A Lexicon of Psychoceramics

Several terms on this page get used in similar circumstances; the goal of this list is to collect together these related words and call attention to their differences.

crackpot : "a capriciously eccentric person", according to an old version of the Crackpot page on Wikipedia.

One who, among other things, practises pseudoscience or makes unfalsifiable statements.

One who speaks in an authoritative fashion, despite not being trained in the field, or despite making false or ludicrous claims.

crank : A person who sticks to beliefs that are considered false by others in the field, for an unusually long period.

falsifiability : The quality of scientific theories or hypotheses that can be disproven by some experiment. For example, general relativity predicted that stars would appear to shift when viewed along a sightline near the Sun, suggesting an experiment that was carried out during the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919.

pseudoscience : Something appearing to be science, but uniformly lacking one or more of the qualities of science, such as falsifiability.

psychoceramics : See Josiah S. Carberry.

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2015 Apr 24.

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