apologies, I am having a weird font problem and may need to reboot - I was simply trying to add "cognitive science of mathematics" as a protoscience, but doing so mangled string theory and I can't fix it.
This may be a Freudian slip but I assure you it isn't intentional...
I fixed the link; I also removed "homeopathy" as an example--it's not anything like a legitimate protoscience, or even half-legit. It's total pseudoscientific nonsense, and not taken seriously as many protosciences are. I'm willing to tolerate a sympathetic and historical treatment of it on its own page, but pages about real science shouldn't be littered with frauds. --Lee Daniel Crocker
--- What's fraudulent about homeopathy (not that I believe in it)?
Ummm... homeopathy is a protoscience in that many traditional remedies of indigenous peoples are later discovered to have real provable medical properties - so it's more proper to say that a constant stream of claims have been passed through a a medical filter, and some have passed... many more than a random sampling would admit.
there are a lot of definitions of "homeopathy" as well... maybe this just needs to be framed a bit?
Based on the homeopathy article alone, I'd have to call it protoscience rather than pseudoscience. I personally strongly disbelieve it, but the article looks okay.
One comment is that homeopathy might work by a means other than that espoused for it, just as aspirin "worked" even when no one knew why. Our task as scientists: to discover the real means by which homeopathy works -- or prove that it doesn't work.
If homeopathy is proven, it will be promoted from protoscience to science. If it is disproven, but its adherents keep promoting it, then the wikipedia will demote it to pseudoscience. Even Lee Crocker would agree to this, I'm sure.
Homeopathy has been tested, hundreds of times, and has utterly failed every test (except for few it passed by barely measureable margins as might be expected by pure chance). We know exactly how homeopathy works: the placebo effect. We've known it for decades. There's no mystery here. There's no unexplanied effects, because there are no effects at all. It's just plain water, and everyone with even a basic medical education knows that. Anyone who wants to support homeopathy has to willfully and dishonestly ignore these decades of failed tests and evade the placebo issue. Real protoscience doesn't demand strong proof, but it does demand the basic personal and scientific integrity that homeopathy utterly lacks.
I left the "accupuncture" example in place, because that's a different story. It deserves to be called protoscience because honest, reputable scientists have shown real results from it that we have yet to explain, so even though we know the "chi" explanation is nonsense, there's still something going on here worth investigating. But homeopathy is different. Homeopathy is well-tested, well-understood, useless, and fraudulent. --LDC