LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Pseudoscience
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Pseudoscience is a term applied to a field of inquiry by critics claiming that it is a pretended or spurious science because it does not meet established standards. The term [P]seudoscience is reserved for fields that claim to be a science, that make claims about the world and give explanations of natural processes. Statements of personal values or beliefs are neither scientific nor pseudoscientific, nor are works of art or literature. Religion is not a pseudoscience because it does not make scientific claims, but a faith-based alternative to Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory would be. Freudian psychology is an example of a theory considered pseudoscientific by some and defended as legitimate by others. Since the term pseudoscience is general, it is used to dismiss an entire field, rather than a specific study or the work of a particular individual.
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Pseudoscience is use of scientific language to describe blatantly unscientific ideas. The film "Ghostbusters" is an amusing parody of pseudoscience; its characters describe their goofy "ghost science" with all the jargon and clinical detachment of a real science. But while "Ghostbusters" is smart enough to know it's a comedy, other forms of pseudoscience such as Creationism aren't. They take themselves very seriously, and they hope you will too.
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Pseudoscience books offer examples of almost every kind of fallacy of logic and reason known to scholars and have invented some new ones of their own. A favorite device is the non sequitur. Pseudoscientists ... love the "Galileo Argument." This consists of the pseudoscientist comparing himself to Galileo, and saying that just as the pseudoscientist is believed to be wrong, so Galileo was thought wrong by his contemporaries therefore the pseudoscientist must be right too, just as Galileo was. Clearly the conclusion does not follow! Moreover, Galileo's ideas were tested, verified, and accepted promptly by his scientific colleagues. The rejection came from the established religion which favored the pseudoscience that Galileo's findings contradicted.
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Marks of Pseudoscience: The following list provides guidelines for recognizing pseudoscience. Any item on the list is a sufficient condition for being pseudoscientific. It is not to be expected that a single pseudoscientific idea will satisfy all the conditions, only some of them. Also, just because an idea does not meet any of the conditions does not guarantee that it is not pseudoscientific. Failure to exhibit any of the marks of pseudoscience is not sufficient to make someone a scientist. It is... a necessary condition for being a scientist.
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Pseudoscience, in contrast, is characteristically inadequately tested; indeed, may even be untestable in principle. If tests appear to contradict its evidence, supporters may insist that the existing scientific results are false. Pseudoscience is often unresponsive to ordinary scientific procedures (for example, peer review, publication in standard journals). If untestable claims have been made, the failure to test and disprove these claims is often cited as evidence of the truth of the pseudoscience.
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Pseudoscience is distinguished from protoscience in its deliberate deviation from the accepted Scientific Method. Protoscience is science regarded to be in accordance with the method, but which has yet to be properly tested and either supported or refuted. Such fields as acupuncture and lucid dreaming may perhaps be best categorized as protosciences, pending more evidence and theoretical underpinning.
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