Astrology

I love comments about astrology like, “I don’t believe in astrology. I am a Virgo and we are very skeptical.” A good friend of mine once told me that he did not believe in astrology but had made it a point to move all the way across the classroom from a redhead he had sat down next to the first day of class because he thought she was cute. They made a little small talk before the lecture started and he jokingly asked her if she happened to be a Scorpio. It turned out she was, just like a former girl-friend, also a redhead and former for easily five years at the time this was happening, who he would swear after consuming his second Mike’s Hard Lemonade of the evening had emotionally scarred him for life. 

He knew better but still could not make himself not feel better avoiding her after he knew; the fear was still real for him as emotion even though he knew that it was irrational and was a little ashamed to let it determine his behavior. This kind of story, and they are not rare, explains to me why astrology has survived well past the time when the world view that originally generated and supported it has passed away. There was still a chair in Astrology at the Sorbonne the year Shakespeare was born. Jung wrote a book about Astrology that examined it seriously as a theory of personality. The book presented what Jung accepted as hard evidence that astrological sign correlated significantly with several other measures of personality type or temperament.

The problem with astrology and fortune telling is that the descriptions of personality offered are so broad and so general that no prediction specific enough to test can be derived from those descriptions. This means that the description offered cannot be proven wrong. In order to be a scientific theory, a description or broad explanation must generate very specific particular predictions that can be tested and proven wrong. If such specific predictions are proven false, the broader description or explanation is also falsified.  If my horoscope said “You will met a woman on Tuesday named after a flower. She will be into macramé and lack the big toe on her left foot in consequence of a riding mower accident suffered when she was eleven.”, that would be empirically testable. Horoscope readings tend to be more like “Tuesday is promising for romance. Be careful with your cash in the afternoon.” If I have a nice conversation with a redhead named Sandy in the produce section of Winn-Dixie while doing my grocery shopping on Tuesday, I may call that vague prediction fulfilled. 

I will not change my mind later when Sandy and I never see each other again but will forget the whole episode, just as I will have forgotten the part about being careful with cash by Wednesday if nothing coincidental occurs to bring it to mind. Horoscope readings prime us to look for things that could be read as confirmations of their vague predictions. We remember the predictions that we can see as being fulfilled by some coincidence and forget the other five equally broad predictions made in the same reading.