Protoscience

The term protoscience has been used to describe a new area of scientific endeavor in the process of becoming established.

Protoscience is to be distinguished from pseudoscience by its adherence to the Scientific Method and standard practices of good science, perhaps most notably a willingness to be disproven, or supplanted by a more-predictive theory.

Examples of protosciences might be the theory of continental drift as originally proposed by [Alfred Wegener]? (which eventually became an accepted scientific model when the mechanisms of [plate tectonics]? became understood), or the various string theories of physics.