Since the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attempts to adjudicate the difference between science and pseudoscience have always been more than an exercise in academic debate. The religious, political, and social implications of how science is defined, who defines it, and who and what is left out of the definition has been a contentious one. Today, the term pseudoscience is often employed by those in the scientific community to disparage claims to scientific credibility that, in fact, lack evidence or fail to employ the methods of science. Pseudoscience is only one term used to contrast with science; others include, on the neutral side, nonscience, protoscience, prescience, frontiers science, and borderlands science; and on the pejorative side, pathological science, junk science, voodoo science, crackpot science, and bad science.

With the ascendancy of science in the seventeenth century other knowledge traditions...