Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 283Few epithets, however, have drawn as much scientifi c blood as pseudo-
science. Defenders of scientifi c integrity have long used it to damn what
is not science but pretends to be, “shutting itself out of the light because
it is afraid of the light.” The physicist Edward Condon captured the trans-
gressive, even indecent, implications of the term when he likened it to
“Scientifi c Pornography.”^5 Such sentiments might make it appear that
tracing the history of pseudoscience would be an easy enough task, sim-
ply requiring the assembly of a rogue’s gallery of obvious misconceptions,
pretensions, and errors down through the ages. But, in fact, writing the
history of pseudoscience is a much more subtle matter, especially if we
eschew essentialist thinking.
If we want to tell the history of pseudoscience, we have to come to
grips with the term’s fundamentally rhetorical nature. We also need to
take a historically sensitive track and focus on those ideas that have been
rejected by the scientifi c orthodoxy of their own day. But here, too, prob-
lems arise. For most of the history of humankind up to the nineteenth
century, there has been no clearly defi ned orthodoxy regarding scientifi c
ideas to run afoul of, no established and organized group of scientists to
pronounce on disputed matters, no set of standard scientifi c practices or
methods to appeal to. However, even in the presence of such orthodoxy,
maintaining scientifi c boundaries has required struggle. Rather than rely-
ing on a timeless set of essential attributes, its precise meanings have been
able to vary with the identity of the enemy, the interests of those who
have invoked it, and the stakes involved, whether material, social, or intel-
lectual. The essence of pseudoscience, in short, is how it has been used.
English- speakers could have paired “pseudo,” which had Greek roots,
and “science,” which entered English from Latin by way of French, at
any time since the medieval period. However, pseudo- science (almost
universally written with a hyphen before the twentieth century) did not
become a detectable addition to English- language vocabularies until the
early 1800s. Its greater circulation did not result from a sudden realization
that false knowledge was possible. Instead, it involved larger shifts in the
ways that people talked, including a greater tendency to append pseudo to
nouns as a recognized means of indicating something false or counterfeit.
This habit was apparent as early as the seventeenth century, but became
particularly common during the nineteenth.^6
Even more signifi cant, increased usage paralleled important changes in
the concept of science. Pseudoscience appeared at precisely the same time
during the early part of the 1800s that science was assuming its modern
meaning in English- speaking cultures to designate knowledge of the natu-
ral world. The more the category of science eclipsed and usurped signifi -