I think in many minds out there in the general public, the prefix “pseudoâ€? is taken to mean “sort of”.

If, say, Copernicus had no scientific credibility given what was known at that time, were his contemporaries correct to dismiss his heliocentric ideas? If he couldn’t prove with the means available, but was right in the end, was either side anti-science?

“They use the respectability of science to confer fake legitimacy on their own pet projects.”

This looks a very good description actually. An attempt to give the legitimacy of science to unscientific claims is, on itself, unscientific.

For example, the debate about the design (and, perhaps most importantly, purpose) of nature or lack thereof is way outside the realm of science and belongs to philosophy. As such, to claim to have scientific proofs about this matter is an unscientific claim.

There’s no objective standard to know how a designed or random universe should look like, or to investigate if it has a purpose. Individuals will tend to tailor standards to fit their predispositions, as usual.

The kind of words that people use to convey ideas have a huge impact on the way others view those ideas. Most opinion polls are able to return whatever result the sponsor desires, because they set up a context with a series of questions prior to the critical ones that return the data that will be reported. For instance, if you wanted peoples’ opinions on the place of science in society, you could start with questions about issues that portrayed science in a negative light (e.g. in the UK this could be about GM crops for food) or a positive one (e.g. the contributions of medical science to the wellbeing of the popultaion at large). Since most people wish to appear to be rational, reasonable and moral, the answers they give to the “scene-setting” questions will influence the answers they give to the questions where you will actually report the answers.

So, the issue of framing can be a very important one in terms of the kind of feelings that people will develop towards an issue.

Having said all that, BA, you may have missed a point that could be relevant. The term “antiscientist”, while fully expressing the way many of us probably feel about the perpetuators of lax thinking, sounds quite negative. If you are perceived to be using such a negative term to refer to the other side of a debate, that could backfire: the audience may react against you for your use of negative terms when referring to the person rather than the point they make.

I think.