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There was a thread a few weeks back about pseudo-science and I just
ran across an essay by Paul Thagard titled 'Why Astrology is a
Pseudoscience' which gives an interesting definition of pseudoscience.
Thagard says:
"A theory or discipline which purports to be scientific is
pseudoscientific if and only if:
1. It has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long
period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but
2. the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the
theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for
attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others and is
selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations"
Thagard points out (and rightly so I think) that by this definition
we can forgive Copernicus, Kepler and the lot for casting horoscopes
(which almost all astronomers at that time did); at the time the idea
was new, untested and there was little in the way of alternative
psycological theory which was any better. Today, in retrospect, we
can see that astrology is a dead end, unproductive and so should be
abandoned as a scientific endeavor.