Astrological theory is testable, but not in either of these
modes.
Predictions must be based on individual horoscopes and
refer
to specific dated events. The kind of test I have in mind
would
be based on the fact that everyday throughout the world
many
people win lottery jackpots and many others fall victim to
violent accidents or crimes. Match pairs of
lucky/unlucky
events. Submit the relevant horoscopes, double
blind, to
a panel of competent astrologers--say twenty matchings
each to fifty astrologers. Compare the total success
rate
to the expected random outcome. A sufficient positive
outcome (say, at a 99.9% confidence level) should be
enough to convince even the strictest Popperian that
the hypothesis that astrology is pseudoscience had
been falsified.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that
all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true."
(N. Weiner)
DD writes:>
But as I have pointed out before, not, of course, to
the paradigmatic example of a Popperian social science,
astrology. Unlike any other social scientists, the
astrologers provide me with twelve succinct, specific
and easily falsifiable predictions every day with my
daily newspaper.<
the predictions of astrology are too vague to be tested or falsified. (They're much vaguer than those of Milton Friedman's codification of monetarism, for example, which currently is seen as largely falsified by mainstream macroeconomics.) A real test would be to reverse the normal astrological process, predicting one's birthday -- or, easier, one's sign -- based on personality tests and the like. (No google searches allowed.)
Jim
