Protoscience

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

Protoscience is a word with two meanings. One, an unscientific field of study which later becomes a science (e.g. astrology becoming astronomy and alchemy becoming chemistry). Two, a field of study which appears to conform to the scientific method but is not falsifiable, or if it is, its predictions have not yet been observed.

1 Historical perspective
2 Examples of protosciences
3 See also
4 External links

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Historical perspective

Some protosciences become mainstream science.

Alchemy has become chemistry.
Astrology evolved into Astronomy. (cf. Johannes Kepler)

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn is cited as using the word in an essay published in 1974. Retrieved on May 19, 2006 from this page (pdf): [1]; HTML version from Google

‘I claim no therapy to assist the transformation of a proto-science to a science, nor do I suppose anything of this sort is to be had. If certain social scientists take from me the view that they can improve the status of their field by first legislating agreement on fundamentals and then turning to puzzle-solving, they are misconstruing my point’ (Kuhn, 1974, p. 245)

ref: Kuhn, T. S. (1974). Reflections on my critics. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge (pp. 231-278). London: Cambridge University Press

With the advent of the scientific method, natural philosophers produced the scientific fields of astronomy and chemistry respectively. All sciences started as branches of philosophy, such as mathematics, physics and biology (see philosophy of nature), as well as — in so far as these are sciences — economics, psychology and sociology.

Generally, a protoscientific field is one where the hypothesis presented is in accordance with the known evidence at that time, and a body of associated predictions have been made, but the predictions have not yet been tested (or cannot be tested, due to current technological limitations). There may also be a variety of theories, each of which explains some portion of the experimental data at hand.

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Examples of protosciences

The most famous modern example of protosciences might be the theory of continental drift as originally proposed by Alfred Wegener (which eventually became an accepted scientific model when the mechanisms of plate tectonics became understood). Other examples include:

The various string theories of physics.
The cognitive science of mathematics.
Abiogenesis, the hypothesis and theories concerning the natural production of living material from nonliving material.
Astrobiology or Exobiology, the protoscientific study of extraterrestrial life forms, including speculation on alternative biochemistries.
Memetics, the study of hypothetical self-reproducing ideas called memes, and associated field of sociobiology.
The theory of sanity from the discipline of general semantics.
Neurotheology, the study that analyzes the biological basis of spirituality.
Xenoarchaeology, the study of alien cultures from their material remains