A fringe theory is an idea or a collection of ideas that departs significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view. It can include work done to the appropriate level of scholarship in a field of study but only supported by a minority of practitioners, to more dubious work. Examples include pseudoscience (ideas that purport to be scientific theories but have little or no scientific support), conspiracy theories, unproven claims about alternative medicine, pseudohistory and so forth. Some fringe theories may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations.
Read more about Fringe Theory: Fringe Science, Fringe History, Fringe Archaeology, Conspiracy Theories
Famous quotes containing the words fringe and/or theory:
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)