On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 10:35:11PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
Thats it: 'Parascience' shall be the NPOV term that replaces the SPOV term 'pseudoscience' in most cases.
If it describes what pseudoscience describes, and it ever reaches common English usage rather than being a Wikipedia neologism, I predict those so labeled will object to it in just the same way.
Yup. See also [[euphemism treadmill]]. Creating a politically-correct neologism won't change the situation: People who are misleading the public (by pretending to scientific research they aren't doing) don't like having the fact pointed out.
(Trivia: the word "Scientology" was first used in 1910 or so to mean what we now call "pseudoscience".)
I've heard people who didn't know of Hubbard's group use the term in that way as recently as a few years ago. Also to mean what's sometimes called "scientism", that is, the ascription of moral truth to the latest favored hypothesis.