here, my musing upon Perplexity AI's response regarding the epistemic status of vitalism and science this 2025:
001. when Perplexity AI is asked "Why does vitalism violate scientific process?" this 2025-05, we're told in the summary:
[and I'll repeat for accessibility] "Summary Table: Vitalism vs. Scientific Process. Aspect Vitalism. Scientific Process. Testability. Not testable or falsifiable. Requires testable, falsifiable hypotheses. Empirical Evidence. Lacks empirical support. Demands empirical validation. Explanatory Power. Invokes metaphysical, non-material forces Relies on physical/chemical mechanisms. Role in Research. Does not lead to productive scientific inquiry. Drives discovery and refinement. In summary, vitalism violates scientific processes because it relies on untestable, metaphysical claims that cannot be empirically validated or falsified, and it has been rendered obsolete by advances in biology that provide naturalistic explanations for life’s phenomena."
I think that's a pretty excellent summation!
002. years ago and to this day:
23 years ago, 2002 actually, I labeled naturopathy "cultic mystical weirdness" and later "an unethical sectarian pseudoscience." I'd, of course, attended ND school for four years wherein the "science" status of what was decades-ago science-ejected was instead said to be "in fact" including naturopathy's "life force [...] vis medicatrix naturae." It may be an odd occurrence, but, 20 years later I'd author an M.S. Health Sciences capstone that further distinguished the kind of contrast I then and Perplexity AI now adheres to.
in the sense of institutionalized pseudoscience, one term I developed this 2025, within the 2025 Naturocrit logo actually, is "sectarian capture" -- when science is posed as the process or domain, but, it is severely warped by narrow, extra-scientific restrictions or fixations. That leads, eventually, to deceit and such. Deceit and sectarian capture stands opposed to factuality and freedom within my visualized paradigm.
003. a funny little thing about Perplexity AI's employed references:
one of the references indicated is the PubMed indexed and fully publicly available article "Coulter, I., Snider, P.,
& Neil, A. (2019). Vitalism - a worldview revisited: A critique of vitalism and its implications for integrative medicine. Integrative Medicine (Encinitas, Calif.), 18(3), 60–73" by the Foundations of Naturopathic Medicine Institute. The FNMI is still, to this day, wrapping vitalism in a science veneer [as well as supernaturalism].
the authors ask, in that 2019 article, "is there a powerful future where science, empirical practice and vitalism work together?" at the END of their article.
ah, the naturopathillogical: this is similar to insisting 2 + 2 = 7 [which is factually wrong] and yet insisting also that 2 + 2 = 4 [which is factually right], and then demanding that both are good, compatible, and together POWERFUL.
