Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 285“pseudo- science” appeared in 1824 and was directed obliquely at phre-
nology.^10 Still, even amidst antebellum debate over phrenological ideas,
invocations of pseudoscience remained fairly few. Phrenology was identi-
fi ed as pseudoscience more frequently during the latter portions of the
nineteenth century than it was in its heyday. This was partly because in
the early years a strong scientifi c orthodoxy remained more hope than
actuality. Historian Alison Winter has argued that individual scientifi c
claims during this period had to be established without the help of an
organized community of practitioners with shared training, beliefs, and
behaviors.^11 The same was true of attempts to exile ideas from science.
Even among the most notable members of the American scientifi c scene,
there was less- than- universal agreement about the status of novel ideas.
One of the most prominent men of science of the period, Yale’s Benjamin
Silliman, was publicly friendly to phrenology, albeit it in one of its more
scholarly forms.
The most important explanation for the relative rarity of charges of
pseudoscience in the early parts of the nineteenth century was that science
remained a somewhat amorphous term. It had, by the second quarter of
the 1800s, largely taken the place of earlier names, such as natural philoso-
phy and natural history, for the study of the natural world. But enough of
its former connection to reliable and demonstrable knowledge in general
remained that science went well beyond the natural and included a huge
swath of areas, from theology to shorthand. Such enormous extent was
supported by contemporary methodological standards that made it much
easier to include fi elds within porous scientifi c boundaries than to exclude
them. This fuzziness actually made science diffi cult to use in many cases,
and Americans appealed to “the sciences” collectively or to individual
sciences, such as chemistry or geology, more frequently than during later
eras.^12 It was also diffi cult to know exactly how to describe scientifi c trans-
gression. Popular rhetoric had not quite settled on pseudoscience as the
means to do that. Many Americans also denounced “pseudo- chemists,”
“pseudo- induction,” “pseudo- observation,” and, in the case of a new re-
ligious phenomenon with scientifi c pretensions, “pseudo- spiritualism.”
In Britain the mathematician Augustus de Morgan contributed the term
“paradoxer” to describe those whose ideas “deviated from general opin-
ion, either in subject- matter, method or conclusion.”^13
The fuzziness of science meant that many ways of categorizing knowl-
edge with false pretensions to truth did not have any direct link with
the scientifi c at all. Defenders of scientifi c integrity routinely denounced
“mountebanks” and “pretenders.” Even some of the American practitio-
ners who agitated most for a more controlled and organized scientifi c