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