Manufactroversy
The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed
SOURCE: SP
Contemporary rhetorical tactics designed to confuse politicians and the public about scientific issues are as old as antiquity. The methods are just as disingenuous 2,500 years after their invention.
Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē)
N., pl. -sies.1. A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.
2. Effort is often accompanied by imagined conspiracy theory and major marketing dollars involving fraud, deception and polemic rhetoric.
With all the sophisticated sophistry besieging mass audiences today, there is a need for the study of rhetoric now more than ever before. This is especially the case when it comes to the contemporary assault on science known as manufactured controversy: when significant disagreement doesn’t exist inside the scientific community, but is successfully invented for a public audience to achieve specific political ends.
Three recent examples of manufactured controversy are global warming skepticism, AIDS dissent in South Africa, and the intelligent design movement’s “teach the controversy” campaign. The first of these has been called an “epistemological filibuster” because it magnifies the uncertainty surrounding a scientific truth claim in order to delay the adoption of a policy that is warranted by that science. Languaging expert Frank Luntz admitted as much in his now infamous talking points memo on the environment, leaked to the public in 2002, where he confessed that the window for claiming controversy about global warming was closing, but he nonetheless urged Republican congressional and executive leaders “to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” ExxonMobil was doing this when it published its “Unsettled Science” advertisement about climate science on the editorial pages of the New York Times in March 2000. A more recent guest editorial by a reader made the same claim in the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January 2008. All three seemed to be following the playbook of the tobacco industry when scientists discovered that their products cause cancer; when a threat to their interests arises from the scientific community, they declare “there are always two sides to a case” and then call for more study of the matter before action is taken.
I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them.
South African President Thabo Mbeki’s support for AIDS dissent eight years ago is a similar case. Like global warming skepticism, this assault on the science of HIV/AIDS research ingeniously turned the scientific community’s values against it by drawing on the importance of rational open debate, a skeptical attitude, and the need for continued research. Mbeki alleged that the mainstream scientific community branded scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS as “‘dangerous and discredited’ with whom nobody, including ourselves, should communicate or interact.” Claiming the successful dissident’s authority in post-apartheid South Africa, Mbeki condemned the mainstream scientific community for occupying “the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism which argues that the only freedom we have is to agree with what they decree to be established scientific truths.”
A parallel case is being made by the intelligent design movement in conjunction with its “teach the controversy” campaign against evolutionary biology. Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled, portrays scientists as participating in a vast conspiracy to silence anyone who questions the Darwinian orthodoxy. This movie promises to be the most extreme application yet of the intelligent design movement’s “wedge” strategy to break the supremacy of evolutionary theory in contemporary science. Just as a wedge can be set into a chink in a solid structure and, with the careful application of some concentrated force, will split that structure to pieces, so too do the producers of this movie hope that it can break the scientific community and allow for a change in how science is taught in America. Of course, any claim by biologists that there is no scientific controversy to teach merely feeds the conspiracy theory.
In light of this difficulty, some have suggested that the best response to manufactured controversy is no response at all. They say that countering such nonsense merely gives these modern-day sophists publicity and enables their continued efforts to reopen debate on settled science. I understand this impulse to remain silent in the face of foolishness, but as a professor of rhetoric, I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them. Ever since the field of rhetoric was born, there have been those who misuse the power of persuasion to mislead public audiences, and it has been only through vigilant counter-persuasion that such deception has been overcome.
The ancient sophists, or “wise men” (wise guys?) who taught the new art of rhetoric to those who would pay their fee in the 5th century BCE, included Gorgias, who was said to have boasted that he could persuade the multitude to ignore the expert and listen to him instead, and Protagoras, who claimed that there are always two sides to a case and it’s the sophist’s job to make the worse case appear the stronger. It was to oppose this kind of deception that Aristotle codified the art of Rhetoric in his treatise by that title. He recognized that before lay audiences “not even the possession of the exactest knowledge” ensures that a speaker will be persuasive, so Aristotle promoted the study of rhetoric so that experts could confute those who try to mislead public audiences.
Today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data.
As a scholar of rhetoric, I have studied some modern cases of manufactured controversy to discover how to best confute these contemporary sophists, and I have come up with some preliminary hypotheses about what makes their arguments so persuasive to a public audience. First, they skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the American public alike, like free speech, skeptical inquiry, and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who invokes these values without seeming unscientific or un-American. Second, they exploit a tension between the technical and public spheres in postmodern American life; highly specialized scientific experts can’t spare the time to engage in careful public communication, and are then surprised when the public distrusts, fears, or opposes them. Third, today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data; any dissent by any scientist is then seen as evidence that there’s no consensus, and thus truth must not have been discovered yet. A more accurate portrayal of science sees it as a process of debate among a community of experts in which one side outweighs the other in the balance of the argument, and that side is declared the winner; a few skeptics might remain, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the rest, and the democratic process of science moves forward with the collective weight of the majority of expert opinion. Scientists buy into this democratic process when they enter the profession, so that a call for the winning side to share power in the science classroom with the losers, or to continue debating an issue that has already been settled for the vast majority of scientists so that policy makers can delay taking action on their findings, seems particularly undemocratic to most of them.
Aristotle believed that things that are true “have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites,” but that it takes a good rhetor to ensure that this happens when sophisticated sophistry is on the loose. I concur; only by exposing manufactured controversy for what it is, recognizing its rhetorical power and countering those who are skilled at getting the multitude to ignore the experts while imagining a scientific debate where none exists, can scientists and their allies use my field to achieve what Aristotle envisioned for it—a study that helps the argument that is in reality stronger also appear stronger before an audience of nonexperts.
Leah Ceccarelli is an associate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington. She teaches rhetoric and is the author of the award-winning book Shaping Science with Rhetoric.
Comments on this article
Overall, an excellent and very useful post. I will definitely adopt use of the word “manufactroversy.”
However, in the overall context of your article, your definition as
is inaccurate and misleading.
Your definition in the context of this article could lead one to believe that a debate among scientists could be won by rhetoric alone, which is not the case at all. All accepted scientific knowledge is based on reproducible evidence and facts. Any legitimate scientific debate is over the interpretation of that evidence.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:15 pmI’d like to thank chezjake for a thoughtful response and assure you that I never meant to suggest that scientists win debates “by rhetoric alone.” Rather, I was merely pointing out that actual scientific controversy, which involves argumentation about the interpretation of evidence, is settled when the majority of experts in an area agree (not when 100% agreement, or total consensus, is achieved). I think those who characterize science as if it involved no argumentation, being built through the steady accumulation of unassailable facts, are doing a disservice to science because any dissent by any scientist is then seen by the public as a sign of scientific revolution. This characterization leaves science vulnerable to those who manufacture controversy for their own purposes.
My own profession, the study of rhetoric, is also frequently mischaracterized to the public. Many assume it is focused only on empty talk, sophistry, words that are divorced from truth or action. But the study of rhetoric is actually much broader than that; it examines how the means of persuasion are marshaled in any given case. I completely agree with you that in the case of science, persuasion of fellow experts is accomplished through arguments that are grounded in “reproducible evidence and facts.” Those who study the rhetoric of science have taken a close look at that process of argumentation, and also at how that argumentation is sometimes distorted in the public sphere by modern-day sophists.
April 12th, 2008 at 1:03 pmIt seems that rhetoric is a way to defuse tensions introduced by sophistry, allowing a return to substantive debate that rises above mere semantics and arguments over standards. It clears away the confusion so people can actually explore the issues in constructive ways.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:35 pmI thought it was a wonderful article! Enlightening and intriguing! Not dry at all:)
April 12th, 2008 at 11:00 pmexcellant article except for one horribly innacuracy. Right at the beginning of the article it states that global warming skepticism is a manufactured controversy. When in fact the notion of human induced global warming is itself the manufactured controversy designed with no other goal than enriching the rich and supressing smaller nations by larger ones. Try researching old science books of the nineteen twenties to find complete explanations of the fact that “ice ages” happen cyclicly based on the suns recorded fluctuations in temperature. We are near the end of an ice age and ice ages have come and gone for millenium without human assistance. Common sense science shows that the sun was hotter for a while recently and ALL the planets heated up including but not limited to earth. The cyclic warming and cooling of this planet has had devastating consequences many times before and still may now but technology has little or nothing to do with it. There is the simple fact that this planet was much ,much hotter during Greco/Roman times than now. And twenty to forty thousand years ago so hot that there were no polar ice caps at all with a whole civilization called circumpolar archaic thriving on the tremendous resources of the open arctic ocean. And between circumpolar and the Greeks was a minor ice age. And another between the Romans and us, This is all well documented. Huge hot and cold events occurred in an irregular fluctuation on this planet long before human beings. But these are facts and facts seem totally lost in this age of manufactured controversy and the authors boldly stated errors only point out the authors overall correctness. All in all very, very good.
April 13th, 2008 at 4:46 pmFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
April 13th, 2008 at 5:02 pmCOINTELPRO (an acronym for Co unter Intel ligence Pro gram) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception……..The FBI motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order…….in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups…… exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.
In the Final Report of the Select Committee COINTELPRO was castigated in no uncertain terms:
The Church Committee documented a history of the FBI being used for purposes of political repression….”Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that…the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”
According to the Church Commmittee:
While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the “national security” or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a “potential” for violence — and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave “aid and comfort” to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.
The imprecision of the targeting is demonstrated by the inability of the Bureau to define the subjects of the programs. The Black Nationalist program, according to its supervisor, included “a great number of organizations that you might not today characterize as black nationalist but which were in fact primarily black.” Thus, the nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference was labeled as a Black Nationalist-”Hate Group.”
……. to the peaceful Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and included every Black Student Union and many other black student groups. …. to the New Mexico Free University and other “alternate” schools, and from underground newspapers to students protesting university censorship of a student publication by carrying signs with four-letter words on them.
According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home , the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
2. Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.
3. Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.
4. Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, beatings, and murders. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks—including political assassinations—
were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official “terrorism.”
The Final report of the Church Committee concluded:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone “bugs”, surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous — and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations — have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity. Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed — including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials. While the agencies often committed excesses in response to pressure from high officials in the Executive branch and Congress, they also occasionally initiated improper activities and then concealed them from officials whom they had a duty to inform.
Governmental officials — including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law –have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.
The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them.”
You teach rhetoric, do you? And you have written a book on “shaping science with rhetoric”, have you? I pity your students and the people who have bought your book!
Have you come across the concept of “argumentum ad populum”? Just because a majority of people believe something to be true, doesn’t make it so. Finding the truth in science is not a democratic process.
“With all the sophisticated sophistry besieging mass audiences today, there is a need for the study of rhetoric now more than ever before.”
Are you familiar with the terms “ipse dixit” or “remove the beam in your own eye”?
April 14th, 2008 at 1:57 pmJust because a majority of people believe something to be true, doesn’t make it so.
Ms. Ceccarelli never said any such thing. She said that when a significant majority of scientists agree that something is true, it is accepted within the scientific community as true.
I think it’s also important to note that science is empirical, that it is based on evidence derived from experimentation and observation—and that it is flexible: its perception of truth is mutable, depending on the evidence. That which we perceive as “truth”—even scientific truth—can change, based on changes in the evidence and on our increasing ability to understand the universe. Sophists will try to turn this vital characteristic of science against it, citing cases when scientists “changed their minds” or “flip-flopped” on particular issues. The dogmatic mind sees rigid inflexibility of theory or opinion as a virtue, and sophists will play that tendency for all it’s worth.
Thanks, Ms. Ceccarelli, for a wonderful article.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:32 pmMatthew Cross, if you’re interested in what actual climate scientists (the ones who do the research) have to say about global warming, I recommend www.realclimate.org. It’s very good, and most likely has answers to many of your points.
As a scientist myself I couldn’t agree more that the power of persuasion is massively important in communicating to the public what it means for something to be a scientific fact, or the most widely-accepted scientific theory. Of course scientists will always have different opinions about the interpretation of those data, or whether that model is a good fit, or how the evidence for X supports Y, or whatever. That’s because we’re people, each with out own bias and way of looking at things.
What this does *not* mean is that there is necessarily a scientific controversy. It basically works like this: All these little bits and bobs of data and theoretical models from different labs swim around together in a great big mess of publications, conferences, and scientists having chats down the pub. Someone might look at something and go ‘that’s funny, I wonder how that works…?’ and someone else might go ‘oh yes, that fits in here’ and someone else might go ‘no, that doesn’t work at all’, and so on. There are different people with different opinions, yes, but rarely a controversy.
Obnoxio, of course truth in science is not determined by democracy. But I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. Science does not search for truth. Science searches for the best model for the data. And models are made by scientists, and it’s the consensus among scientists that determines the generally accepted model at the moment. The model will change, of course, because there is always more data, and sometimes the model will be shown to be fundamentally wrong and will have to be replaced by (and this is important) a model that fits the data *better*.
…oh, I see Nobody in Particular made my point for me, probably better than I have just done!
Thanks for the article, it was excellent.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:20 pmThis dovetails quite nicely with something else I read recently which you and other interested readers on this topic might be interested in. I just finished reading “Influencer” (multiple authors, more info at influencerbook.com)
One of the excellent points made there is that “verbal persuasion” is *often* effective but not *always* effective, and that some of our most persistent problems will not yield to effective argumentation alone. For those problems, you have to have a “well-told story” which generates a “vicarious experience” for the reader/listener. By attempting to condense the message to its essence, we often drain the message of its power to convince.
One example from that book was a set of facts and figures delivered to three audiences. One audience had just the facts, a second had charts and graphs, and the third had the same information worked into a story about a little, old winemaker. Not only did the third group *remember* the material better, they also *believed* it more strongly because they had been led to identify with a character in a story.
I’m not 100% sure why this is, but I believe that *emotion* has a lot more involvement in thought than we give it credit for, especially scientists, engineers and academics. Logically we can usually work out whether something is true, but emotion is what makes it *important* to us and emotion also controls what people believe and identify with.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:51 pmI worry that the article itself might border on sophistry in that it conflates anthropogenic climate change, HIV as the cause of AIDS and evolution by natural selection as equally “settled” science, where I believe they are quite different cases.
Evolution by natural selection is about as settled as anything can be outside fields that allow for truly precise measurements such as basic physics. It has been endlessly confirmed directly and through further theories and predictions that assume evolutionary theory as a base then go on to make further predictions which have also received experimental confirmation.
While less well settled than, say, evolution - that HIV causes AIDS seems to this non-specialist to be quite well confirmed and to have been the base theory behind the development of a number of (rather-more-than-less) successful treatments that have had positive effects controlling the process of the disease.
With anthropogenic global warming (or whatever the correct term is this week), however, I see rather fewer unassailably confirmed predictions. I see a great deal more argument about even such things as the basic data that climate scientists are dealing with, and I see a large number of people saying that “science proves” that their preferred political outcomes are the correct ones (whereas I believe that science may inform political decisions, but that can neither confirm nor deny their correctness).
While I am somewhat agnostic about anthropogenic climate change, my skepticism is informed by the feeling that both “sides” are lying to me. I become very uncomfortable when told not to look at things too closely, because the “science is settled” (I thought science was never settled), because “consensus has been achieved” (I thought scientific questions were addressed through hard data obtained from well-designed experiments) and (in my opinion) highly premature announcements that climate science should be considered as well-established as evolution by natural selection (and, by perhaps by rhetorical extension on my part) the existence of gravity and the certainty of death and taxes.
…Mike
April 16th, 2008 at 9:53 pmManufactroversy is an apt term that can be applied to lots of examples not included in this article, many of which are outside the scope of science.
For just one example, in recent years, American elections have become unverifiable. Counting is done in secret, by machines thoroughly debunked as unsuitable for their purpose, often producing nonsensical results, such as negative vote totals or jurisdictions reporting more votes than registered voters. Regardless of what outcome is reported, to accept it is an article of faith as no verification of accuracy has been done and often no proof even exists. Such conditions necessarily create *inherent uncertainty*, and at its core, this is what I think the notion of manufactroversy is about.
As Naomi Wolf documents well in “End of America,” authoritarian governments close down free societies in predictable patterns that are in abundant evidence in the US. The wedge concept mentioned by Leah demonstrates a consistent method used to intentionally divide the masses. The manufactroversy that creates inherent uncertainty serves as a particularly insidious divider in that it creates a rift in the perception of reality. This phenomenon has been recorded in literature such that our lexicon recognizes the terms Orwellian and Catch-22.
For more on inherent uncertainty, please see:
April 17th, 2008 at 12:28 amhttp://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/from-around-world-inherent-uncertainty.html
Science is never decided by consensus or by whose list of scientists is longest. Galileo did not have consensus and all those learned people who opposed him were “flat-earthers” - sound familiar? He was the skeptic - one against many. Science is advanced by proposal of hypothesis and then becomes accepted when it can’t be falsified. Unfortunately the pseudo-scientists putting forward the hypothesis are not attempting to falsify it to prove its robustness but merely search for any evidence to support it .however trivial . Those brave souls who are doing the true scientific work of falsification are called names, and abused as deniers. This great debate on rhetoric really has nothing to do with science and the experts who are promoting AG warming have little to do with true science just collectors simply of data which supports their claims.
April 17th, 2008 at 3:56 amIsn’t it interesting how an article about the process of public discussion becomes hijackd into a discussion of the content of the examples? I found the article interesting and useful, and will use it for teaching my medical students. My own take on ’science’ is that it identifies “statements of conditional probability that are useful and testable”, rather than facts, and the debate ought to consist of identifying the conditions and establishing the probabilities - but that’s POV!
April 17th, 2008 at 6:06 amNice example of sophistry and rhetoric, but not much substance. On global warming Madame C uses Appeal to Authority (Eminent People e.g. scientists believe it to be true, therefore it must be true) coupled with Guilt By Association (Bad People e.g Big Oil believe the opposite, therefore their POV must be bad also).
Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t. Believing something doesn’t make it so. At one time the consensus was that fire was caused by an invisible fluid called phlogiston, that disease was caused by miasmas, and the universe was filled with an invisible substance called ether. Seventy-five years ago eugenics was considered good science and only a few mavericks doubted that “race hygiene” was a good idea.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:15 pm@Neil/Titus
“Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t”
“Science is advanced by proposal of hypothesis and then becomes accepted when it can’t be falsified”
You’re missing the point. Leah didn’t say science should be accepted based on votes or “who’s who”. She is just stating that in the real, practical world science is not as concrete as you would like to think. You both list absurd examples (flat earthers, phlogiston) from a history of “established facts” that have now been debunked.
You are confirming the real point, there are no established facts. Scientists might not believe in relativity or quantum mechanics in the same way that historical peoples believed “scientific facts” (or at least not in the same way we picture flat earthers, since the Galileo narrative is itself just a narrative). These are accepted models.
How, in actual practice, does a community of scientists acknowledge that models can and will continue to change, but still assess just how significant the difference is between say, how certain evolution is, and how uncertain the beneficial effects of wine are? (Wine studys… another news obsession which the public sees swinging wildy with each new story)
Combine this with a science that is now so large that no scientist can even begin to evaluate all of the arguments for an against the principles of his own field.
The way we evaluate what is valid and what isn’t, and the way we evaluate what models can’t be falsified, is in practice a very communal process. And that is what Leah is trying to articulate and define.
Her point is to say that just because the scientific community is debating an issue, it doesn’t mean there is any real scientific controversy. Those who make that argument are fundamentally misunderstanding the scientific community. I think it is a very insightful articulation of just why these “controversy” arguments are so convincing to the public.
I also see nothing in your comments which disputes her point.
April 18th, 2008 at 2:11 pmIt might help Professor Ceccarelli’s point, and the commentators to her article, to think about science and philosophy(or theology) by making a rather simple
distinction:
science determines and/or explains conditions; philosophy(or theology) justifies preferences.
Science has no preferred outcome. It tries to discover and explain what is. We may not like what is, but that is not the fault of, nor does it disprove, the scientific fact.
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:17 amIt amazes me how often people can make things up to fulfill their own fantasies, and how many people willingly buy into it??? For our Country to succeed we need to teach individuals how to discern fact from fiction. I think it was James Randi who introduced many of us to the bologna detection kit….We all need it now more than ever.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:27 pm“Nice example of sophistry and rhetoric, but not much substance. On global warming Madame C uses Appeal to Authority (Eminent People e.g. scientists believe it to be true, therefore it must be true) coupled with Guilt By Association (Bad People e.g Big Oil believe the opposite, therefore their POV must be bad also).
Scientific consensus means absolutely nothing — either it is valid or it isn’t. Believing something doesn’t make it so. At one time the consensus was that fire was caused by an invisible fluid called phlogiston, that disease was caused by miasmas, and the universe was filled with an invisible substance called ether. Seventy-five years ago eugenics was considered good science and only a few mavericks doubted that “race hygiene” was a good idea.”
Titus–you said it best: believing something doesn’t make it so. Using erroneous beliefs of the past also does nothing but show that mistakes and bad conclusions are part of science, but science being what it is (based on analysis of repeatable findings) those erroneous beliefs come to light and are changed accordingly. The fact of evolution, micro and macro, has been shown to exist. The passage of time will find the fitter of theories to be the one that survives. Creationism will end up on the dust heap of history; along with phlogiston, eugenics, miasma, and ether.
April 28th, 2008 at 5:53 pm