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出典:『Wikipedia』 (2011/07/24 20:53 UTC 版)

英語による解説

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In the philosophy of science, a protoscience is an area of scientific endeavor that is in the process of becoming established. Protoscience is distinguished from pseudoscience by its standard practices of good science, such as a willingness to be disproven by new evidence, or to be replaced by a more predictive theory. Sometimes scientific skeptics refer to protoscience as “pathological sciences”. “Protoscience” is a term sometimes used to describe a hypothesis which has not yet been tested adequately by the scientific method, but which is otherwise consistent with existing science or which, where inconsistent, offers reasonable account of the inconsistency. Some protosciences go on to become an accepted part of mainstream science, e.g., astrology and alchemy (at a time before invention of the scientific method), might be called “protosciences” by historians of science, but after the invention of the scientific method, when some practitioners refused to adopt the scientific method, the fields were then labeled “pseudoscience”. Several sciences started as branches of philosophy: mathematics, natural philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and the same may end up, historically, being the case for some cultural, traditional, or ancient practices. A “protoscience” may be a field where the hypothesis presented may or may not be in accordance with the known evidence at that time, and a body of associated predictions have been made, but the predictions have not yet been tested, or cannot be tested, due to current technological limitations. Such was the case for general releativity at the time of its proposal, which is now considered science, and the case for string theory, which at the time of this article writing is a protoscience.