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claims
taxonomy of skeptical claims v2.5

make your claim

Claims seem to fall into three broad categories:

  • claims about the supernatural
  • claims about nature
  • claims about human culture

    Nature, religion, and politics.

    focus, people

    It's important to observe, though, that most claimants make several claims, and while their claims may be all over the map, each one will fit into exactly one category. Often this is because any one claim is questionable, but several claims working together can become a functional worldview. Consider this example:

    Scientology claims that we have reincarneted souls of the departed (a supernatural claim) which can be detected with instruments (a scientific claim), but that there is a government conspiracy to squash this truth (a political claim). If you believe all these things are true, then you're probably a Scientiologist. But the point is that Scientology is not just making religious claims. So there's some confusion about whether they should be treated as a religion, an alternative health modality, or a political movement.

    Generally speaking, all religions are making at least one supernatural claim.

    On the other hand, many claimants have no supernatural claim. For example, Holocaust Revisionism is a claim that there is a conspiracy to exaggerate the events of the Holocaust in order to generate sympathy for Jews. This is a political claim, but some of the evidence they submit are scientific claims.

    An example that comes from the other direction are relentless pseudoscientific claims of free energy machines. These are primarily a scientific claim, but almost all are coupled with political claims that the technology is being suppressed by interests who are invested in energy corporations.

    So, without further ado... the latest version of...

  • Taxonomy of WooWoo (v 2.5)

    category

    1 [Supernatural] 1.1 [Immortality] 1.1.1 [soul of dead goes elsewhere]
    1.1.2 [soul of dead goes into another body]
    1.1.3 [soul of dead hangs around]
    1.1.4 [soul of living can leave body]
    1.1.5 [soul of dead merges with others]
    1.2 [Purpose] 1.2.1 [creator]
    1.2.2 [guidance]
    1.3 [Control] 1.3.1 [blessings and curses]
    1.3.2 [reward and punishment]
    2 [Pseudosciences] 2.1 [scientific errors]
    2.2 [extraterrestrial life]
    2.3 [unclassified terrestrial life]
    2.4 [pseudophysics] 2.4.1 [free energy]
    2.4.2 [undetectable energy or forces]
    2.5 [powers] 2.5.1 [psychokinesis]
    2.5.2 [telepathy]
    2.5.3 [clairvoyance]
    2.5.4 [psychometry]
    2.5.5 [precognition]
    2.6 [health] 2.6.1 [questionable diagnoses]
    2.6.2 [questionable treatments]
    2.6.3 [natural is healthy]
    2.7 [pseudopsychology] 2.7.1 [suppressed memory]
    2.7.2 [questionable personality tests / lie detectors]
    2.8 [nature / nurture extremism]
    3 [Pseudohumanities] 3.1 [world domination conspiracies]
    3.2 [cover-up conspiracies]
    3.3 [urban legends]
    3.4 [historical revisionism]


     [end]







    |r 2009.09.12@07:25 | GTK
    url: http://www.bcskeptics.info/resources/claims/index.html [Δ]