Monthly Archives: December 2008

Weird role-reversal in the “framing science” debate

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 11, 2008 0 comments

Mark Hoofnagel of the Denialism Blog and Orac take a stand for using the term “denial” for purveyors of pseudoscience, Matt Nisbet gets huffy about name-calling. There’s something basically weird about this debate: Nisbet is the great promoter of framing, but wasn’t one of the insights about framing supposed to be that part of winning [...]

Carnivals

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 10, 2008 0 comments

I wonder if I should just steal Greta’s or Adam’s HTML, but I’m too lazy to take the 30 second it would probably take for me to figure out how to do that.

Emergency philosophy: relevance, omission, and deception

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 10, 2008 2 comments

A problem I just ran into while working on a paper: In philosophy of language and linguistics, Paul Grice is known for proposing the idea that conversation is governed by cooperative maxims–Steven Pinker actually said that the paper in which he did this is one of the most important ever. One of these maxims is [...]

Philosopher’s Carnival #83

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 8, 2008 3 comments

Welcome to the 83rd philosophers carnival–a collection of the the best recent philosophy post from around the web who’s hosts do a minimal amount of self-promotion. *Ethics* A question of moral language: James Garvey asks “What does the phase ’100% ethically traded coffee’ mean when used by Starbucks?” Crazy metaphysics and morality: Richard Chappell discusses [...]

David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 8, 2008 0 comments

The great overall impression I get of David Wolpe’s Why Faith Matters is one of laziness. There are no grand sophistries or crazy ideas, but there’s also a lack of any serious attempt to answer the atheist writers he’s supposedly responding to. A few examples early on are striking, but as the book wears on [...]