true. the importance of pseudoscience is that there is a beginning to a new avenue of discovery or explanation, in which there will always be a rough start with mistakes along the way, until it's all understood.
The 'pseudoscience'
might conceivably involve the recognition of a new class of phenomenon that needs to be better understood. The first step would seem to be to collect observations about it (the bigger and more diverse the data-set the better) and to form very early hypotheses about what's happening. As we see with the histories of all the sciences, from Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian physics through astrology and alchemy, those earliest hypotheses might turn out to be woefully mistaken in the light of later ideas. But that's part of the process.
Astrologers did valuable service by closely observing and by trying to predict the motions of the heavens, which laid the foundation for the work of people like Kepler (himself an astrologer) and subsequently Newton and his followers. My point is that people would have been less likely to even think of the motions of the little dots of light in the night sky as an important scientific problem if astrology had never existed. For thousands of years astrologers were the ones with the most complete and accurate data on what happened in the heavens. Their hypotheses (the Earth being subject to the heavens) and their motivations (predicting the most auspicious times for doing things) were subsequently abandoned, but astronomy might never have existed without them.
I do think that today's intellectual heretics and non-conformists should probably begin by trying to clarify and define the phenomenon that interests them
without prejudging its nature. Then they should collect all the data that they can about it. They can try to form testable hypotheses, but at the earliest stage in a proto-science, that might be premature. The earliest hypotheses are almost certain to be wrong. So I'm inclined to think that data collection might be the most valuable service at this stage.
It's conceivable (more than conceivable, it's very likely) that some of these purported phenomena might turn out to not exist objectively at all. But the thing is,
we don't yet know that. Our woefully misnamed "skeptics" (they are nothing of the sort) simply dismiss the existence of everything they don't believe in
because they don't believe in those things.
But consider UFOs. Even if it eventually turns out that none of these are alien spaceships, that doesn't invalidate the existence of the UFO phenomenon. Alien spaceships is just one interpretation of a phenomenon that is indisputably real. Countless people report mysterious visions in the sky, and probably have been doing it since paleolithic times. What changes are the
interpretations, from animistic nature spirits, to visions of God, Christ and the Virgin, to chugging steam-punk airships in the late 1800's, to alien spaceships (since the 1950's). People say they see what they are culturally-primed to say they see. But what (if anything) was it, really? Arguing against alien spaceships just discredits one interpretation, not the phenomenon of heavenly visions itself.
Even if there's nothing objectively there, the phenomenon still stands, except now as a social-psychological phenomenon and a phenomenon of popular mythology. That's still exceedingly interesting since it might cast new light on the origins of religions out of popular street-level folklore.
But having said all that, I don't think that the 'pseudo-science' will actually arrive at the status of a fully developed science until it not only produces explanatory hypotheses that can be confirmed by others, but also stimulates new unanticipated avenues of investigation whose results display consistency and (even stronger) consilience with things that are already known by different means. ('Consilience' is when distantly-related avenues of research lead to the same result, such as fossil evidence and genomics suggesting the same phylogenetic ancestry for a kind of organism.)
But even if the new avenue of interest and investigation isn't a full-fledged science, doesn't mean that it isn't useful, instructive or valuable.
I personally wouldn't include the so-called 'social sciences' in the same epistemological or methodological class as the natural sciences. These ostensible "sciences" deal with the imagined interactions of many things blithely said to exist but whose objective ontological status remains questionable: society, social relations, community , power, authority, testimony, institutions, norms, rules, culture, custom, convention, ethics, good/evil, art, beauty, development, human flourishing, reason, ideas, meanings, logic, mathematics, scientific method, and countless more. None of these seem to have the same kind of reality as physical objects nor do they enter into the same kind of causal relations.