Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 293archetypical “pseudo- scientist.”^44 As social scientists reacted to the fer-
ment in their own rapidly changing disciplines, they sometimes painted
the ideas of opponents in pseudoscientifi c tones. Advocates of Franz
Boas’s new ideas about cultural anthropology sometimes claimed that
“the old classical anthropology... is not a science but a pseudo- science
like medieval alchemy.” By midcentury one critic, exasperated by “the
deference paid to the pseudo- sciences, especially economics and psychol-
ogy,” declared that “if all economists and psychiatrists were rounded up
and transported to some convenient St. Helena, we might yet save some-
thing of civilization.”^45
In discussions of race in particular, the concept of pseudoscience
proved a useful tool for redrawing scientifi c maps for a new century. In a
1925 letter, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that talk about racial disparity was
“not scientifi c because science is more and more denying the concept of
race and the assumption of ingrained racial difference.” However, he la-
mented that “a cheap and pseudo- science is being sent broadcast through
books, magazines, papers and lectures” asserting “that yellow people and
brown people and black people are not human in the same sense that
white people are human and cannot be allowed to develop or to rule
themselves.”^46 Over twenty years later, another critic of racial stereotypes
asked “what greater evidence of the use of pseudo- science can we ask than
that afforded by Nazi doctrines of the ‘superiority’ of Das Herrenvolk?”^47
The particular basis on which certain ideas or entire disciplines were
accused of being psuedoscientifi c varied considerably. Whatever their spe-
cifi cs, assertions about scientifi c status—pro and con—have drawn from
the greater physicalization of science since the late nineteenth century.
Skeptics typically pointed out that the social sciences did not measure up
to the objectivity visible in such disciplines as biology or physics. Sup-
porters emphasized new methods for overcoming potential subjectivity
and prejudice in the study of human beings, often through the incorpo-
ration of mathematics. In an article discussing the differences between
history and science, the philosopher Ferdinand C. S. Schiller asserted that
“the essential characteristics of scientifi c knowledge, which distinguish it
from pseudo- science, divination, guesswork, metaphysics, verbiage, and
nonsense, are prediction and control.”^48 Some social scientists, such as the
psychologist John B. Watson, claimed that their fi elds promised a measure
of control over human behavior. That promise often appealed to busi-
ness leaders and members of the emerging advertising industry, though
such interest in the practical side of social science was not immune to
pseudoscientifi c aspersions. The author of a 1920 Scientifi c Monthly article
noted interest among industrialists in intelligence and personality testing