On the Benefits of Sticking to Certain Principles: A Response to Lloyd Morain's "How Pseudo-Scientists Get Away with It" an Essay Dedicated to the Honest Auto-Mechanics of the World (2013)

Every few years, it seems, someone comes out with a purportedly new argument claiming that astrology does not work, or cannot work, or a delusion, or something along those lines. Though I have practiced astrology for over three decades and written three books (one soon to emerge) and numerous articles on the subject--as well as numerous essays, some published in ETC, addressing various non-astrological matters--I have never taken the time to respond to the arguments against astrology, partly because most of them simply recycle older arguments and partly because the people who offer them usually have not taken the time to investigate the subject with anything even remotely approaching thoroughness (and, I suppose, because one generally does not respond to arguments claiming that something one observed numerous does not really happen). However, I took it as too curious to ignore when a reprint of Lloyd Morain's How Pseudo-Scientists Get Away With It appeared in the issue of ETC containing my first published piece on general semantics (Why Johnny Can't Make His Point, April 2008). Though much time passed, and though I have had enough encounters with skeptics in the interim to convince me that most of them support their skepticism with untested assumptions, I have decided to offer a response, not to defend my own practices, but to make some general-semantics-related points that perhaps need making (though, admittedly, points do not seem to have needs). Despite Mr. Morain's reputation in general semantics matters, and despite Mr. Korzybski's assertion to the effect that most of our problems arise not because people do not know enough, but because they think they know much that they really don't know at all, Mr. Morain seems to know very little about matters about which he expresses great conviction. Further, in arguing that astrology, along with other pseudo-sciences, does not look very respectable when viewed through the lens provided by general semantics, he violated or ignored one general semantics principle after another. Before supporting those claims, let me do what I advise my university-level writing students to do: give ground. I readily acknowledge that much astrological thinking and writing takes place at a woefully high level of abstraction. Consider this assertion, of a type that many astrologers make all too often: emotional. The assertion does not seem to assert anything worth asserting; the template--that X's Y--surely provides fodder for anyone intent on criticizing astrological practice. Certainly far too many astrologers make this kind of assertion (e.g., Scorpios passionate, Leos proud, Pisceans mystical, etc.). The term Cancers refers to all people born with the natal Sun in tropical Cancer (roughly speaking, everyone born between June 21 and July 21). Just as we would have a hard time finding an informative statement about, say, what Muslims allegedly are, for quite likely no useful attributive statement will apply to all Muslims, so with any statement about what Cancer's are. The predicate (are emotional) could surely apply to most (perhaps all) people on the planet, for everyone apparently has emotions and seems to be at least some of the time. Though we can say that are emotional, none of us really a clear idea of what refers to or how that attribution by itself serves to distinguish one person from another. Do we mean that the person acts differently than someone who not emotional, assuming we could find such a person? Does it mean that the person expresses emotion sometimes? Constantly? Whenever he sees a lady he considers attractive? On days that the Red Sox beat that disreputable team from New York? Here and elsewhere, the predicate seems to create a verbal fiction somewhat akin to is normal: it suggests that we can distinguish the emotional from the non-emotional just as we purportedly can distinguish the normal from the not-normal. …