Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is any body of knowledge, methodology, or practice that is erroneously regarded as scientific {{mn|dicdef|1}}.

Criticisms of the concept of pseudoscience

Members of communities whose studies are considered pseudoscientific find the term pseudoscience inherently stigmatizing to those fields. Such critics dispute the concept of pseudoscience and the process of mainstream science. Some believe that using peer review to assess the quality of a scientific paper is a conformist process that can be influenced by personality and social disputes; they contend that the process tends to exclude originality from genuine science in a way that scientific pioneers did not experience. Scientists typically reject these arguments, and insist that peer review is essential in ensuring some level of quality control.

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Some philosophers of science (such as Laudan and Lakatos) dispute the concept of pseudoscience as being unnecessary or politically engaged. Scientists already have several neutral notions (a theory, a hypothesis, etc.) which can be used instead of pseudoscience. Mainstream science has a natural way of assessing these hypotheses and theories (peer review, predictions, confirming experiments, etc.) which turn them into either mainstream science, nonsense, or theories with a limited range of applications. History of science knows a lot of examples where mainstream science of the past becomes pseudoscience of the present (old theory of heat transfer) and pseudoscience of the past becomes the mainstream science of the present (Lobachevsky non-Euclidian geometry).

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