These arguments about the nature of science, and the acceptance of theories are exactly why I keep harping on about a much more rigorous definition of psuedo-science. Most of the above arguments about the manner in which hypotheses get accepted would go away if this was understood. Plausibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for a scientific hypothesis. It is nice to have, but plays second fiddle to the need for falsifiability. Not understanding that is the cause of many many arguments. If a hypothesis is plausible, but unfalsifiable, it isn’t science. If it is not plausible, but is falsifiable it is science. Same goes for mechanism.
If a scientist proposes a hypotheses that is testable, then no scientist will label it as psuedo-science. On the other hand, lots of scientists will say it is false, rubbish, “not even wrong” etc. Typically because it has implications that might contradict well accepted ideas, or simply is really inelegant. (The nature of elegance, truth and beauty is one of those areas of science that comes in under the radar of Popperian science, and causes all sorts of, mostly good natured, discussion.) On the other hand, scientists know that there are occasionally ideas that really are important and do pan out that are so confronting. But, they happen only very occasionally, and there are many many more such ideas that do indeed simply turn out to have no supporting substance, and quietly die.
Science does suffer from human bias. On the other hand, this is pretty well understood, and in the back of any good scientists mind is the little voice that points this out.
A few examples of where science wanders about a bit.
Fred Hoyle. Fred was IMHO on of the most egrarious omissions from the cannon of Nobel lauriates. He worked out the vast majority of the manner in which stars create the elements. This was really really good stuff, and stands head and shoulders above some other Nobel winning physics. Yet he was never in contention. Why? Because he stuck to the steady state theory of the universe, when the evidence for the big bang continued to mount. (Fred actually coined the term “big bang”. It was supposed to belittle the theory, but instead named it.) Fred’s work on the genesis of the elements is accepted as core solid physics. The steady state theory is pretty much dead. So he remained a controversial figure, and enough other influential physicists didn’t feel comfortable with him that he never got the big prize.
Cold fusion. I wasn’t completely absolutely clear it was rubbish. There ws just enough wiggle room, that if there was some other process involved, that just maybe there was a chance there was something to it. That Fleishman and Pons were both eminent experimental chemists lent a tiny tiny bit of additional credibility to the idea. They were however not atomic physicists, so their domain knowledge was not a good fit. But no-one could reproduce the results, and the whole thing fizzled out. As it should. The fact that the discovery was announced through the media, and not the scientific press didn’t exectly endear things to the scientific community, but enough physicists were interested enough to try to reproduce the experiments. If it were not for the media furor, we might have found the whole story a good example of science at work. If the story had been handled in the normal manner, though scientific publication, peer review, and the like, it would probably have been an interesting story that would have got as far as the pages of New Scientist and the appropriate journals, before dying. And it is important that the odd left field idea like this does get an airing, and otherwise eminent, tenured, scicntists with nothing to lose but their time, are those that can try them. But someone got greedy, and it all went to rubbish.
