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.