Attacking a Straw Man? A theoretical alternative and an exploratory empirical approach on how to “inoculate” students against astrology

Abstract

Belief in astrology is a worryingly popular phenomenon, particularly among the young. In order to provide students with epistemic “antibodies” against this discourse, we identified some of the characteristics of astrological discourse. By focusing on a sample of representa-tive astrological texts and on a survey concerning personal beliefs, we found out that, con-trary to what canonical approaches claim, astrological discourse neither poses (or is re-ceived) as scientific nor is exclusively committed to false hypotheses. On the contrary, while presenting itself as a type of knowledge “alternative” or “complementary” to science, it is characterized by a large number of statements which are either unfalsifiable or trivially true—which entails that they cannot count as valuable factual knowledge. Having encoun-tered these traits, we devised a didactic intervention in two stages: one centred on the dis-tinction between falsifiable and unfalsifiable statements and the other on trivially true statements and the risks of accepting them as informative. Both stages yielded promising results.