Non-science

No single test has yet been devised that can clearly separate science from non-science, but some factors, taken as a whole and evaluated over time, are commonly used.

[5] In the view of Thomas Kuhn, these factors include the desire of scientists to investigate a question as if it were a puzzle.

[8][9] Philosophers disagree about whether areas of study involving abstract concepts, such as pure mathematics, are scientific or non-scientific.

For many centuries, alchemy was accepted as scientific: it produced some useful information, and it supported experiments and open inquiry in the pursuit of understanding the physical world.

[1] The Wissenschaft concept is more useful than the distinction between science and non-science in distinguishing between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, as the errors made in all forms of pseudo-scholarship, from pseudohistory to pseudoscience, are similar.