Talk:Non-science

International validity of classification?

This new article describes a local anglophone version of science, which restricts it to the physical and social sciences. This classification ignores the broader, international classification of sciences which includes many diverse forms of systematic knowledge, including those which English speakers classify among the Humanities. This broader view reflects the concepts of Wissenschaften in German and of Science in French. The article should refer clearly to the local anglophone nature of this classification and avoid taking that local perspective as normative. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 17:50, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I'd like to expand that, but I haven't found a good way to say it (i.e., a way that doesn't imply that one set of terminology is "right" and the other is "wrong"). So far, we've only got two sentences about it (Feyerabend is name-checked as a proponent of the German-language concept).

I'd also like to address the question of whether fields that use the results of scientific inquiry are themselves considered "science" in the non-German sense. (e.g., architecture owes a lot to the scientific study of metals; the processed food industry owes a lot to the scientific study of infectious disease). I think that it would also be good to include the historical shift in meaning. English speakers made no significant distinction between the systematic study of, say, chemical reactions and the systematic study of, say, money in the 19th century.

Do you have any sources that you'd recommend for this expansion?

Also, systematic knowledge is a red link. May I encourage you to change that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Thanks for the suggestion, but in my opinion systematic knowledge is such a broad topic it doesn't merit a Wikipedia entry. In that regard, this article Non-science is marginal, at best.--SteveMcCluskey (talk) 12:36, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

If Wikipedia doesn't talk about this subject, then people won't know that the concept even exists.

Surely systematic knowledge is a proper subset of knowledge? We already have an article on that even broader topic. If you don't want to create a separate article, then perhaps you'd like to expand Knowledge to mention more about it than the current version, which says only that knowledge "can be more or less formal or systematic". WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:11, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

I've been looking at this claim about the French word, and I don't think that half-sentence is an entirely fair description. Like English, French has generally used science as a larger idea in the past. Like English, that meaning is still used occasionally today, and normal dictionaries include it in both languages. However, that's not what most French speakers usually mean when they talk about "science". The French Academy of Sciences is entirely about natural sciences and math. If you ask a French speaker what they think about science, they'll tell you something about the natural sciences.

And – in the end, it's the wrong question. The correct first question is, "Do some people sometimes divide knowledge into two categories, namely, 'natural sciences and similar stuff' and 'everything else'?" The answer is "yes, some do (and some don't)". The correct second question is, "In the English language, what's a reasonable name for that 'everything else' category?" IMO the reasonable name, as attested by various sources, is "non-science". If you are aware of a different, relatively common, verifiable name for 'all knowledge that isn't natural sciences and similar stuff', then I'd be happy to discuss moving the page to a different name. I will, however, oppose efforts to change the subject of the article from 'everything else' to 'everything'. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:28, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

fr:Science#Un_terme_générique_de_la_connaissance - gives a wide definition with three main common meanings; and a strict definition attributed to Michel Blay, which divides sciences into exact; physico-chemical and experimental; and human; and the strict definition subsection ends with a caveat by Dominique Pestre. So a proper WP:CSB version of this article would take into account (at least) the French-language point of view. I haven't tried to look at the sources (books), but there's no hint at all in the French-language Wikipedia article fr:Science that human sciences are considered to be "non-science" by any of the French-language sources; the strict definition clearly lists the human sciences, including history and politics; and the wide definition versions 1 and 2 most likely include these. Boud (talk) 23:17, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

I have never said that the French definition actually excludes, say, economics. I am saying:

• that if you ask a French person to name a science, they're going to think about biology/chemistry/physics first, just like an English speaker.
• French (and English) speakers do sometimes use the word science to describe the social sciences, but the modern French (and English) speakers don't use the word science when describing arts/humanities.

In other words, the modern French concept is very similar to the modern English one. Both cultures put, sciences (e.g., sociology) and humanities (e.g., Spanish literature) in different "buckets". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:13, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

You are opposing WP:OR - "ask a French-speaking person" - against what's already NPOV'd by French speakers editing the French-language Wikipedia. Claims without sources cannot help to converge here. The French-language Wikipedia is edited by modern French-speaking people, who follow the same basic pillars of Wikipedia as in en.Wikipedia. Boud (talk) 18:25, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

User:Boud, I'm sorry if I've made this seem like it's just some guess I have, or that I'm making all of this up. Here's the beginning of the dictionary definition, from the 8th edition (1932) of "the" French dictionary: "Connaissance exacte qu' on a de quelque chose. [Sample idioms omitted] Il signifie particulièrement Système de connaissances rationnelles ou expérimentales sur un objet déterminé. Les sciences naturelles. Les sciences exactes. Les sciences physiques." If you read any French at all, you should be able to tell that it says, roughly, "Exact knowledge of a subject. It [the word science] particularly means a system of rational or experimental knowledge on a specific object. The natural sciences. The exact sciences [i.e., math]. The physical sciences."

It's quite long, and l'Académie ultimately goes on to offer a definition that encompasses the same, older, more expansive notions as English (e.g., occult "science" was indeed called a "science" back when intellectuals did experiments on that area), but the natural sciences come first and are primary in the modern French conception of science, just like they do in English.

Here's Larousse's definition: "Disciplines ayant pour objet l'étude des faits, des relations vérifiables. Disciplines scolaires et universitaires comprenant la physique, la chimie, les mathématiques, la biologie, les sciences de la Terre, par opposition aux lettres et aux sciences humaines[1]

I'd translate their definition this way: "Disciplines for the study of facts, verifiable relations. Scholarly and academic disciplines including physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, earth sciences, as opposed to the arts and humanities.

I really don't think that we can claim that the French concept is very different from the English one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:44, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

You correctly quoted the Academy 8th edition version, but « particulièrement » has the meaning "especially", which agrees with the existence of the demarcation problem: the word is often used to separate the hard sciences from the soft sciences, but not always.

In the Larousse definition, you missed the bullet points. The correct quote is:

• Disciplines ayant pour objet l'étude des faits, des relations vérifiables.
  
• Disciplines scolaires et universitaires comprenant la physique, la chimie, les mathématiques, la biologie, les sciences de la Terre, par opposition aux lettres et aux sciences humaines.

So both a wide definition and a stricter definition are present in Larousse, in agreement with the more-than-80-years-out-of-date Académie 8ème édition.

There's also the fr Wiktionary definition, which we could reasonably expect to be more up-to-date and accurate:

1. Savoir, connaissance de certaines choses qui servent à la conduite de la vie ou à celle des affaires.

2. Ensemble des connaissances acquises par l'étude ou la pratique.

3. Méthode de hiérarchisation, organisation et synthèse des connaissances au travers de principes généraux (théories, lois, etc.).

Definitions 2 and 3 are both wide definitions; neither separates highly quantified/hypothesis/prediction/experiment sciences from the softer sciences. There also remains fr:science, which, like the fr wiktionary, is written and maintained by French-speaking people alive today (though the wiktionary definition 3 has literature examples from the 19th and 20th centuries).

Boud (talk) 09:49, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

I absolutely do not expect the French Wiktionary to be either more up to date or more accurate than any recent, reputable, professionally written dictionary. WP:V defines all of our wikis as being unreliable sources (except in specific circumstances, which do not attain here). Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and that goes for all languages of Wikipedia and all of the sister projects, too.

I additionally think that you are over-interpreting the existence of such wider definitions. Have you looked into any English dictionaries for their entry on science? Merriam-Webster puts even more emphasis on these wider definitions than Larousse, complete with an example of "the science of theology", but you and I both know that (a) this is not the most prominent use of the term, and (b) that these wider definitions aren't the relevant definition for this particular subject.

And I want to emphasize that last point, because we seem to have a map–territory problem here: Yes, there are a lot of definitions for some words. But it does not matter that other definitions exist for this word, because within the context of this subject, the whole point (and the main complaint against it) is that this idea pits the natural and social sciences – which, for shorthand, it calls "science" – against everything else in the world (the "non-sciences"). It does not actually matter if you find a dictionary that says science is also a word for a cat; the existence of such a source will not change the division being discussed into cat and non-cat subjects. The boundary exists where it was laid down by proponents of this concept, and the words we use to describe them are just labels on the map. The location of the boundary does not change just because the labels happen to have alternative, irrelevant definitions. Even the critics of this idea do not attempt to say "Well, I found a dictionary that mentions occultism in a definition of science, so the boundary is actually over there." Its critics say that the dividing line is arbitrary, arrogant, and harmful, but they know exactly where the line is being drawn and what's being separated and denigrated by that line.

(All of this has reminded me that I haven't checked in over at Ketogenic diet for months. That's another page where too many people say "But this website calls my body-building diet 'ketogenic', so how come I can't say that it's exactly the same subject as this treatment for epilepsy in children?" The subject of the article is the subject of the article. The fact some source gives the same name to a second subject does not change the subject of the first article.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:41, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

This isn't something made up by Hansson

The idea that some things are science and some things was not made up by a guy who was born in 1951. They are much older than any living person. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

I don't know how old the idea of the specific name "non-science" is. This article does not have the name "fields of intellectual enquiry that are not science", it is presently named "non-science", and it is proposed for DYK. So it needs proper inline sources for (preferably) notable intellectuals who have used that specific word in print. Please remember WP:AGF when looking at my recent edit. Boud (talk) 22:59, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Boud, The use of the word science as something that specifically excludes the arts (all the arts, not just fine arts) dates back to the 17th century.[2]

The first known use of the exact word nonscience, meaning "something (such as a discipline) that is not a science" was in 1855.[3]

Given that the idea is from the 17th century and the word is from the 19th century, it is unreasonable to claim that this idea originated with, or is limited to, any handful of living persons, and especially not all the editors of a textbook. You don't even know which one of them, if any, actually wrote that paragraph. That's a really serious error. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:50, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

I did some digging in the OED to try to clarify this a bit. Their definition is: "That which is not science; a discipline or form of study which is not genuinely or adequately scientific" Their examples don't identify any specific fields of study as non-scientific but seem to relate to past science no longer accepted as being scientific.

For example, they give an 1855 example, apparently the same as that alluded to by the Merriam-Webster reference above, as "1855 'The doctor talked mere science, or nonscience, about humours, complexions, and animal spirits.'" This passage does not refer to a non-scientific discipline, but to a particular obsolete form of medical theory (or practice).

The OED's other examples include Popper's use of falsifiability as a criterion to distinguish science from non-science and the case of cold fusion.

None of the OED's examples use the term "non-science" to identify a specific group of disciplines as non-scientific and only the discussion of Popper alludes to such non-sciences — although without identifying them. The concept in this article's sense is not widely used and we should edit this article carefully to avoid stepping into the area of original research. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 21:41, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

SteveMcCluskey, the fact that this idea is "widely used" is exactly why I started this article. Here's an article about students getting in financial trouble for taking nonscience classes. Here's a complaint about a new Chinese university that plans to offer no nonscience classes. Here's an article complaining that universities aren't taking nonscience disciplines seriously enough. I get 647 Ghits on the quoted term "nonscience" just among news articles, 63,000 Ghits in books, and millions for nonscientific. Naturally, I haven't read all of them, but I haven't yet see one that doesn't consider humanities, arts, religion, etc. to be in that category of "nonscience". If this term wasn't widely used, there wouldn't be literally millions of websites using that term.

Now, if what you meant is that serious scholars in this area think that this division is more artificial and historical than meaningful, then it happens that I agree with you (and them). IMO we do not need to have an article that says this concept is philosophically important, but we do need to have one that says that this concept exists and draws a distinction (however artificial it may be) between the natural and social sciences, and everything else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

If you're saying what I think you're saying, those parts of this article that deal with the philosophical significance of this concept — which includes the entire section Classifying Knowledge as well as many scattered comments on its philosophical significance — should be deleted. Your thoughts, please. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:27, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

My main thought is that I have no idea how one goes from "this classification approach is the subject of many serious scholarly debates about its meaning and relevance" to "Wikipedia should not provide any information about what serious scholars have to say about whether, when, and how this classification approach is meaningful". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:37, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Here's another source: [4]. Note the paper's title, Demarcating Science from Non-Science. From that paper, discussing categorizing theology as non-science: Indeed, only few authors (e.g., [Kuipers, 2001]) have dared ask the question of whether, for example, theology is a pseudoscience, and whether there is such a thing as pseudophilosophy. ... Theology is somewhat different, because the work of theologians ranges from the social sciences to the humanities. While working, for instance, in the field of comparative religion, text analysis, or sociology of religion, theologians do proper scientific and humanistic work... However, he says that theology itself is a non-science because: Presumably, the main problem with theology is institutional, because theology is by its very essence denominational: the theologian is the representative of some particular religion and is therefore expected to accept its creed as a given. The core of this belief system is not open to revision as a matter of principle, wherefore it must be regarded as a form of unscientific dogmatism and concludes that Thus, it seems that, due to its fundamentally denominational and dogmatic nature, theology as an epistemic field is pseudoscientific or pseudohumanistic, respectively. --Aquillion (talk) 23:10, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

DYK link

See Template:Did you know nominations/Non-science for a (closed) DYK discussion of this article. Boud (talk) 09:51, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Place of linguistics

The article specifies linguistics as a non-science. Upon reading the description provided here, it's hard to place most of what linguistics does, especially in the more recent decades, outside the umbrella term of science. We're a field that sticks to objective rationality and empirical experimentation, utilising a wide variety of tools from corpora-based statistical inference to psycho- and neurolinguistic inquiries using even neuroimaging and eyetracking technologies. Linguistics has separated from philology---which probably is a non-science---upwards of a century ago. In this day and age linguistics is a social science that often crosses roads with natural sciences. Its intersection with humanities is little; not much more than sociology or psychology. Classifying it as "non-science" is, IMHO, a mistake. --- User:G kayaalp 15:35, 22 April 2020‎ (UTC)

@Wolfdog, perhaps we should join this conversation.

Whether linguistics is 100% scientific depends on what definition you're using. I know that the textbooks for beginning classes on linguistics say things like "Linguistics is the scientific study of language", but it's a bit of a Lie-to-children.

Specifically, modern linguistics strives to be the comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of language. But we define Science as the "neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe".

Linguistics matches only part of this definition. It is a "neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor" and it "builds and organizes knowledge". However, it does not build knowledge specifically and exclusively "in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe". Linguistics is not falsifiable. It does not depend on controlled experiments. Its subject (i.e., human language) is not a deterministic phenomenon.

As an analogy, I want you to consider the "comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis" of Shakespeare's poetry. Would you call that "science"? I wouldn't. But it has the same claim to being "scientific" as any other subject that says it's scientific because it is comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis.

Consequently, I think it is fair to describe linguistics as being a non-science – not "nonsense", not "unimportant", but just ...not actually science, as that word would be understood to mean in, say, a university's chemistry department. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:28, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

It seems you're rehashing the discussion that took place at Talk:Linguistics (Talk:Linguistics/Archive 7#Whether linguistics is scientific), even editing "scientific" out from the opening sentence of Linguistics 18 months after the discussion died down. As Wugapodes pointed out then, you have to stop making arguments based on original research, or it'll be a waste of time. Nardog (talk) 16:10, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

It's not OR when an editor is saying what reliable sources say, like these:

1. "But in spite of all the technical terminology, linguistics is not a science."
2. But then on the other hand, it has been argued “linguistics is not a science”—by the same people—”like the natural sciences whose remit is the search for 'truth'. It belongs to the humanities, and as such it is a part of the endeavor to make sense of the human condition"
3. Saussure is equally unsparing of the intellectual pretensions of the contemporary discipline to being a “science”: "For us [contemporary] linguistics is not a science"
4. the status of modern linguistics within the modern disciplinary order is unclear, as it is neither a recognizable natural science, nor primarily a hermeneutic, interpretative discipline...linguistics is not a science in any universal sense
5. It is often said that linguistics is not a science where explanations of the natural-scientific form can be achieved, since grammars (as well as phonological and morphological rules) are complex descriptions, summaries of rules, not causally efficacious laws of nature
6. There is always the argument that linguistics is not a science; but it does at least share a number of characteristics with scientific disciplines
7. The book which you are reading attempts to show that literature is not a subdiscipline of linguistics, and that linguistics is not a science of all-encompassing universal thought.
8. we are well aware that linguistics is not a science of nature analogous to physics
9. descriptive linguistics, generally looked upon as non-scientific
10. descriptive grammars are non-causal and prima facie non-scientific in character. Yet they qualify as scientific in a secondary sense
11. Saussure and subsequent linguists have been able to argue that the only scientific (the only true) way to understand language is through versions of the 'scientific study of language' as defined from within the discipline of linguistics...With a few quick moves, therefore Saussure managed to construct a linguistics that relied on a massive set of exclusions.  It was able to claim scientific status and thereby deny that other approaches to language had anything useful to say.  As Harris (1981) explains, 'the version of the language myth propounded by modern linguistics has it that there is only one descriptive standpoint which allows us to proceed to a systematic analysis of linguistic phenomena.  He goes on to explain that 'A study of the development of modern linguistics makes it clear that the entrenchment of the language myth as a basic theoretical assumption arose from the need to establish for linguistic studies respectable academic status as a 'science'.  It is indeed interesting to note that, as Derrida (1974) points out, of all the human sciences, 'linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity'.
    With the coming of the so-called Chomskyan revolution, the scientific status of linguistics was even further emphasized.  'Academic prestige is dependent on various factors, but one of them is ''scientific status'':  a prestigious discipline will tend to possess qualities associated with science (however erroneously)...'only another episode in the history of the long and desperate effort to reduce thought about language to an exact science'. [5]
12. Not many academics currently holding posts in linguistics will define their subject without invoking the term ''science'', and some departments of linguistics even incorporate that term into their title (as if officially calling their subject a science automatically made 'scientists' of them).  But the survival of the notion that linguistics should be a science has little to do with Saussure.  ''Science'' is one of the most popular and vacuous buzzwords in modern academic culture, particularly in those areas where the 'scientific' status of a subject is in doubt.  Every discipline wants to get in on the act...During the latter part of the nineteenth century, various fringe subjects were queueing up and vying for official recognition as 'sciences'  Apart from linguistics, those in the academic queue included anthropology, psychology and sociology.[6]
13. Linguistics is with us to stay, even if it must abandon its claims to be a 'science', even if pragmatics may supplant syntax as the core of the subject.
14. Relativity is probably the best known (though not best understood) principle in twentieth century physics, and has exercised a strong influence on non-scientific disciplines, including linguistics.
15. Robinson begins by scoring the non-scientific bias of Chomsky's epigones; but he ends by questioning the very existence of linguistics as a scientific discipline

You could claim that these sources have WP:UNDUE emphasis on what you'd like to believe is a minority POV, but I believe I have amply demonstrated that this POV is not one that was made up by any Wikipedia editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:08, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I have changed your above bullets to numbers so that I can address each more easily. #1 argues, a few sentences after your excerpt. that we have expectations of linguistics "as having a precise scientific core consisting of unchalleangeable facts. Linguistics is not like that. Neither, of course, strictly speaking, are mathematics, statistics, or physics." So this source is arguing that linguistics is not science only so long as we don't think of physics as science either. I assume a larger philosophical premise is being set here. 2 is hard to follow but seems to be talking about some people's arguments ("the same people") without taking a particular stand. 3: Saussure died 110 years ago when linguistics was much less scientifically-inclined than today. 4 refers to the intellectual history of colonial linguistics [in] India, which to me again refers to a time predating linguistics' more rigorously scientific bent. 5's It is often said that linguistics is not a science where explanations of the natural-scientific form can be achieved doesn't seem to be arguing that linguistics is non-science whatsoever. 6 essentially upholds that linguistics is indeed science, of some kind. 7: Does the fact that linguistics is not a science of all-encompassing universal thought support the idea that it is not a science at all? 8 is like 7 and 5: it gives a careful, qualified, or questioning approach in using the word science: a lens typically applied to all social sciences and even, by philosophers, to all hard sciences. 9: If you provided a longer excerpt, you'd see this is actually placed in a particular framework of time (WWI), place (Europe), and tradition (Neogrammarian) and so isn't making the sort of knockdown argument you're seeking. 10: Like with 5, the selected excerpt here certainly does not support your view that linguistics is non-science. 11: Like with 1, this is delving into some fascinating philosophy of science, including the ongoing debate within and without scientific disciplines about what precisely constitutes science. Here, at least, the author seem squarely on your side in thinking that calling linguistics science is just a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is an intriguing "meta" look at the debate. 12: An interesting zoomed-out view, like with 11, though you would also have to use this source to label anthropology and psychology non-science. Perhaps you do. (As with linguistics, of course, psychology 100 years ago or more was very different than today.) 13 actually calls linguistics a scientific discipline, while also getting into the philosophical debates of 1, 11, and 12: linguistics.. is caught, like other sciences -- like other sceintific naratives -- in what is now commonly called the post-modern crisis. Once again, does the mere debate about scientificity in the wider culture confirm that linguists is definitively a "non-science" that should be listed as such on our Wikipedia page? Of course not. 14: admittedly, this source indeed straight-up equates linguistics to non-science. (It might be the first one you give that actively does that.) I wish in the ensuing sentences it would provide some reason for that bold claim. 15 recounts a particular scholar's philosophical questioning of linguistics' scientificity in the 1970s, a time when Chomskyism was alive and well, again, in the vein of the rich scholarly debates that we get some reflection of in 1, 11, 12, and 13.

The general thrust of these sources is that a vibrant debate exists about what science is and linguistics, an evolving discipline over the last two centuries, like many social sciences, gets to sit at the very heart of that debate. None of the sources except one or maybe two (that are doing what you want them to, at least) seems to directly call linguistics "non-science", which is the only thing we're meant to discuss on this page. Even you have agreed in the past that linguistics is a mixture of science and humanities or uses the scientific method in much of its modern incarnation. Way up above, you argue for the criteria of a "neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe". Most of the linguistics articles I read do in fact do this: discuss hypotheses, and then test those hypotheses in experimental settings to form predictive patterns. (The only odd word here is "neutral" which is not even true of the hardest physics if we mean being perfectly free from human bias, error, or contamination.) Linguistics seems to be doing just fine. Wolfdog (talk) 14:48, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I cited some of these to show that even people who individually believe that linguistics is a True™ Science are aware that this is not a firmly agreed upon belief. It appears that the main way to achieve "scientificness" is by declaring a whole lot of linguistics to be Not True™ Linguistics, but some other alternate field. Maybe we'll call it Inguisticslay, but the non-science can't be linguistics because we are desperate for linguistics to be accepted as a science.

Have you ever imagined what the discussion would sound like if someone claimed that chemistry wasn't a science? Probably a quiet shrug of the shoulders and moving on, because it's so obviously wrong that it isn't even worth talking about it. But for linguistics, we head right straight into "The lady doth protest too much" territory. Suggesting that linguistics is not a science seems to make linguists respond with fear, anger, and defensiveness. They do not appear to be feeling secure; they are acting fearful that they will lose their "respectable academic status" if they cannot maintain their tenuous and debated claim to that "most popular and vacuous buzzword in modern academic culture". WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

As a linguist who works as a scientist now, I'd say it's mostly a non-science. I say mostly because disciplines like articulatory phonetics are absolutely just a linguistics front-end on acoustic biomechanics, but historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, etc. are emphatically social sciences. I'd say linguistics is an outlier in that some subdisciplines can fully apply the scientific method to their work without any "social science" interpretation, but that's a slim minority of the field. Warrenmck (talk) 21:14, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

A sociolinguist like Labov's work is mostly non-science? I don't really understand. There are hypotheses, tests of those hypotheses using fine-tuned acoustic technology, and very specific data documented to provide robust results of those tests. Perhaps there is a bigger human element (or bigger room for bias) than, say, pure mathematics. But non-science? Wolfdog (talk) 15:17, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I think that part of the challenge with this page is that so many people of a certain age have been told that "non-science is nonsense", and accepted that uncritically, so it feels threatening when someone labels their favorite subject as non-science. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Just because something isn't science doesn't mean it's invalid. Sociolinguistics is a huge field with a lot of approaches to get good results, but if you try to shoehorn most of linguistics into a framework that a scientist would recognize as science you're going to have a hard time. Some places like articulatory phonetics, as mentioned, pretty neatly do fall within the realm of the scientific method in many instances. @WhatamIdoing is pretty correct in pointing out that some people view "science" as an indicator of validity, rather than a methodological framework and approach that applies to some fields and not others. But I don't think you'd find many scientists who would look at linguistics as a science, and attempts by linguists to label it as such will always seem a mix of fanciful thinking and a profound misunderstanding science itself. Warrenmck (talk) 22:25, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree with G_kayaalp -- whatever sociology and psychology are, linguistics is also that AnonMoos (talk) 21:21, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

The article about Sociology begins with the claim that it "is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life." That puts it in the same general category as economics, political science, and history.

Psychology is complicated, because it's a lot of things. Psychoanalysis is a non-falsifiable non-science (others would say straight-up pseudoscience); Clinical psychology and Talk therapy could be a non-science or an applied science (e.g., like engineering or medicine), depending on what's being done [Tangent: Keep in mind that only half of modern medicine, at best, is evidence-based, so quite a lot of what happens when you seek medical care isn't scientific, either]; Experimental psychology could be an empirical science, or at least somewhat near that category; Group psychology (aka group dynamics) might be closer to social studies/social science. The result is that if you say "psychology is a science" without any qualifiers, you are mostly, but not completely, wrong (and you were probably thinking about those p-hacked studies about whether people serve themselves more ice cream if the bowl is bigger, and not the everyday uses of psychology by therapists and marketing departments).

Each of these fields could also be described as a Human science, which is another term that comes with a disclaimer about what, exactly, the word science means to them, because it's not the definition used by the chemistry department. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:10, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate your various points raised in the last day (linguistics being a social science, a human science, or more subject to debate about its scientific rigor than chemisty). That all makes perfect sense. Still though... we can't and shouldn't definitively list linguistics here as "non-science". That's all. Wolfdog (talk) 14:19, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing -- You're quite eloquent, but Wikipedia goes by general opinion. Linguistics is also "complicated, because it's a lot of things"... AnonMoos (talk) 18:25, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I'm beginning to think that the better approach is to neither list it as an example of non-science here (although some parts of it certainly are non-science) nor to claim that it is "the scientific study of language" at Linguistics (although some parts of it certainly belong to the social sciences). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:48, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

I am noticing some very odd ideas of what defines a science here, notably what might be a default position of falsificationism, which may be a useful guideline but has long been obsolete for demarcation (see also list of references in top comment). Is this article, and this "list of non-sciences" specifically, going to use a wide or narrow definition -- and if so, whose? Consider the final paragraph of chapter 2 of SEP's article: In a wider approach, the sciences are fact-finding practices, i.e., human practices aimed at finding out, as far as possible, how things really are (Hansson 2018).

As an aside, but worth considering for the article as a whole: the sources for putting history on the list are nonsense: a blurb in a biology textbook and another blurb from SEP, which is a description of how the English word “science” is primarily used, immediately contrasted to the equivalent German word which does encompass history and the humanities. The paragraphs are explaining the difference between seeking a descriptive versus a normative definition of science.

If editors insist that this article must specifically say such-and-such departments at their local university are sciences versus not, they need a modern RS of the philosophy of science saying explicitly and definitively just that, to the exclusion of an RS saying the opposite. Or present a diversity of modern RS giving their demarcations. Or just link to the demarcation problem for those editors to sort out.

As for linguistics itself, some subfields are harder sciences and some are softer sciences. Characterizing the modern term in its entirely as one thing or another is simply ridiculous. To use the example above, I would respond to such an proposal the same way a chemist would respond to a proposal that chemistry is not a science: shrug and keep walking. SamuelRiv (talk) 02:46, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

The rule of thumb that I have found useful is: If the definition of science you propose allows you to say something like "I have done a very scientific reading of this poem" or "I have analyzed this document according to scientific principles" (in both cases meaning something like "I have read this text systematically, paying careful attention to what the author meant and trying to understand it without letting my personal biases interfere", and not something e.g., like determining the chemical composition of the ink), then that is IMO not a definition of science that will be recognizable to the average English speaker. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like work that has empirical demonstrability and replicability. There's a 1999 Nature physics paper that did very similar to that (except for painting and not poetry -- note that both authentication and intent of the author are discussed). Also a 2006 Nature paper discrediting it, which sounds something like falsifiability to me. Perhaps you could spell out more precisely what demarcates this kind of work, in terms of philosophy of science, preferably with support from sources. SamuelRiv (talk) 07:23, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Does it have empirical demonstrability and replicability? I'm not sure that it does, actually. People can read the same words and have very different responses to them. This is notorious for religious texts, but it happens even in everyday experiences. I've recently had a couple of conversations on wiki in which editors say "This policy says X", when it doesn't, and we have to go through a round of "So, pretend you're taking a reading comprehension test, and you are given this sentence. Does the sentence say X or not-X?" – sometimes ending with them saying that the policy says not-X, but that all good editors know that it means X anyway.

I'm aware that there is a strain in philosophy (e.g., Paul Feyerabend) that believes that making a distinction between science and non-science is meaningless; that, essentially, neither science nor non-science really exist. They're not saying that there isn't such a thing as, say, chemical reactions or the theory of special relativity or art or love or beauty, but simply that in their opinion, someone saying:

• "This ancient text, when you read it in the original, calls this character the King when he's angry but Darling when he's not, so that means the angry stories were written in a different century than the happy stories"
  • inevitably followed by someone else saying "No, it doesn't! It means that the stories are about two different kings who had the same first name, one of whom was feared by the populace and one of whom was beloved",
  • and then a third scholar saying "You're both wrong. It means that the stories are from two different cultures",
  • and a fourth scholar saying "I use different names for my spouse and other loved ones, depending on whether I'm happy or angry, so why wouldn't a good storyteller do the same in a story?",
  • and a fifth scholar saying "It could be different centuries for your text, but it's different authors in the same century for the text I'm studying, and I proved it with my own new unvalidated calculation",
  • and a sixth scholar saying "You're not paying enough attention to the meter and the rhyming pattern. The name is chosen to be consistent within each story and still make the rhymes work. Of course the happy stories use that name, because Darling rhymes with the words love, joy, gift, and happy",
  • and the seventh scholar saying "You've got to know the territory! The territory! You're completely overlooking the importance of place!"
  • and the new hire who got stuck teaching with the intro class sums it up by saying, "Look, we'll never know exactly who wrote which bit when, so as long as you write come up with a good story to explain why you picked a given theory on the test, you'll get full credit".

is not materially different from someone saying:

• "FOOF is explosive"
  • – and everyone else saying "Yeah, I won't work with that", or even
• "Hey, look, when you put this stuff in a clear acid, it turns pink, but when you put it in a basic solution, it turns blue"
  • and everyone else saying "Awesome, now the entire world has a reliable way to distinguish between acids and bases".

While this idea that science and non-science are unimportant distinctions does exist, for the purpose of this article's subject, I think it would be WP:UNDUE to explain that there is a minority POV that thinks there's no such thing as non-science. Most of the scholarly world thinks that there's a difference between the science division and the fine arts division. Most of the general public thinks there's a difference between playing the piano and figuring out how to work with fluorines without blowing up the lab. Consequently, the question in this discussion is which examples we can provide that will set the average reader on the path towards grasping the concept of a non-science. I think, overall, that we've done a pretty good job of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Nobody has mentioned anything close to fine arts or playing the piano. Nobody is arguing that the article should hitch itself to a single controversial school of philosophy except, apparently, those whose only knowledge of the demarcation problem is the outdated falsificationism. The SEP article, to which I directed you to a specific section to save your eyes (but you should also read the SEP intro, as well as Lewens 2016 ch. 1 from the Reddit thread link, which discusses falsificationism's irrelevance during the CERN FTL neutrinos experiment), is by a subject matter expert on this very topic, about this very topic, roughly overviews the field and its history. Again, please do your fellow editors the courtesy of providing some sources relevant to the subject to support, or instead of, your opinions on the matter. SamuelRiv (talk) 21:43, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

@SamuelRiv, the article, in that same list of examples says "Non-science encompasses...art, including music", so I think we are talking about examples that are very close indeed to fine arts and playing the piano.

As for reading the sources, I have already read that section of that SEP page. That section is one of the sources that inspired me to create this article. Specifically, that section says The English word “science” is primarily used about the natural sciences and other fields of research that are considered to be similar to them. Hence, political economy and sociology are counted as sciences, whereas studies of literature and history are usually not.

I assume that your interest in the last paragraph of that section caused you to accidentally overlook this direct statement that history is one of the disciplines "usually not" "counted as sciences".

As for the role of falsication, I invite you to consider my comment above about linguistics, and compare it to your comment here. Specifically, I said:

"But we define Science as the "neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe".

Linguistics matches only part of this definition. It is a "neutral, rigorous, systematic endeavor" and it "builds and organizes knowledge". However, it does not build knowledge specifically and exclusively "in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe". Linguistics is not falsifiable. It does not depend on controlled experiments. Its subject (i.e., human language) is not a deterministic phenomenon."

So here's a list of factors that I mentioned just in that one comment:

1. neutral
2. rigorous
3. systematic
4. builds and organizes knowledge
5. testable explanations
6. predictions about the universe
7. falsifiable
8. controlled experiments
9. subject matter is a deterministic phenomenon

Can you read that list of nine items and still honestly say that this discussion, or the article, is based just on "a default position of falsificationism"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:19, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Also an aside: your imaginary (and absurd) dialogue among scholars kinda reminds me in spirit of real discussions-cum-arguments we used to have in the grad physics lounge after a controversial colloquium, or over some methodology someone was considering in some papers. Have you considered that maybe Feyerabend and co. were onto something about the importance of the social and cultural process of science, (and certainly pluralism imo, if you've ever done cross-disciplinary work) even if one can discard his epistemological anarchism? SamuelRiv (talk) 21:57, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

My imaginary dialogue is just a one-minute summary of the field of Textual criticism. I could expand it, if you didn't want it to be universal: For Hebrew and Greek, someone's going to say that the numbers matter (they use the same characters for letters and numbers). Texts originating after the Age of Discovery in most of the world will get layers of comments related to European colonialism. Texts originating in or associated with previously or currently marginalized groups will be declared to be subversive in some respect. And so forth... WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Also from Lewens 2016: "There are sciences. Physics is one, chemistry another. There are also disciplines that involve the generation of knowledge and insight, but that few of us would immediately think of as sciences. History and literary studies are examples. All this is fairly uncontroversial."

This confirms for me that history is generally accepted as not being a science.

The closest Lewen comes to accepting history as a science is to say that "We do not typically call history a science, but it would not be an outrage if we did: in the German language the term Wissenschaft is used to denote any disciplined approach to the generation of knowledge, and it thereby encompasses subjects that English speakers would intuitively classify as sciences and as humanities."

"It would not be an outrage" is not anywhere near saying "History is generally considered a science" or even "History is generally not considered a non-science".

Saying that the German culture cares more about the difference between knowledge-ship (anything scholarly) and non-knowledge, and English speakers generally care more about the distinction between knowledge of the universe and human ideas about the human condition is also not anywhere near saying that history should not be considered a non-science. It should, according to this source, be considered – in English – a non-scientific scholarly field. Auf deutsch, we might have to say it in a rather roundabout way, that it is ein wissenschaftliches Fachgebiet, das nicht zu den Naturwissenschaften gehört, but the effect is the same. Germans don't expect the typical history prof to be running controlled experiments to study deterministic, universal phenomenon, either. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

It's a lot of text to deal with, but I must direct you to reread my first or second response here. I indeed read all of SEP ch. 2, and I quoted above both directly and indirectly from the very same paragraph you just now quoted from. Hopefully you read the entire thing (that is, all of ch. 1 and 2 since you're doing so already -- I'd never in good faith ask an editor to read an entire SEP article) and appreciating what they mean by "descriptive" and "normative" definitions. They are introducing the nuance of the subject, not making a final declaration.

And I would very much prefer that you'd reference and quote specific sources in specific places for specific things, instead of quoting yourself and linking to generic articles to make generic points that are... unfalsifiable? SamuelRiv (talk) 23:24, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

So... you have read the SEP source, which says that history is "usually not" considered a science, and you wish to put the SEP source forward as evidence that, at least for the purposes of this article, history should be considered a science instead of a non-science? I must be misunderstanding something. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 14 August 2023 (UTC)