[WikiEN-l] Parascience subst. pseudoscience

Sat Dec 17 16:12:36 UTC 2005

David Gerard wrote:

>And by the way, "pseudoscience" does not imply bad faith; it implies
>incompetence. The pseudoscientist frequently takes the label as a
>personal attack because they literally do not understand why what they
>do is not science at all, even though they sincerely believe in what
>they are doing.
>  
>
Well, it really is a personal attack; it means something akin to what 
"quack" means in medicine.  It occasionally gets slung around among 
scientists, especially when getting into flamewars about the relative 
merits of various of the "soft sciences", and is rarely considered 
anything but an attack.  For example, if I were to say, "although it 
uses many statistics, sociology is more of a pseudoscience than a proper 
science", it's pretty clearly an overt attack on sociology.

-Mark