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