Philosophy of Science: Demarcation of Science

I am a philosophy neophyte. So I decided to check out a book at the library that caught my eye: Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, edited by E.D. Klemke. Frankly most of it doesn't look that interesting to me, but I did read--and enjoy--two essays dealing with the demarcation of science from non-science (including pseudo-science). It turns out that defining what is science--and what is not--is not always easy. But it can be important when it comes to public issues like what kinds of things should be taught in public schools.

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The first essay is "Why Astrology is Pseudoscience" (pdf) by Paul R. Thagard. The content of the article is obvious from the title. Thagard proposes these basic criteria for determining that something is pseudo-science:

1. It has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but

2. the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory toward solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations.

An interesting implication of this is that something can be legitimate science at one time and pseudo-science at another.

The second article is "Believing Where We Cannot Prove," by Philip Kitcher. This is apparently a chapter taken from his book, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. Unfortunately I can't find an online copy. Kitcher lays out three basic characteristics of science:

1. Independent testability--A commonly cited characteristic of science is that it can be falsified. In other words, a scientific idea has to be vulnerable to being disproved. This characteristic was articulated by Karl Popper. However Kitcher points out that philosophers of science have long known that it is insufficient for identifying science because its application ends up either including or excluding everything. If a scientific theory consists of a bundle of hypotheses and assumptions, it is always possible to modify or discard part of the bundle, thus rendering the theory resistant to falsification. Creationists have figured out how to play this game and use it against scientists, charging that creationism is just as scientific as secular science. Kitcher calls this naive falsification.

Part of his solution is that scientific theories will have auxilary hypotheses that can be tested independent of the original theory. His example is that Newton's laws of motion and gravity explained the oribits of the planets very well--except for Uranus. Faced with the problem, Newton's theories could have been discarded as false (naively falsified). Instead it was hypothesized that another planet was affecting Uranus's orbit. A critic could charge that this was just ad hoc rationalization except for one thing--it was a testable hypothesis. In fact it turned out that another planet was indeed involved--Neptune.

2. Unification--Good scientific theories will explain much using a few simple statements, and will invoke the same reasoning processes or problem-solving-strategies for new questions. His example here is that the motion of the planets are explained by a few fundamental principles--not a patchwork of rules for individual planets.

3. Fecundity--In finding answers to questions, scientific theories turn up additional questions to be addressed, and answers will be sought using the principles contained in numbers one and two above.