It seems to me that the sides of this debate are somewhat talking past
each other. I take the opposition to the term "pseudoscience" as based
on the claim that we should not be judging whether particular
experiments or observations are done scientifically or not.
In that, I actually agree. Wikipedia isn't a judge or critic of
scientific methodology. In such cases we should report what was done
and how the world responded to it.
But I've been talking about fields where there _aren't_ any experiments
or methodology to report on. There's just speculation, tradition,
marketing, or religious pronouncement ... and an adherent claiming that
the noises of same are "scientific".
I just don't see what's non-neutral about saying that speculation
doesn't count as science just because someone says it is. Or that while
3000-year-old religious tradition is a fine thing, it isn't a form of
scientific methodology.
Is it the "pseudo-" prefix, that some people have taken as an imputation
of criminal fraud? We could simply say "nonscience" or "not based on
experiment" or whatever instead. But I don't think we should fail to
report the fact that some fields _do_ claim to be "science" for
political or marketing reasons, even when there's no science around.
--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>