[lbo-talk] putting quackery to the test

Alex zap_path at yahoo.com
Wed Aug 9 17:41:01 PDT 2006


--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> There are all kinds of ways that our cultural baggage becomes enmeshed
> in our "neutral" science. This baggage determines both our certitude
> that science is perfectly netural as well as all the ways that it is not.

I completely agree with this, but not this next bit.


> Somebody realized, oh, twenty years ago, that ALL of Piaget's testing
> and foundational work on the development of children's learning was
> based on experiments on boys. Now Piaget was a smart and creative
> scientist, but it never occurred to him that limiting his testing to boys
> was, indeed, a limit. That is not a reflection of Piaget; it is a
> reflection of the Scientific Model that you worship and whose
> assumptions, I am arguing, must be questioned.

Why is this a reflection of the scientific model? The scientific model here is that the truth of any theory is determined by experiment. I don't see how Piaget's assumption that tests done only on boys should apply to girls says anything about the scientific method. If an assumption is in dispute, it can be checked with experiment.


> When estrogen therapy was introduced, there were lots of
> tests that demonstrated it was the best thing since sliced bread.

Wasn't there as much hype and invented claims as there was actual testing?

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1380

-Alex

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