Q&A: Made-Up Sciences
Made-Up Sciences
Question
Hello.
Rabbi Michael Abraham has written several times about “made-up sciences.” He even devoted a post to it.
But I looked and didn’t find that the Rabbi gives examples of studies like that. Could the Rabbi please point out a few representative studies for me?
And in the future, if I may ask, that the Rabbi devote a post to this as well (just as he did to philosophy).
Thank you.
Answer
Basically, you’re talking about research-scientific garbage from the fields of the humanities and social sciences. I think that a considerable portion of the studies you’ll read in these fields are like that. We’re talking about several different fields, so there’s no point in trying to define them. In principle, science deals with observations, including the humanities (I commented on this in the columns about the cat). It doesn’t interest me enough to devote time to it (here I wrote that column in order to complete the discussion about philosophy, which is of interest to me), but perhaps I’ll do it another time.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t remember any at the moment. In the post you mentioned, a few topics are mentioned that are nonsense by definition even בלי reading what was written about them.
Okay, thanks.
Maybe just, if possible, could you at least point me to some study you remember that is really just a pile of nonsense, so I can get a sense of it?