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 Though dogged in his desire to confirm this "pseudoscientific" (plain false tbh) model of the solar system, #Kepler also stuck to the data and thus ended up elaborating three robust laws of planetary motion which paved a significant part of the way towards Newton's later laws.

If I've understood the now (imo) become distasteful dispute between #IIT advocates and critics, then I believe this historical example contains important lessons for both.

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I love these historical examples! And sorry if I'm being dense here, but in what way was Kepler pseudoscientific? He took Copernicus's idea and Brahe's data and formulated his 3 laws; those equations made predictions about where the planets would be in the future that could be tested (And as you said, those laws triggered some of Newton's ideas about why the planets move as they do).

Is the pseudoscience here the absence of an account of "why the planets do it that way?"

In contrast, IIT appears to be prescientific insofar as most of its predictions cannot be empirically tested at all (as I understand it).