[WikiEN-l] Parascience subst. pseudoscience

Wed Dec 21 09:48:12 UTC 2005

Delirium wrote:

> 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. 

Now that McLaren is a convert it wouldn't do for them to criticize her 
plans to get a "real" degree in sociology. :-)

Ec