Which Comes First?

[Ryft]

Things that significantly matter, or impact my life.

Things like theories of morality?

... but if you say you saw a ghost, I'll need substantial evidence before believing ...

It would seem that only matters if your belief is actually called for. Right? Just because I tell you that I saw a ghost, that doesn't mean you are required to believe ghosts exist (explicit). I am not even asking you to change your worldview (implicit). I am simply telling you something that happened. You may not believe ghosts exist yourself, but in the final analysis, what has that to do with my experience?

If you look over the list again I'm pretty sure you will agree that, if you modified Step 4 to include the use of previously gathered data to arrive at a conclusion, then it will accomodate the other areas of science that you mentioned.

I understood that point you raised; however, the data gathered by previous sociologists was likewise not based on conducting human experiments. If a discipline must test hypotheses by doing experiments in order to be considered science, then the disciplines I mentioned cannot be considered scientific. So yeah, the problem is Step 4. The list is far too restrictive, as I said; "the arena of science has a larger scope than that narrow definition." Either lots of scientific disciplines are actually not science at all, or that list is a badly flawed explanation of what constitutes as science. If we agree that the latter is the case, then solarwave needs a better answer.

(And I agree with solarwave. You are among the few really decent members on these forums.)

Reality isn't refereed by a girl/woman sitting at a computer no matter what her age.

Quoted For Truth!