Why We Maybe Should Try to Make Astrology More of a Science
Or why understanding is great and all, but why it’s better done intelligently
By MARTIN REZNY
This is a response to an article written by Stephanie Georgopulos called Astrology Critics Don’t Even Know What They’re Criticizing. I would write a direct response, but Medium has finally made it too much of a hassle to turn responses into full-fledged articles, which irritates me to no end.
I guess nobody on the Medium team knows what a discourse is, but I digress.
As I have mentioned a couple of times already on this forum, I’m currently writing a book about astrology and skepticism, which is nearly done at the moment, actually. I intend to call it Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Astrology. In part, to address the uninformed critics, but not just them.
Stephanie’s main argument is probably the best formulation of a common sentiment among astrologers that I’ve seen, which is often used, much less eloquently, as a defense of astrology. This is the core of the argument, as Stephanie would put it herself:
“The pseudoscience argument presupposes a couple things. First, it assumes that astrology claims to be or wants to be a science. There are scientific and mathematical elements of astrology — astronomy was borne from astrology, not the other way around — and you will certainly find those who make the case that astrology should be recognized as a social science. But insistence that astrology follow the scientific method is not one of its fundamental principles, nor is mainstream acceptance of that premise an overarching goal. Many astrologers hold an opposing view: that we do astrology a disservice when we attempt to legitimize it by wedging it into a scientific framework. Rather, a commonly held view is that astrology and science are complementary, not incompatible.”
To answer the obvious follow-up question of okay, so what is astrology about or for then, she quotes Swiss physician Alexander Ruperti:
“What is the value of trying to fit astrology into the straight-waistcoat of scientific knowledge, when its technique and basic philosophy enable one to escape from the prison into which science has put man’s mind?… Science gives us knowledge, nothing more. It has nothing to say concerning the why of the universe, and everything dealing with the understanding and the significance of individual human values and goals is outside its domain.
…[A]strology’s gift to mankind is its capacity to solve and explain that which science cannot and does not attempt to do. We need more vision, more constructive imagination, if we would free ourselves from our present bondage to analytical and mathematical details, to statistical methods. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts and no collection of separate data, however complete, on the outward behavior and characteristics of a person, will ever reveal him as a living human being with a life purpose of his own.”
In short, science is all about knowledge and intelligence, while astrology is about things like constructive imagination and understanding. All of which is fair to say, I would agree as someone who has studied astrology for almost two decades now. Well, up to a point, at least. Astrologers make knowledge claims.
At the most basic level (think sun sign astrology), astrology is supposed to describe differences in personality between people. If those differences mean anything at all, they’re real differences between specific personality traits, or related behaviors, life circumstances, or life events, that you claim to know.
The part that’s fair to say is that modern science doesn’t deal with understanding very well, if at all, which makes its models of personality or behavior arguably crude, reductive to a point of near-meaninglessness and personal uselessness. Signs are far more than a mix of IQ and temperament.
But still, they’re (claimed to be) something specific enough that people can understand it. If you can understand something, you should be able to devise some sort of test to, well, test whether it’s there, or not there. From this point of view, the problem is one of imagination, but of scientific imagination.
Take the example of a thing that Stephanie claims people who are into astrology all know — that the two signs that people are going to hate, if any, are scorpio and gemini. You know what, as a person versed in astrology who is a scorpio and knows plenty of scorpios and geminis, I understand and agree.
That’s a test right there. You could do many variations of it, but you can try something along the lines of getting a group of people together (who don’t know which sign who is), make them do something together, and then ask them to rank how much they liked or disliked all other participants.
I’m not saying such a test would necessarily work, or that it working or not working would be *definitive* proof for or against all of astrology. Jumping on one test result to prove a point, or even on a bunch of results for one type of test, is precisely a sign that someone is being political and not scientific.
What I’m saying is, I can think of a dozen different astrological test designs that have never been tried before per minute, and any astrologer who tries should be able to do so as well. The reason why I think they should also want to do that is that doing tests would be a great way to advance astrology.
Trying to win points with skeptics isn’t the only, and definitely not the best, motivation for why to try to do astrology scientifically. While astrology is truly nuanced, to a point of it being veritably arcane at times, every single part of it isn’t so complicated that you couldn’t start experimenting somewhere.
How do you think anyone has ever figured out anything in astrology? Ancient astrologers were the top astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists (or natural philosophers) of their day. They were often also healers, priests, artists, or even conmen, but they were mainly logicians and experimenters.
The sentiments shared by Stephanie are not incorrect, per se — astrology can be practiced without being examined, it’s not supposed to be exactly like modern science, and its critics should know what they’re criticizing. That’s all true. However, astrology, as an ancient science, has always been part science.
The contented attitude of many, perhaps most astrologers isn’t damaging modern science, despite what the occasionally flaring skeptical hysteria suggests, it’s damaging astrology. Astrology is devolving. Which is a pity, since if it even remotely touches on real phenomena, it could be so much more.
One could look at the current sorry state of social science and conclude that it would be stupid to try to aspire to be a part of that hot mess, with the replication crisis and popular science rubbish, etc. One could also look at it as an opportunity — if astrology does some things better, how does it do that?
While the core of the scientific method is more or less fixed — the need to experiment to verify and falsify claims to produce reliable knowledge and ideally useful technology — most of science is constantly evolving. Not just the state of our knowledge, the state of scientific methodology is evolving.
Social science is a fairly young science, still in the process of finding its methodological footing, figuring out how to best figure things out. Astrology is such an old science, that it may have already figured out everything several times over, but then forgot how it did so, and most of what it figured out.
Applying the approaches of social science to the study of phenomena to astrology may help astrology find its keys so that it can restart its engine, so to speak, while the social science can learn a thing or two by taking a closer look at all the stuff that astrology has accumulated and retained over the eons.
Who knows, maybe I have now simultaneously insulted both social scientists and astrologers. But I’m serious. I’m saying it as someone who already knows a couple of things that can be adapted from astrology into social science, especially to make qualitative science more quantifiable, of all things.
The main thing that I have learned so far, over the course of about four years of writing a book about fundamental disagreements between skeptics and astrologers, is that by either focusing on the disagreements, or by feeling justified while ignoring all of the hard questions, one is truly wasting time.
After the book is finally done and released into the wild, what I have already decided to do is to focus on turning something that I know I can rigorously extract from astrology into something useful. I think I’ll start with the underlying numerological architecture on which astrology is built.
You can take something as abstract and ineffable as music and make everyone’s lives better forever by applying math and engineering to it to get everything from a tonal scale to the electric guitar. You can also take the zodiac as a basis for advanced game systems and basic qualitative math.
I’m fairly confident that even if astrology isn’t strictly true in the physical sense, there are more practical applications that it can lead to. Maybe the statistics are too dumb of a method to tease them out of astrology, but that’s also an opportunity — how could one make statistics less reductive?
To be more specific, statistics nowadays usually mean something called “frequentist inference”, or the measuring of relative frequency. But how often something happens, as opposed to how often something else happens or should be happening, isn’t the only thing you can describe using statistics.
Already, the replication and debunking attempts aimed at various astrological or more broadly paranormal claims, which have so far involved fairly rudimentary and often doomed research designs I might add, have stirred debate about the reliability of the standards of evidence in social sciences.
The nice thing about science is that failures also advance it, as long as they’re recognized and addressed. Astrology that doesn’t even attempt to test itself cannot share the same benefit. Maybe Stephanie is right that skeptics attack astrology to feel intellectually superior. Also, maybe astrologers fear failure.
Or maybe astrologers fear work, hard, tedious science work. I don’t know, psychoanalyzing the motives of one’s opponents proves nothing and is kind of a dick move. In any case, none of this should be about superiority, or caring about one’s status, or about sheltering pet beliefs. It should be about curiosity.
If you test some astrological claim and the test fails, and you’re sure that the claim does have basis in fact, then, by all means, work to improve the test design. After you improve the test design a couple of times, that’s already an accomplishment that has moved everyone and everything forward.
At the end of the day, all scientific findings are tentative. There’s no point in getting personally attached to any of the “known” facts. In the case of astrology, it will still be all kinds of meaningful even in what it is factually wrong about. Poking at it and talking about that will be fun, I promise.
What do you say?
