we have here. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:49, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Although the status quo seems fine, this newer suggestion of jps/SA probably needs some punctuation/minor tweaking at the start: Astrology is a form of divination, rejected by modern science, in which practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Mathsci (talk) 14:09, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I still definitely prefer the current wording, however, if a consensus is reached to change what we have now, I’d be ok with the second option you wrote. But again, my preference is no change. Cpotisch (talk) 21:42, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I understand the hesitancy. We won't change without RfC, that's for sure. jps (talk) 02:18, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

100% behind this lede, good job jps. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 07:50, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

More wordsmithing

How about "prototypical pseudoscience"? Source, e.g.: [18] We also have the five sources already included in our lede that all attest to the pseudoscience categorization. jps (talk) 04:06, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Astrology is a form of divination, rejected by modern science, in which practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. To the extent that astrologers claim to have empirical evidence that astrology works, astrology has been identified by science educators and skeptics as a prototypical example of a pseudoscience. Records of astrological practices have been documented in different cultures as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

Records of astrological practices have been documented in different cultures is redundant, Astrological practices have been documented in different cultures has the same denotation. To the extent that astrologers claim to have empirical evidence that astrology works could be whittled down to To the extent that astrologers claim to have predictive capability or thrown out altogether. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 07:37, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, "prototypical example of a pseudoscience" sounds very good, and Lilienfeld, Lynn & Ammirati 2015 looks like a good source for our purposes here. We should actually also make use of the broader paragraph in which the mention is made in the body of our article: Nevertheless, few scientists believe that Popper’s falsifiability criterion, important as it is, succeeds as a necessary or sufficient criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience. For one thing, certain pseudoscientific claims do appear to be capable of refutation. For example, although astrology is a prototypical pseudoscience, many of its claims, such as the proposition that astrological signs are correlated with personality traits, are falsifiable, and have been essentially falsified (Carlson, 1985). I and one other editor argued this on this talk before (Pseudoscientific and disproven?) but it fell on deaf ears. To this day our article both says that according to Poppers's criterion of falsifiability astrology is a pseudoscience (that it "has not responded to falsification through experiment"!), and that "it has made falsifiable predictions" which "have been falsified", with a nice picture of Popper beside it (!) and without ever pointing out that these two approaches to pseudoscience ('what is unfalsifiable' and 'what has been empirically falsified yet keeps presenting itself as scientific') are mutually contradictory. This is argued at length by Sven Ove Hansson in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's "Science and Pseudo-Science" article, where the exemplary nature of astrology as a pseudoscience is mentioned in the exact same context: Astrology, rightly taken by Popper as an unusually clear example of a pseudoscience, has in fact been tested and thoroughly refuted (Culver and Ianna 1988; Carlson 1985).

Lilienfeld, Lynn & Ammirati 2015 do blunder, however, in their opening: The prefix “pseudo” means “false.” is a bit misleading, since ψεύδω primarily means 'to lie, to deceive', 'to lie for one's own benefit', 'to cheat by lies'. At least etymologically, pseudoscience in the first place means 'lying science' or 'intentionally deceptive science' rather than 'false science', which in fact accords with their received view that pseudoscience is not really 'false' science so much as 'fake' science, i.e., science that displays "the superficial appearance of science but largely lack its substance".

I Agree with MCRIRE that "records" and "documented" is somewhat redundant, though it's no biggie. I strongly disagree that the vague "predictive capability" would be better than the simple and clear "works", or that the mention of "empirical evidence" would be unneeded: the lack of such evidence is what most philosophers of science (contra Popper) regard as the primary reason to categorize astrology as pseudoscience, and though this should be better explained in the article body, it probably is the way to go for the lead. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 09:37, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

1. Records and documented may seem redundant, but I'm rather more concerned with getting the wording right to not necessarily imply that the practices were thought of as astrology in the cultures that practiced them: that astrology is a category applied by others on these practices. I think this is one of the main sources of the tension we have between the "two astrologies" I outline above. We call a lot of things "astrology" which are proper mash-ups and contextualized careful "science" (if such a thing can be said to exist prior to the scientific revolution) about which certain sources bemoan a casual dismissal by less careful sources.
2. The Popper/falsifiability thing I felt like was more of a "both/and" scenario. To the extent that astrology makes predictable claims it is falsified. To the extent that it rejects claims that have been falsified as having been falsified (and to the extent that the practitioners claim that it is verified) and to the extent that it makes claims which defy falsification (the classic "vague horoscope" being a favorite example), astrology functions as a pseudoscience. It's both falsified and impossible to falsify depending on which astrologer you listen to.
3. I think "works" is better too because it is more than just questionable claims of predictive capability. It's also such things as arguing that there are "subtle influences".

jps (talk) 11:14, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

I think that the most natural way to understand astrological practices have been documented in different cultures is that those who do the documenting think of the practices as 'astrology', not the cultures. In fact, it seems to me that 'documented' is already doing the work you want records of to do: recording is merely a synonym of documenting, so anything conveyed by 'recording' is already conveyed by 'documenting'. Perhaps most importantly, scholars don't document records, they document (or record) practices. According to their own frame of reference, of course.

Now I really appreciate your efforts here, and I've been thinking about other ways to make your concern about the 'two astrologies' thing clearer. But ultimately I think it depends too much on a particular POV to be due for the lead paragraph. Whether we like it or not, most historians use the term 'astrology' for ancient practices without asking too much questions about whether ancient cultures themselves had a clear and distinct concept of it. If there's criticism of that in RS, we should cover it in the article body, but it just doesn't seem basic and uncontroversial enough for the lead. All that said, the "records of" is a stylistic issue as far as I'm concerned, which is not what interests me here, so if you think it's better that way, by all means keep it.

About (2), I think it's a rather grave problem in our article, but since it's off-topic here I'll self-hat it.

Self-hatted off-topic comment

Yes, astrology is both in part unfalsiable and in part falsified, but the argument these sources are making is that you can't define pseudoscience both as 'that what is unfalsifiable' and as 'that what is falsified but still upheld'. Astrology is merely used as an example for the debate on how to define pseudoscience (and that's also what we're rightfully saying in our lead here: it is often cited as an example of pseudoscience; the reason why we can have such a long section on it in our article is not because it's so difficult for astrology in particular to establish that it is a pseudoscience, but because attempts to explain why it is pseudoscience bring up the really interesting question, 'what exactly is pseudoscience?'). In Popper's view, anything that is falsifiable is scientific, and so according to his critics, Popper's view would falsely entail that astrology is at least in part scientific. The point is that the views of Popper and those of others of what constitutes pseudoscience are in direct contradiction with each other, yet our article presents them both as facts. It's stupefying that no one around here seems to be able to perceive this.

☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:23, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Structure of article

There's been a lot of discussion about the lead paragraph, but generally the article could be better, and I would be interested to read opinions about the structure. For me, the main interest is as part of the history of thought, and in fact that does take up a lot of the article. However, it dips in and out from one tradition to another, and spends a lot more time on "western" astrology than on Chinese, Indian or other traditions. Coming closer to the present day, it does not clearly lay out the difference between full horoscopes that take account of the hour and date of birth, as opposed to the "your stars" sections in magazines. I was wondering whether there should be main sections on Babylonian, Hellenistic/Roman/Islamic world, Indian, Chinese/Vietnamese/Japanese, and Modern Western, each structured chronologically, and that the material on "Principles and practice", and "Cultural impact" be brought into them. Itsmejudith (talk) 16:08, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, the page needs a substantial rewrite. Strange how it is WP:GA, to be quite honest. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 07:51, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone else have any ideas or suggestions? Itsmejudith (talk) 17:26, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

I have been looking for sources on how to handle this sort of thing and am a little confused. The use of the word "astrology" seems to be ambiguous at best. The extent to which "astrology" is applied to other cultural beliefs seems to be to the extent that predictable and repeated observations of the night sky was used in divination (so, for example, portents of comets and supernovae are often not included in the accounts of what constitutes different cultural "astrologies"). Most problematically, I cannot find very good sources that look at "astrology" as a singular subject and treat the cross-cultural comparisons in a consistent manner. This academic book (though I should have added a WP:REDFLAG as Nicholas Campion isn't exactly an independent source we would want to rely on), for example, seems to treat basically any mention of the sky in any religion as "astrology" which doesn't quite conform to the best and most rigorous definitions I've seen. jps (talk) 12:10, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 11 June 2022

Change the opening sentence to:

Astrology is a form of divination that while often regarded as a science throughout its history, is widely considered today to be diametrically opposed to the findings and theories of modern Western science. 87.80.59.179 (talk) 08:03, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

 Not done. See discussions above. Alexbrn (talk) 08:12, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Final final wordsmithing

It's been 2 or 3 days and discussion has calmed down. User:Apaugasma / User:ජපස / anyone else involved: is it time for a RfC?

--MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 09:47, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but we should agree amongst ourselves before composing the proposal for consideration by others. I think we were at something like this:

Astrology is a form of divination, rejected by modern science, where practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. To the extent that astrologers claim to have scientific evidence that astrology works, astrology has been identified by science educators and skeptics as a protoypical example of pseudoscience. Astrological practices have been documented as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

The only novel edit here is the sentence about pseudoscience which I tried to augment to accommodate the two senses of pseudoscience (unfalsifiable and falsified but still promoted) as per the discussion by Apaugasma. Perhaps there is a more artful way to do this. jps (talk) 11:28, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

I am not going to support any text that uses the words 'skeptics' to describe those supporting the scientific consensus regarding the divinatory efficacy of astrology. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:17, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that is a problem. And I'm not entirely sure about "prototypical". I think it would be better just to assert "To the extent that astrologers claim to have scientific evidence that astrology works, astrology is a textbook example of pseudoscience." This captures the sense it has been designated as such by scholars I think and is nicely WP:YESPOV. Alexbrn (talk) 12:23, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

That WP:ASSERT version of the sentence is fine with me. jps (talk) 12:24, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Fine with me as well, it's sufficiently nuanced and narrow. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 12:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

The scientific consensus (from astronomers, etc.) is not that astrology is a pseudoscience, but rather that astrology has no explanatory power. Those are two very specific claims. Caloric theory is empirically untenable, but it is not (or was not) pseudoscience. It is not up to the scientific community per se to demarcate science vs. non-science or in fact pseudoscience: that is indeed up to philosophers of science, science educators, and lately the skeptical movement. There is, of course, significant overlap.

Though I would argue that skeptics is very defensible in the article as it is the modern skeptical movement largely spearheading the criticism of astrology and similar practices, it is something of a loaded term, and philosophers of science would almost certainly be a better choice. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS REAL EMO!_{(talk or whatever)} 13:08, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

I agree with Andy's objection: the whole "by" (science educators/skeptics/philosophers of science) is problematic: all of our sources, no matter their background, agree on this, and mentioning any group explicitly makes it look like it would only be them saying this. I do think that replacing "empirical evidence" with "scientific evidence" was a nice move to include pseudoscience qua making empirically unfalsifiable claims.

I like Alexbrn's suggestion: straightforward and concise.

It's probably a good idea to also include the older proposal first mentioned in the 'Further/final wordsmithing' section as a third option in the RfC (next to this one and the current revision). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:59, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

okay

Astrology is a form of divination, rejected by modern science, where practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. To the extent that astrologers claim to have scientific evidence that astrology works, astrology is a textbook example of pseudoscience. Astrological practices have been documented as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

Note that there is an article scientific evidence, but I'm not sure wikilinking it is all that useful in this case.

Also there are about six or seven references we could use in the lede, but there is an argument to be made for putting references in the body of the text where, I notice, two excellent references currently being used in the lede are not included (and probably should be). I am all for excising dicdef references from articles (1 and 2).

jps (talk) 22:37, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Request for comments: Lead paragraph

How should the first sentences of the lead be worded?

• Option A – Keep the current revision:

Astrology is a pseudoscience that claims to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Astrology has been practiced since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

• Option B – Change to:

Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

• Option C – Change to:

Astrology is a form of divination, rejected by modern science, where practitioners claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. To the extent that astrologers claim to have scientific evidence that astrology works, astrology is a textbook example of pseudoscience. Astrological practices have been documented as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.

The new proposals were formulated as a result of the discussions above. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 12:16, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

This RfC has been advertised on the WikiProjects Skepticism, Philosophy, Occult, History of Science, and Classical Greece and Rome. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 18:22, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• Change to option B (preferably) or C, strongly oppose A: sources are quasi unanimous in recognizing that in its modern form, astrology is a pseudoscience. Per WP:PSCI, it should be clearly described as such. However, historians and philosophers of science often warn that pseudoscience is a modern phenomenon, and that it should not be retroactively applied to historical forms. Examples are numerous:
  • Paul Thagard in his 1978 paper "Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience" (cited in our article since 2011) says that a theory can be scientific at one time but pseudoscientific at another, that astrology should be judged as not pseudoscientific in classical or Renaissance times, and that relativizing the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods is a desirable result (full quote below).
  • Tamsyn Barton in her 1994 Ancient Astrology writes that the old tendency to see astrology as a pseudo-science is an anachronistic diversion from the more fruitful enquiry into how astrology functioned in antiquity.
  • According to Roger Beck in his 2007 A Brief History of Ancient Astrology, "just a pseudo-science" is a wholly inadequate characterization of ancient astrology.
  • Wouter Hanegraaff in his 2012 monograph warns against an anachronistic use of basic concepts, citing Lynn Thorndike and David Pingree as examples of prominent historians of science who reacted to the standard post-eighteenth-century image of astrology as “pseudoscience,” (full quote below).
  • Francesca Rochberg in the 2018 Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World states that Astrology was not a pseudoscience until the modern era; it was part of science.

Examples of this could be multiplied; I don't even know whether there still is a historian of science today who seriously contests this.

Thagard 1978

Thagard 1978, "Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience", p. 229: “ One interesting consequence of the above criterion is that a theory can be scientific at one time but pseudoscientific at another. In the time of Ptolemy or even Kepler, astrology had few alternatives in the explanation of human personality and behavior. Existing alternatives were scarcely more sophisticated or corroborated than astrology. Hence astrology should be judged as not pseudoscientific in classical or Renaissance times, even though it is pseudoscientific today. Astrology was not simply a perverse sideline of Ptolemy and Kepler, but part of their scientific activity, even if a physicist involved with astrology today should be looked at askance. Only when the historical and social aspects of science are neglected does it become plausible that pseudoscience is an unchanging category. Rationality is not a property of ideas eternally: ideas, like actions, can be rational at time but irrational at others. Hence relativizing the science/pseudoscience distinction to historical periods is a desirable result. But there remains a challenging historical problem. According to my criterion, astrology only became pseudoscientific with the rise of modern psychology in the nineteenth century. But astrology was already virtually excised from scientific circles by the beginning of the eighteenth. How could this be? The simple answer is that a theory can take on the appearance of an unpromising project well before it deserves the label of pseudoscience. The Copernican revolution and the mechanism of Newton, Descartes and Hobbes undermined the plausibility of astrology. Lynn Thorndike has described how the Newtonian theory pushed aside what had been accepted as a universal natural law, that inferiors such as inhabitants of earth are ruled and governed by superiors such as the stars and the planets. William Stahlman has described how the immense growth of science in the seventeenth century contrasted with stagnation of astrology. These developments provided good reasons for discarding astrology as a promising pursuit, but they were not yet enough to brand it as pseudoscientific, or even to refute it. ”

Hanegraaff 2012

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (2012). Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-19621-5. p. 171: “ Astrology and alchemy were central to this development of medieval science, and, as will be seen, these two traditional disciplines are the supreme examples of how thoroughly mainstream academic scholarship can be led astray by an anachronistic use of basic concepts. Reacting to the standard post-eighteenth-century image of astrology as “pseudoscience,” Lynn Thorndike pointed out as early as 1955 that modern historians of science have been “strangely blind” to the fact that classical astrology was grounded in a concept of universal, immutable natural law. As formulated more recently by the leading contemporary specialist David Pingree, the union of some aspects of advanced Babylonian celestial divination with aristotelian physics and Hellenistic astronomy had resulted, in Egypt by the second century BCE, in the supreme attempt made in antiquity to create in a rigorous form a causal model of the kosmos, one in which the eternally repeating rotations of the celestial bodies, together with their varying but periodically recurring interrelationships, produce all changes in the sublunar world of the four elements that, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary effects, constitute the generation and decay of material bodies and the modifications of the parts or functions of the rational and irrational souls of men, animals and plants. In other words, ancient Greek astrology in its strictest interpretation was the most comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity, providing through the application of the mathematical models appropriate to it predictions of all changes that take place in the world of cause and effect [...] ” For context on Thorndike's approach, see David C. Lindberg & Michael H. Shank 2013, The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science, p. 13 (introduction): “ Contemporaries like Sarton hated Thorndike’s focus on magic and astrology (pseudo-science!), which he loved to find lurking in the early-modern heroes of science, but Thorndike’s eclectic contextual vision won the day posthumously. ”

It's the explicitness and ubiquity of these warnings that should give us pause. Since historical forms of astrology are the main topic of our article, we should not start with a blanket statement that "astrology is a pseudoscience". Rather, the pseudoscientific nature of astrology should be historically (option B) or denotationally (option C) contextualized. This should also inform how we approach the subject in the article body. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 12:20, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B - I don't like phrasing that speaks for science (e.g. "rejected by modern science"). Either is better than A. I also think it's important to avoid criticism in the first paragraph, even for astrology. Cuñado ☼ - Talk 15:27, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
• I prefer A, but I’d be ok with C if there is consensus for a change. I STRONGLY oppose B because it greatly waters down the fact that it is a pseudoscience. Cpotisch (talk) 17:27, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

  Pinging @RandomCanadian, since they were in the original discussion. Cpotisch (talk) 17:28, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B. Ifly6 (talk) 18:26, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B at the moment seems the best option. I like the reference to history. Mathsci (talk) 18:29, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• C, or if not that, B. Option A attempts to project 'pseudoscience' as an analytic term into historical and cultural contexts where doing so simply makes no sense. B and C both avoid this, and C does a better job of explaining what the scientific consensus is rejecting, and why. As to broader questions regarding how the article attempts to define astrology, and whether such definitions are applicable over the scope of all that the article describes, this clearly needs looking into further, but we need to be constrained by what the sources we have available say. Sort the lede out first, since as it currently stands it is clearly unacceptable. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:52, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B or C, I think, with perhaps a preference for the latter. I don't see the problem with "speaking for science"; we're summarizing what the science says, and has said for a long time. I am also still content with A, because being a pseudoscience now is consistent with having been more respectable in the past. (I use this phrasing in deference to those scholars who refrain from labeling any ancient activity as "science".) The quotations above ("Astrology was not a pseudoscience until the modern era", "...it is pseudoscientific today") do nothing to undermine describing astrology as pseudoscientific in the present tense. As Alexbrn wrote above, we can call a person dead now even when reliable sources say they used to be alive. XOR'easter (talk) 19:06, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• C. Option A feels too recentist, being focused on what astrology is now, as opposed to what it was in the days when there was no science as we understand it. The wording of Option B isn't as crisp as that of C, and bringing up the 18th century in the middle of the definition in the first sentence, before bringing up the time period in which astrology first appeared, feels weirdly digressive. A. Parrot (talk) 19:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B. I think the important point is that astrology-as-entertainment, while not a pseudoscience, isn't astrology either. C seems to leave a lot of wiggle room to new variants of astrology ("as long as you're willing to admit you have no evidence yet, we won't call it a pseudoscience"), and A sounds like the chain of events was that someone emulated scientific processes, which is not unambiguously true. I would prefer to say "recognized as a pseudoscience" rather than "recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century", though, because that's the name of the phenomenon (and shorter). IpseCustos (talk) 19:45, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• C': I think this is the clearest of the proposals; the explicit reference to the fact that it is rejected by science alongside a sentence outlining what it means for it to be pseudoscientific is best for the general reader in my opinion. Even for the non-general reader, I feel that it is the most to-the-point wording. I do like the inclusion of a historical frame of reference in B ("recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century") which avoids anachronistic generalisations, but I feel that later parts of the lead adequately convey the same idea anyway (the second paragraph of the current version of the lead) so leaving it out isn't too much of a sacrifice. Alduin2000 (talk) 19:56, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

• B if fine. C's ...a form of divination, rejected by modern science... can be seen as sympathetic to Astrology practitioners who feel victimized by "modern science" that unfairly rejects this "form of divination" because of materialistic bias, groupthink, etc. - LuckyLouie (talk) 20:48, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

I kinda wish you had waited a bit for more work above. In my opinion, there are still some more questions to answer vis-a-vis sourcing and having three options instead of two is going to make this RfC harder to close. Your argument also makes me a bit uncomfortable. I think that the "historical forms of astrology" are not very well defined in the literature and the "reject science" definition is the one that is most consistent. I still have yet to see a source which explains exactly what, for example, is "astrology" in the various contexts where it is claimed to exist. This is especially problematic when talking about traditions that had no contact with the antecedents of "Western astrology". jps (talk) 12:56, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

@jps: I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but we've worked on this for 2 weeks, and discussion has died down during the last few days. We can discuss some more here, but ultimately I think it's better to accept that you and I have two fundamentally different views: I believe that in scholarly discourse, astrology is most often historically determined as a specific cosmological frame of reference (Thagard 1978 citing Thorndike 1955: a universal natural law, that inferiors such as inhabitants of earth are ruled and governed by superiors such as the stars and the planets; more detailed in Pingree as quoted by Hanegraaff 2012), while you believe that astrology is primarily determined by its rejection by modern science. Option B fits the former view a little better, option C the latter, but both are thoroughly grounded in the sources cited in the article (+ Hanegraaff 2012).

It's true that scholars often do not dwell long on formulating a precise definition of astrology, which may indeed be most problematic in non-Western contexts where Thorndike's and Pingree's definitions may not fit. But what we can't do is supplant scholars' definitions by our own. We shouldn't be trying to pin it down too much in the lead anyway if we don't even have sources for such alternative definitions. Remember that most non-historians speaking of astrology are using astrology as an example in the debate on how to define pseudoscience, taking the nature of astrology itself for granted. I appreciate that you are uncomfortable with the historians' definitions (though I assure you that at least from a historical perspective Pingree's description is very accurate), but I fear that what you would be comfortable with wouldn't be what most of our sources are actually using. Anyway, as I said, we disagree. I believe there's still some time for you and others to come up with sources, but we will probably still disagree in the end. Better then to let the RfC play out and see what others think. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:02, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

No need to apologize, I might be wrong in my crumbumness. I am actually not at all clear what the "historian's definitions") actually are for astrology. I think they are making tacit reference to rejected by modern science, but I suspect that you have a different take on this? If so, what is it? jps (talk) 19:13, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

To wit, Pingree's definition is as follows: "astrology, type of divination that involves the forecasting of earthly and human events through the observation and interpretation of the fixed stars, the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. Devotees believe that an understanding of the influence of the planets and stars on earthly affairs allows them to both predict and affect the destinies of individuals, groups, and nations. Though often regarded as a science throughout its history, astrology is widely considered today to be diametrically opposed to the findings and theories of modern Western science." The idea he is proposing is that astrology was "often regarded as a science throughout its history", but we have plenty of sources that argue that "science" may not have been a thing prior to the scientific revolution. His last point that astrology is "widely considered today to be diametrically opposed to the findings and theories of modern Western science." is super problematic in terms of comparison to other sources for (a) making some sort of vaguewave towards "non-Western" science (whatever that is) which may not find astrology problematic(!) and/or (b) not providing an identifier which would allow us to distinguish between astrology and, for example, predictions of when the Nile flooded. Pingree, I suspect, would classify the Nile predictions as astrology, but this is entirely novel, as far as I can tell. Do other historians classify it as such? It seems to me that the answer is "no", and I'm not even clear whether Pingree would take his definition that far. jps (talk) 19:23, 14 June 2022 (UTC)