Pseudoscience

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

See also

• Critical thinking : mental process of analyzing or evaluating information, particularly statements or propositions that are offered as true.

Related topics

• Bad science : pejorative term used to derogate purportedly scientific data, research, analyses or claims which are driven by perceived political, financial or other questionable motives.
• Cargo cult science : term to describe work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty".
• Junk science : pejorative term used to derogate purportedly scientific data, research, analyses or claims which are driven by perceived political, financial or other questionable motives.
• Mind myths : practices known to be used as a part of a belief systems.
• Pathological science : term to describe ideas that would simply not "go away", long after they were given up on as wrong by the majority of scientists in the field. The term is semantically loaded, and has often been taken as a personal insult implying utter foolishness in the target.
• Pathological skepticism (or Pseudoskepticism) : class of pseudoscience masquerading as proper skepticism, where claims of "reason" and having a "scientific worldview", but frequently uses logical fallacies, attempts to silence opponents, and employs various invalid strategies of persuasion.
• Protoscience : new areas of scientific endeavor in the process of becoming established and sometimes used to describe a hypothesis which has not yet been tested adequately by the scientific method.
• Pseudohistory : term for information about the past, which purports to be historic or supported by archeology, but which is judged to fall outside the domain of mainstream history.
• Pseudophilosophy : any idea or system that masquerades itself as philosophy while significantly failing to meet some suitable intellectual standards.
• Quackery : practice of producing medicine which may lack any commonly respected evidence of their effectiveness and are generally considered to be in the business of selling false hope to ill-informed people.

Other

General

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• Bible code (or Torah codes) : belief system that there are meaningful intentionally coded forms in the text of a holy scripture.
• Extrasensory perception (or ESP) : any ability to acquire information by means other than the five canonical senses (taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing), or any other sense well known to science (balance, proprioception, etc).
• Magical thinking : used by historians of religion to describe one kind of non-scientific causal reasoning.
• Memetics : scientific approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme.
• New Age : broad movement of late twentieth century and contemporary Western culture characterised by an individual eclectic approach to spiritual exploration.
• Ufology : study of Unidentified flying object (UFO) reports, sightings, and other related phenomena
• Sokal Affair : famous hoax played by physicist Alan Sokal upon the editorial staff and readership of a leading journal in the academic humanities.

People

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• Erich von Däniken : controversial Swiss author who is best known for authoring works about prehistoric times.
• Michael Shermer : science writer, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor of its magazine Skeptic.
• Marcello Truzzi : professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University and director for the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research.

Lists

• List of alternative, speculative and disputed theories
• List of misconceptions