Skyscript Astrology Forum

[b]Nixx[/b] wrote:

That's why the antiscientism that is so rife on this board ? even on the Philosophy & Science subforum! ? is unfortunate, because I think there are useful lessons to be learned but we'll have a hard time learning them if we're blindly prejudiced against 'science'.

I appreciate your posts Spock, amongst the best I've seen on Skyscript over the years.

Thanks.

Picking up on this observation there might be some irony, even hypocrisy, present as when one looks at the aims and practices of many, if not most, Traditional Horoscopists they are operating quite explicitly within the scientific paradigm There is a strong focus on concrete manifestations on the material place, if you like, events of this nature either occur in a certain way or they don't. This is evident on Skyscript on the Horary, Sports, Mundane boards or when we have had the Mystery chart exercises the objective is to test empirically the various systems entertained by the participants.

Perhaps irony more than hypocrisy. Most people, including most astrologers, are sincere in their beliefs. And operating on the material plane doesn't mean they're operating within the scientific paradigm, only that they're operating within science's domain even as they deny its relevance. So you could say they're being inconsistent but not deliberately so. Only sociopaths consistently lie consciously and deliberately. However, I doubt that even sociopaths lie to themselves more often than most people do. Perhaps lie in this context is too strong a word, but like any caricature it highlights a feature that might otherwise be unobvious, the ways in which people fool themselves in order to maintain belief.

I don't think their doing so is necessarily bad or wrong. Part of Kuhn's accomplishment in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was to undermine the logical positivist concept of science drawn from science textbooks, in which the "history" section in the opening chapter of the text records a series of piecemeal additions to knowledge, each attributed to a particular discoverer at a particular time, which collectively comprise "what we know" in that area of science. As pedagogy the image of science thus inculcated serves important and necessary functions, but as history it's profoundly misleading. The great discoveries and many of the minor ones were not mere additions to knowledge but were reconceptualizations that overthrew and replaced their predecessors. If Copernicus was right Ptolemy was wrong. If Kepler was right Copernicus was wrong. If Newton was right Kepler was wrong. If Einstein was right Newton was wrong.

You can see where that's leading. Nobody is right forever. Yet each was right, in some important sense of that term, at the time and for some time thereafter. A necessary corollary is that unless we can feel we're right, unless we can reason in ways that make that possible, no revolution can be completed or maintained, in fact knowledge itself becomes impossible. Doubt can act as an examiner only if not carried to the ultimate extreme of doubting everything. In reality mechanisms of doubt must be balanced against mechanisms of belief, and only when anomalies pile up and lead to crisis and those mechanisms become strained are they then seen, through the lens of a successor theory, as "errors".

In astrology the sources of crisis are an awareness that sometimes astrologers get the right answers with the wrong chart, the instances of different astrologers providing different rectified birth times for the same famous person, all of them convincing even though they can't all be right (in the case of Winston Churchill, as recounted in Recent Advances in Natal Astrology, none of them were), and perhaps most of all a vague general sense that astrology doesn't work as well it should. The widespread idea that astrology has too many factors, and the resulting rule of three, is itself an indication that there's a diffuse awareness of crisis among astrologers. For many the failure of statistical studies, even those signed off on or conducted by astrologers, to validate astrology as automatically and unequivocally as expected, brought the matter to a head. This, in my opinion, was the impetus for the neo-traditionalist movement, and divination (i.e., magic) as an explanatory mechanism, as a significant number of astrologers looked to the distant past when astrological practice was apparently unproblematic, overlooking in the process that it was unproblematic only for those predecessors, because the circumstances that have since made it so were at that time far in the future.

The loosening of practice that's a characteristic response to crisis has resulted in the mechanisms of belief feeding the flames. Why do you think we get sometimes get right answers from wrong charts? Why do different astrologers rectifying for the same person come up with different times which work perfectly? The answer is one that I first glimpsed thanks to a thought experiment. I realized that what can be construed as significant configurations are in effect at all times, and that virtually any event can be made to fit the symbolism for the configurations present at a given time. This is aided (exacerbated?) by a multitude of factors, by the slipperiness of symbolism, and by an excessive focus on the surface of things, for instance attributing meaning to geo Venus square helio Mars, as if the zodiacal positions interpreted as square to each other are absolutes independent of the coordinate system (earth versus sun centered) in which each is given. Another example is attributing marriage to, for instance, transiting or directed Jupiter to natal Venus, without considering the psychological processes underlying and leading to that event, and the means by which those processes are caused by or reflective of that configuration. It's as if we wave a magic symbolistic wand and ? presto! ? they're married. Hence our ability to justify virtually any event with virtually any chart means the right event can fit the wrong chart, the wrong event can fit the right chart, and multiple birth times can fit a given life history.

The problem with being able to justify any event after the fact is not knowing which of a multitude of justifiable events to predict before the fact. Beginning students face this problem in acute form because they haven't yet learned from exposure to paradigms (accepted examples of valid practice, aka sample delineations) how not to see it. Hence they suffer from an embarrassment of riches, a multitude of things they could predict, but not knowing which of them to predict. Experienced astrologers cluck sympathetically and assure them that with experience they'll be able to filter out what's important from what isn't and interpret unproblematically. This does happen, but not for the reasons they think it does. They learn to avoid prediction and instead explain what's already happened under the (mistaken) assumption that what's explainable after the fact would have been uniquely predictable before the fact. Or if they do predict it's in vague general terms that a multitude of events would fit, but in which the client sees her events, which she excitedly describes via "client feedback", which the astrologer then "explains" with neither noticing that the meat of the interpretation is coming from the client not the astrologer.

But astrologers, to the extent that they glimpse such problems, tend to blame the astrologer rather than the system. That's why, in After Symbolism, the examples I give of how symbolism leads us astray involve two highly regarded astrologers, Noel Tyl and Dane Rudhyar. My point was that these two, especially Tyl, are expert practitioners who are applying astrology correctly according to accepted methods. It's those accepted methods that are wrong. (i have frequently been congratulated by readers for my acute analysis of how some astrologers misuse astrology, which is not at all the point I was trying to make.) About the former I write, "Tyl, in The Horoscope as Identity, delineates the chart, with Saturn opposite Neptune from the eleventh house to the fifth, of a man who commented that his sex life had tapered off normally during his mid-thirties. Borrowing the opening line from Grant Lewi's Heaven Knows What description of Saturn square or opposite Neptune ? 'Ambition has a way of going to sleep on you' ? and noting the fifth house connotation of sex, Tyl exclaims, 'Ambition throughout the sex spectrum [Tyl's emphasis] had fallen asleep.' And with that clever play on words career ambition, which was what Lewi was talking about, becomes sex drive."

The reason I wrote that, besides highlighting how symbolism misleads, was to suggest that symbolism also subverts empiricism. Grant Lewi observed, in the lives of a number of people who shared Saturn hard-angle Neptune, that they also shared a tendency to underachieve in life (not in sex!) due to a kind of complacency rooted in a sense that they could do it if they wanted to. To the extent that the rest of their charts differed and their other tendencies differed, the fact that they had in common that configuration and that tendency suggested that the two tended to coincide with one another, that having that configuration predicts that tendency.

Whether or not Lewi was right in his conclusion is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Tyl failed to clearly realize what Lewi had concluded, because like most astrologers he was using words differently than Lewi was. Lewi used language figuratively, the same as Tyl, but he used it to convey an observation. Other words, other forms of figurative usage, could have been used to convey the same idea, the common denominator he saw in those people's lives. Tyl, in contrast, was using that phrase the same way astrologers use single words, as a keyword or in this instance a keyphrase, a term that in a sense attaches to the planet almost like a talisman and represents it regardless of what it's made to mean via figurative usage. Their use of words is exactly the opposite. With Lewi the observed meaning or effect is the constant, regardless of the specific words and figurative meanings used to convey it. With Tyl as with most astrologers the word or phrase itself is the constant, seen as belonging to Saturn regardless of the wide range of (possibly conflicting) meanings or effects it's capable of (conveniently) generating, including the one at hand, thus rendering systematic observation irrelevant and its results invisible.

This brings me full circle to your suggestion that with "Traditional Horoscopists...[t]here is a strong focus on concrete manifestations on the material plane," which strikes me as true but only slightly less so for event-oriented "modern" astrologers than for neo-traditionalists. That this focus has loosened at all is one of the ways in which astrology has progressed since antiquity. That it has loosened so little is an indication of how little it has progressed. There is little evidence or logic supporting the idea that astrology predicts concrete external events. What it does predict, in my opinion, is psychological states of mind, specifically motivations. This better fits the evidence, dissolves the fate versus free will paradox, and renders an astrology so conceived, with a nod toward chronobiology, as something that's not after all impossible on the face of it.

But the knowledges that make an observationally based (i.e., empirical) astrology possible and its existence plausible at this time, namely biography, psychology, statistics and chronobiology, to cite only the most obvious, weren't available to our distant predecessors or even to the 17th century astrologers whose attempt at a scientific revolution in astrology was doomed to fail because the background knowledge needed to make good on it didn't exist at that time. But it does now, and its advancement at this time is hindered mainly by the difficulty in getting outside the conceptual boxes inculcated in astrologers by exposure to astrological paradigms, i.e., sample delineations, in the process of learning how to do astrology. I'll offer some ideas on how I think we can best pursue astrology empirically in response to waybread's recent posts.

Good points, Spock.

a significant number of astrologers looked to the distant past when astrological practice was apparently unproblematic, overlooking in the process that it was unproblematic only for those predecessors, because the circumstances that have since made it so were at that time far in the future.

Intending no disrespect to those who love traditional astrology for its own sake I sometimes wonder why, if traditional astrology worked so well in the past, western society decided to dispense with it by the late 17th century. Surely by the Enlightenment, the weight of church prohibitions lost a lot of their force. During the 19th century, an emergent business class should have paid handsomely for traditional astrology's forecasting abilities, if they were as accurate as today's traditionalists claim.

I suspect that the reasons go beyond the Copernican Revolution. For one thing, a lot of "street" astrology in the past really wasn't very good. Most of what has come down to us are the more significant works by master practitioners; but we can glimpse what "average" astrology would have been like through the writings of traditional astrology's critics over the centuries-- and the traditional astrologers' own criticisms of some of their peers.

The fact that Vedic, modern, and traditional astrologers use different techniques yet produce accurate results suggests to me that "the right chart" (sidereal or tropical?) or the right techniques really aren't what produces a gifted horoscope interpretation.

Surely astrology suffers from confirmation bias, aka the Barnum Effect. However, is the astrologer's job really to map out the details, present, past, or future, of a client's life? Clinical psychology doesn't work this way, but tries to empower clients to develop their own insights, in order to reach their own plans of action. It's better to have someone figure out what her sun in Sagittarius means to her and how she can use it, then to receive an operating manual from an astrologer.

In terms of the slipperiness of symbolism, as Anais Nin put it, "We don't see the things the way they are: we see them as we are." Any form of divination with which I have some familiarity, however, equally uses symbols with multiple possible interpretations.

It's a bit different in horary questions, where the missing passport is either where the astrologer said it is located, or it is still missing.

spock wrote:That it has loosened so little is an indication of how little it has progressed. There is little evidence or logic supporting the idea that astrology predicts concrete external events. What it does predict, in my opinion, is psychological states of mind, specifically motivations. This better fits the evidence, dissolves the fate versus free will paradox, and renders an astrology so conceived, with a nod toward chronobiology, as something that's not after all impossible on the face of it.

Actually Spock I think it's truer to say that there's little to no evidence either way, and whilst it may be that you believe it predicts psychological states of minds, this is similarly lacking in evidence either way.

You mentioned earlier that astrologers:

learn to avoid prediction and instead explain what's already happened under the (mistaken) assumption that what's explainable after the fact would have been uniquely predictable before the fact. Or if they do predict it's in vague general terms that a multitude of events would fit

Well this hasn't been my experience of any professional astrologers I've gone to. I've been to one years ago before I knew much at all about astrology and he, a modern astrologer, predicted several things, quite concretely. Last year I went to a traditional astrologer who predicted a number of things, also very concretely (such as that I would return to University, which I did). The fact remains that there's little to no evidence whether an astrologer can make accurate concrete predictions, nor is there enough evidence to say that "astrologers learn to avoid prediction" - though no doubt many do learn not to, but equally, many do predict.

waybread wrote: Intending no disrespect to those who love traditional astrology for its own sake I sometimes wonder why, if traditional astrology worked so well in the past, western society decided to dispense with it by the late 17th century. Surely by the Enlightenment, the weight of church prohibitions lost a lot of their force. During the 19th century, an emergent business class should have paid handsomely for traditional astrology's forecasting abilities, if they were as accurate as today's traditionalists claim.

Waybread

Let me reiterate what I wrote previously.

I think we're moving away from the point now with regards whether or not a degree is needed to identify a science.

I appreciate people are passionate about differences in approach between what we can loosely distinguish as 'traditional' and 'modern' but I really want to discourage getting into debates about the differences between them or suggestions of superiority for one or the other. Not only is that not the subject of this title, but it seldom produces much of value that isn't subtracted by conflicts which can also arise.

I appreciate nobody is deliberately taking the conversation that way of course.

Let's not accidentally turn this into a polemic against traditional astrology nor even a critique of it. That is not what this subject is about and astrology has suffered enough with "in house" fighting and bickering on this topic in my opinion.

I agree with you when you say:

the right techniques really aren't what produces a gifted horoscope interpretation

I think we've moved way off topic here though.

Paul, as moderator you might want to move the recent parts of this discussion over to the "Art or Science" thread, from which this one split off and where much of this discussion actually belongs.

i don't really care if it all stays here as it is obviously being followed by those interested and it is a big conversation! up to the moderators i suppose. i know mark likes to have the content reflected in the title which is hard to do sometimes!