[WikiEN-l] Parascience subst. pseudoscience

Sat Dec 17 16:14:41 UTC 2005

Delirium wrote:

> 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.

My point remains: it's an attack on its *competence*, not its *good
faith*. Saying it's an assumption of bad faith is simply incorrect.

- d.