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 representative astrological texts and on a survey concerning personal beliefs, we found out that, contrary to what canonical approaches claim, astrological discourse neither poses (or is received) 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 encountered these traits, we devised a didactic intervention in two stages: one centred on the distinction 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.