On Rescuing Astrology from the Pseudosciences
By D. Seiple
In his article for the current issue of the NYC Journal of Philosophy, Kilaya Ciriello offers us a perspective on astrology that may be new to many of us. However, his opening point is more familiar. The Socratic injunction “Know Thyself” is the well-known exhortation to virtue and the long-standing marker for the origin of Western philosophy. Soon after the death of Socrates, this term “virtue” came to cover the positive character traits encompassed by the Platonic notion of the Good. The everyday world, as we familiarly know it, is said to be less real than the unseen unity underlying it, and this somehow connects our character traits to a unifying Whole. This is a view that had actually been rather widely accepted until only the last few centuries. Kilaya still accepts this view, as his article makes clear.
This ancient, all-embracing concept of the Good continues to puzzle many modern minds, who instead regard the virtues as separate functions, nothing more than mundane dispositions explaining why we perform well whatever tasks we should. To fix your badly leaking sink you call in the kind of person who has been trained in the skills of plumbing. In quaint language, you could say that such a person possesses “the virtues of a plumber” – and that’s that. But if we believe in astrology, there’s much more to it.
Personally, I have long been among the most skeptical when it comes to astrology, which has always struck me as one of the least reputable of human endeavors, except perhaps as innocent entertainment for Halloween parlor games.
Other readers may disagree with me. So here may be our chance to think this through a little more. However, that means applying the Principle of Charity and starting with as sympathetic a view towards astrology as our imagination allows. Then we can proceed to testing it out in thought, and with evidence if we can muster it. There are other ways of doing philosophy, but this general strategy pretty much captures how professionalized philosophy has developed, and it bears the same general features of logic that the scientific method displays – what is called “testability.” And we can expand this to include testing out the conceptual as well as the empirical implications. Yet despite this, we also face some limitations when it comes to astrology, which my discussion here should make clear.
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People tend to be opinionated towards astrology, including some in our philosophy club. I’d bet that at least a few of us think it’s pure nonsense. Kilaya’s article is particularly interesting because although Kilaya himself is a practicing astrologer, he acknowledges that the more pop versions of astrology simply cannot be rescued from the status of a pseudoscience. So we actually start from a shared point of view on this, even if we tend to be skeptical.
“Pseudoscience” is a term that gained currency among skeptics in the 19th century. Today that same term is intended to distinguish theories and methods that claim to be as good as the recognized sciences but whose procedures are at variance with scientific method. Phrenology is a good example. It claimed to predict character traits of a person (including intelligence and moral virtue) by measuring bumps on the skull, which were supposed to reflect effective use of the brain’s “muscles.” The more mental competencies were “exercised,” the more space they would need in the expanding skull, just as the more push-ups a guy does, the more his expended masculinity should pop out through his expanding tank top.
Phrenology has been discredited,[1] but it had remained vibrant in some quarters through the early twentieth century. Likewise, pseudoscientific applications of astrology flourish in some quarters even today, and your daily horoscope would be an example of this, insofar as it might aim to promote specific predictions and advice concerning upcoming events in your own life. This is commonly referred to as horary astrology, which is now generally rejected even among the “more cautious” defenders[2] of what Kilaya calls natal astrology.
I have always assumed that something like horary astrology was just what astrology is all about. But I like to keep an open mind, and so when Kilaya announced that he was giving a workshop on natal astrology, I decided to give it a try. That required me to get my birth chart drawn up – easy to do online. Having done that, however, I was quite surprised when it gave me some definitive personal information that it should not have been able to produce just from the data I entered.
And this made me seriously wonder, at least for a moment, whether astrology shouldn’t be rescued from its banishment as a pseudoscience. So how might we decide this? Let’s see.
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People who check their daily horoscope for guidance often reflect back on their immediate past and actually do find meaning in what they read. But is this because (this version of) astrology is a science?
Let’s take a related example. Some Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I might pause before a lovely Grecian urn, get enraptured by those ancient figures, and suddenly recall familiar words from my freshman English-lit class – “Thou still unravished bride of quietness!” Those words certainly do “make sense” of what I am observing, to me anyway. But in finding aesthetic meaning in a piece of pottery, have I just made a scientific discovery?
Of course not. But why not? We might say that for this, my mental image must meet the criteria of genuine science. What makes intuitive sense to me personally might not make scientific sense simply because it would not be testable by “objective” criteria. Simply being inspired by my love of John Keats’ poetry doesn’t cut it. Similarly, any conviction that I (as a Gemini[3]) might take away from horary astrology is nothing more than an index of my own particular sensibility (my own personal “lens”), which tough-minded empiricists could care less about. On the other hand, if those same astrological findings could be scientifically confirmed, then even the empiricists would have to care quite a bit more.
Testability is supposed to assure us that a successful prediction is not just a lucky guess, by allowing even skeptics to see if a horoscope’s readings can get scientifically confirmed. But believers in astrology should want to confirm such a prediction as well, by relying on more than the mere feeling they have about it, and more than a few coincidental predictions that happen to come true. Would anyone really want to say that a broken clock can tell time just because it happens to be right twice a day? Likewise for any retrospective confidence in felt “synchronicity” between the readings of my horoscope and the facts of my real life. Is there any reason to trust that the horoscope can “tell” my future in that way? Most thinking people these days would say no.
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But that’s just for pop astrology. What about natal astrology? Can its findings be confirmed? Deciding this turns out to be more complicated than it might at first seem.
Nonetheless, many knowledgeable people think the issue is already decided. Just look at some of the expert internet resources. If you consult the Wikipedia entry for “Western Astrology,” for example, you’ll find a decent overview of the topic, but it begins with a definitive-sounding pronouncement: “Astrology is a pseudoscience and has consistently failed experimental and theoretical verification.“ (Notice that no distinction is made between horary and natal astrology.) One of the supporting citations is the article on science and pseudoscience in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is commonly taken to be the most comprehensive one-stop summary for a vast number of philosophical topics. Many young scholars in particular, having once landed there, feel no need to stop off anywhere else. And in this case they might not need to, if astrology is really no better than phrenology (or phlogiston, to take another example).
Kilaya’s project, on the other hand, wants to make us skeptical towards this common view. Natal astrology, as he describes it, seeks to tell us less about our future destiny and more about our underlying character. This is not to say it has no relation to the later events – its relation is roughly the same as the relation between “virtue” and the future. I may be a generous type of person (I might have the “virtue of generosity”), but that would not imply that I’m going to be offering $10 to absolutely every needy person I mean. Would it actually have any specific predictive implications at all? Astrologically derived “information” (if you can really call it that) is said to be more subtle than such predictions, which (again) are more like pop horoscope readings.
Actually though, what natal astrology conveys does seem to have something in common those poetic words about the Grecian urn at the Met. As we’ll see, natal astrology (like romantic poetry) is an invitation to draw upon our subjectivity rather than just the empirical evidence. But in contrast to that Keats moment in the museum, this also presents us with a decisive contrast with horary astrology.
This is very important to see. Natal astrological is an invitation to self-interpretation and not just sentimental revery, and this serves “a spiritual purpose and not a material one”[4] -- less about the stars than about the self.
Natal astrology then offers itself as one path to self-knowledge, but we need to be careful when we say this. (1) First – as I understand it, natal astrology at its best does not hazard specific predictions, nor does it stop at rather vague formulations of a person’s character (“You are an extrovert!”). Any specification about details like this would be a final result but an opening for self-reflection, to see how (if at all) a particular reading actually applies – and it allows for other factors to override such an application. Missing this would be missing the whole point, by treating the outputs of the calculations as a substitute for the person herself. This would place someone in the same position as the sophomore who turns in a philosophy paper authored by ChatGPT – in Kilaya’s language, we could regard it as substituting a material purpose (getting the needed grade) for a spiritual one (self-growth in one’s intellectual virtues).
(2) Secondly, we need to be careful about how we understand “self-knowledge.” That’s a topic for another discussion entirely, but let’s see if an example can help here. If I learn somehow (maybe from the stars and planets?) that I have a tendency to be extroverted, then I might want to consider this when I am offered a job opportunity with no likely chance to interact with my co-workers. (And I might be surprised at what this consideration might open up.) I might feel seduced by its prestige and promised pay, but this would be a job that isolates me from human contact. So I need to decide if it’s a decent fit for me nonetheless (since I may have heavy debts to pay off, perhaps). On the other hand, a tough job might get even tougher if I fail to give enough weight to the sort of person I am.[5] Here I would be facing a moral dilemma, and moral dilemmas are always invitations for self-assessment. Whenever we address moral dilemmas in real life, we are hazarding out into uncertain territory, with or without astrology to help.
Of course to a skeptic, the empirical leniency that natal astrology exhibits – leaving us with only interpretive suggestions rather than clear decision procedures -- might seem suspiciously convenient given the lack of more solid evidence for astrology’s efficacy. How is astrology’s vagueness anything more than an escape hatch (what philosophers of science call an “ad hoc hypothesis”), designed to save a bad theory from discredit? That (allegedly) would make astrology the pseudoscience its skeptics claim. That is what we’re trying to decide here. If we really need a definitive decision procedure for astrology to survive its discreditors, we’ve reached our conclusion. Astrology can’t provide this. So -- end of story?
But things may not be quite this simple. It is certainly true that an extrovert horoscopic reading, say, might not cough up rigorously testable predictions. But there turns out to be a plausible reason for this. An elaborate system of further stellar and planetary indicators, which are said to pick out additional factors (once again, other tendencies of character), might either support or mitigate any isolated character trait. At least that’s what any astrologist might tell me on the days I don’t “feel” like the extrovert the stars discern me to be.
Admittedly this entire story though feels like a black hole to skeptics. But here we may notice a surprising fact. This elaborate conceptual machinery produces calculations rather comparable to a meteorological model[6] -- one that “predicts” but might not absolutely promise fair weather for this Saturday’s planned pool party. So I listen to the weather report and have to do a little soul-searching so see if I really am going to go. I can’t get a definitive prediction from the weatherman to help me! Instead, I need to consider the risks inherent in the uncertain situation. Once I know the risks, I then need to know myself well enough to make a wise decision. (What do I really want? How risk averse am I?)
So here is what we see at this point: astrology, with its vast conceptual network of categories and calculations, embodies a comprehensive systematic framework for producing probabilistic models (and A.I. works in the same general way.) And this provide us our first clue as to how astrology might be rescued from the pseudosciences. We have applied the Principle of Charity, to discover that natal astrology is very similar to normal science -- at least in its repertoire of rather exact calculations, and this makes it possible to apply the model to anyone with a complete birth chart. These conditions (the exact placement of the stars and planets relative to the earth) are not generally addressed in the same manner by normal science, but appear to be every bit as empirical as many of the conditions commonly recognized by social psychology (for example), and perhaps more empirically rigorous than psychoanalytic explanations.[7]
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Even so, by itself this isn’t enough to effect a rescue from pseudoscientific exile. For one thing, it still may not be clear how astrology differs in this way from Ptolemaic astronomy, which offered its own structural machinery for a host of specific predictions.[8] And secondly: just because a model may yield a consistent range of results (reliability), that does not mean that the results are true (valid) – as a number of our group members have pointed out in the banter after our Wednesday evening meetings. Even advocates of phrenology might appeal to a consistent set of scull configurations for their teenage subjects, without any eventual predictive success.
So again, how would we decide the status of astrology? The obvious proviso is the same we have been considering already – that it needs to make predictions that turn out empirically true, at least at a rate better than pure chance alone would suggest.
But this means we cannot consider traits of character in isolation. Let’s take another example: let’s say I “know” that I am an outgoing and gregarious person (a true extrovert), and I have also heard that my birth sign is Gemini. My friendly astrologer is not at all surprised at this since persons with a so-called “positive” sun sign (Gemini’s are included here) are correlated with extrovertism. He even announces some carefully designed empirical studies appearing to confirm this – not by showing how any one predictive trait turns out true, but how an entire range of such predictions show a statistical tendency to do so. And lo and behold, yes! My due diligence uncovers at least one such confirming study from highly reputable researchers.[9] This is exactly the kind of empirical study the skeptics should be interested in, no? This would seem to indicate that astrology can do what it claims: even someone who did not already know their sign (which happened to be Gemini) and never thought about whether or not they were extroverted, might learn from their birth chart that they are “likely” to be so. There, a true prediction!
Alas. Problems remain for the astrologers even here. For one thing, these results appear to show a rather weak relationship. Even this begs for an explanation, though. Perhaps, as Kilaya suggests, there is after all a deeper metaphysical reason, having to do with the Platonic Good. That might be an explanation for the statistical significance of the findings on this. But there might be less ethereal reasons -- the study design might have been faulty, or the statistical calculations erroneous. This has been suggested even by some who report having confirmed those extroversion findings.[10] The most convincing of these caveats might be the possibility that subjects in these studies already know their sun sign. Thus they succumb to confirmation bias, without recalling the many occasions in their lives when the behavioral opposite trait occurred instead.
Is it possible to determine this? Here is a question that only a statistician could love, so I won’t belabor it any further. (Here is the limitation I have already mentioned). But it’s worth noting that those who do believe in astrology are not worried about such questions. They typically come to their beliefs because they think astrology “works.” This is hard to refute (as we have seen), and this is not because the evidence is so overwhelming (as we have also seen). As one vocal critic has indicated, the appearance of efficacy for astrology does not depend upon the demonstrable truth of the theory, but only upon the subjective resonance someone feels for the news that astrology brings them. And that brings us back to where we started, in the Museum and in front of the Grecian urn. To say astrology “works” is something like saying that a placebo works – which it very often does, and perhaps even when a tested subject knows it’s only a placebo![11] “Astrology is thus made nonfalsifiable…”[12]
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This mention of “falsifiability” is import here. Just as long as we accept the falsifiability as the foundation for scientific credibility, we seem unable to rescue astrology from disrepute. Falsifiability was the “demarcation criterion” for philosophers of science as recently as the late 1970s, and it still seems to be gospel throughout much of the skeptical literature.
Of course, most thinking astrologers do not accept this starting point,[13] arguing instead that “no factor in a birth chart shall be judged in isolation.” Again, this would be the reason that even the most specific predictions of character end up only weakly reflected in the empirical studies: there are too many confounding factors, so that we should not take apparent refutations of a theory as the final word.
So then this might be where the discussion needs to go. Is the falsifiability criterion itself defensible?
But this will have to await another discussion.
D. Seiple serves with Evan Lundstrom as Co-Editor of the NYC Journal of Philosophy. He especially enjoys symphony concerts and pre-postmodern art museums. He has a master’s degree in theology (Drew) and a doctorate in philosophy (Columbia), and his publications can be found on PhilPapers.
[1] O. Parker Jones et al, “An empirical, 21st century evaluation of phrenology,” Cortex 106:26-35, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29864593/. Also see https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-put-the-dubious-theory-of-phrenology-through-rigorous-testing-for-the-first-time-88291 . However for an interesting alternative view, see Cole Whetstone’s article in this issue.
[2] John Anthony West and Jan Gerhard Toonder, The Case for Astrology (1970), p 29;
[3] Here (from https://www.horoscope.com/us/index.aspx) might be a typical Gemini reading for Apr 17, 2025: “Are you working on a project that requires a little ingenuity? If so, today you may draw a blank. No matter how hard you think about it, you can't come up with a good way to proceed. Perhaps it would be best to put it away and do something else for a while.” Great! This feels very true. And even better, this feels like it resonates with something from my ancient past. A previous life perhaps? (Nope, my mother.)
[4] This is a quote from Kilaya’s article (in this issue). In this “spiritual vs material” distinction, there is some analogy to what St Paul seems to have meant by injunctions like: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). It is no wonder perhaps that astrology often seemed rather compatible, from time to time, with the Christian message – as it did with other religious perspectives as well. One who mainly seeks material success is mainly seeking “material purposes” (Kilaya).
[5] To make matters even worse, this might be so even if I really don’t consider myself as an extrovert – for maybe my behavioral reticence is actually brought about by an inner tension that blocks my true self-expression (though astrology alone is unlikely to decide this for me: that’s where the spiritual self-reflection comes in).
[6] Julia and Derek Parker, Astrology (2007), 12.
[7] Over the years, the clinical benefits of psychoanalysis have seemed at least questionable. (The classical hard-minded critique of Freudian theory is Adolf Grünbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. See in particular Ch 1.) However, more recently empirical confirmation has been more forthcoming, and advocates of astrology might foresee a similar development in their own case.
[8] Ptolemy (2nd cen ACE) was the most famous astronomer of antiquity, whose geocentric theory was the accepted view of the heavens until Copernicus and Galileo (16th-17th cen).
[9] “The hypothesis that Ss born under odd signs show higher extraversion scores is clearly supported” (Mayo, White, and Eysenck. “An empirical study of the relation between astrological factors and personality. Journal of Social Psychology, 105 (1978), 232).
[10] A. G. Smithers & H. J. Cooper, “Personality and Season of Birth,” The Journal of Social Psychology, 105:2 (1978), 240-241. See also David P. Fourie, “Self-Attribution Theory and the Sun-Sign,” The Journal of Social Psychology, 122:1 (1984), 121-126
[11] Blaise et al, “Open-label placebo clinical trials: is it the rationale, the interaction or the pill?” (The BMJ 25: 5 (Jun 26, 2019) 156-165, https://ebm.bmj.com/content/25/5/159).
[12] “Astrologers replied in their usual way to criticism, dismissing it as biased and ignorant. Their repeated claim—that their daily experience confirms their fundamental premise as above so below—is still heard from the rooftops. They still misinterpret cognitive artifacts in a chart reading as evidence of links with the heavens. And they still explain away all failures by the same old excuses, such as stars incline and do not compel; another factor is interfering (there is always another factor), and astrologers are not infallible. Astrology is thus made nonfalsifiable…” (Geoffrey A. Dean, “Does Astrology Need to Be True? A Thirty-Year Update,” The Skeptic Inquirer 40:4 (July/August, 2016)).
[13] Most astrologers base their defense on claiming “that no factor in a birth chart shall be judged in isolation, and that judging all factors collectively is too subtle a process to be investigated scientifically, an argument which can occupy astrologers for several pages” (Dean and Nias, “Professor H.J. Eysenck_ In Memoriam 1916-1997,” https://www.astrology-and-science.com/H-eyse2.htm ).
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