Talk:History of pseudoscience

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This sounds like a fairly difficult topic to handle, in part because there is no clear definition of what is "pseudoscience" even with modern investigations, and trying to apply such a term backwards over time seems like a difficult and ahistorical approach (was Kepler's desire for a harmony of the heavens pseudoscience?). How are you intending on approaching this? --Fastfission 23:56, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hmm...I'm not sure we've really found the best title...what I would think about putting here are things that have happened on the "wrong" branches of scientific progress. That is, after the mainstream scientific community has decided to settle on X, and some minority or non-scientific community adopts Y and carries that forward. (Kuhn would call it pre-paradigm thought, or something.) Kepler's belief in his theory of perfect harmonic shapes pre-dates the scientific consensus on elliptical orbits, and since he was actually a central figure in creating that consensus, I would consider his work on that question part of the mainline history. Though I've not entirely convinced myself that this should really be a unified article, much less one as part of a series on the history of science, but we'll see. -- Beland 03:42, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How on earth would you do a history of the "wrong" branches of science when that state of "wrongness" is itself historically contingent? That's what I'm getting at, here. We would label much of Kepler to be pseudoscientific in origins; history causes us to strip out the parts which don't work with our modern understandings. Are you talking only about sciences which were considered "wrong" in their time or those which are considered "wrong" in our time? (if the latter, the list contains every discredited theory ever used! if the former, then you are including many things we now view as just fine!) This would be a difficult theoretical problem to task out in writing a book on the subject, much less a Wikipedia article. --Fastfission 01:13, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with pseudoscience?

Does this article need to be separate? I would suggest merging it with pseudoscience. Hgilbert 21:33, 24 June 2006 (UTC)