Delirium wrote:
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.
My point remains: it's an attack on its *competence*, not its *good faith*. Saying it's an assumption of bad faith is simply incorrect.
- d.