292 Thurs and Numbers
It remained a prominent feature of talk about such areas as the social
sciences and popular ideas. Over the course of the early 1900s, the term
also began to take important new features that would eventually domi-
nate the rhetoric of pseudoscience, particularly during the last third of
the century.
One area of continuity in early- twentieth- century discussions of pseu-
doscience involved method (see chapter 12). In order to show that textual
criticism was a pseudoscience, a 1910 article in the journal of the Modern
Language Association of America made what was by that time a vener-
able equation between the pseudoscientifi c and the violation of inductive
reasoning.^41 Over the next several decades, ideas about scientifi c meth-
odology changed in some signifi cant ways, particularly in much more
positive assessments of the role of theory. But though the methods of
science changed, pseudoscience remained in violation of them. By far the
most important shift in ideas about the methodology of science, however,
was the emerging concept of the “scientifi c method.” The proliferation
of “scientifi c method” in public discussion implied a growing sense that
science operated in special ways distinct enough to require its own name.
It was, in short, a product of stronger boundaries around science, just like
pseudoscience. Appropriately, a stricter view of “the established methods
of science” was even more intimately linked with the pseudoscientifi c
than during the previous century. A 1926 article in California and West-
ern Medicine depicted nonorthodox medical ideas as an “attack upon the
scientifi c method not alone in medicine but in all fi elds of knowledge.”^42
In a more neutral mood, it was also possible to see a uniquely scientifi c
method as what actually joined science and pseudoscience. The anthro-
pologist Bronislaw Malinowski called magic “a pseudo- science” not be-
cause he thought it was illegitimate but because it had practical aims and
was guided by theories, just like science.^43
Talk about scientifi c method grew especially intense in the 1920s in
discussions of the scientifi c status of the social sciences, which continued
to fi nd themselves depicted as scientifi c outsiders. A 1904 article in the
American Journal of Sociology complained about charges leveled by “work-
ers in other sciences” that sociology was pseudoscientifi c. In The Public
and Its Problems (1927), the infl uential philosopher and psychologist John
Dewey pointed out that no methodology could eliminate the distinction
between “facts which are what they are independent of human desire”
and “facts which are what they are because of human interest and pur-
pose... In the degree in which we ignore this difference, social science be-
comes pseudo- science.” Some critics described psychology as “the pseudo-
science of thought.” Others found in Sigmund Freud an example of the