Some people believe they find support for astrological predictions in their own personal experience. Image from ‘Astronomy Without a Telescope’ (1869). In both cases, they wanted to know how things worked so they could predict how things would go in the future. Any rule that says they are scientists only if they make one set of factual claims but not when they make another set of factual claims divides these thinkers into two halves that aren’t meant to be contradictory. That’s why astronomers and astrologers populated medical schools and governments, advising people on what the heavens signaled was to come on Earth.Įven famed astronomers Galileo and Kepler practiced astrology. After all, knowing where the planets were relative to the stars was necessary to make accurate predictions about how their locations influenced human affairs. To us, that makes astrology sound a lot like a set of scientific beliefs.įor a very long time, until the 17th or 18th century, astronomy and astrology were practiced side by side. In this sense, astrologers, like astronomers, make factual claims about the world. Factual claims are true or false descriptions of the world (Joe is 1 meter tall) as opposed to descriptions of how we define things (1 meter is 1,000 milimeters). Science, in essence, involves making and testing factual claims about the world. As a philosopher and an anthropologist who study what science means to society, we think it is important to separate the question of whether something is a science from the question of whether it is true or false.
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