I personally believe astrology is best thought of as a humanity like history or literature rather than a science, but to the extent that it’s scientific, it’s best thought of as a social science like psychology or sociology.

Hardcore skeptic arguments against astrology are often rooted in an epistemology that leaves no room for the validity of not only the humanities as means of true knowledge acquisition, but the social sciences.

We see this in the culture as large with trends in media criticism that adhere to a hyper-literalism (e.g. cin*ma s*ns). Nuance and ambiguity are rejected as interfering with capital-T Truth, which is epistemologically and ontologically straightjacketed to the concrete.

The assumption is that if it isn’t strictly quantifiable, it isn’t real. So things like astrology, or one’s own emotions, or the bigoted contexts certain comments exist in can be dismissed a priori.

But that assumption—often euphemistically called positivism—is taken on faith.

The world is messy. Most of life just can’t be empirically quantified. Trying to just opens up more cans of worms. If you want to understand the world more clearly, you have to be open to the contradictions and the complexities and the not-being-sure.

To go through the world assuming that everything that’s true can be empirically proven to be true is going to get you hurt, badly, and you’ll end up hurting others badly in the process.

Because the world has never worked that way, and acting otherwise sets you up for heartbreak.