Chris Mooney has a nice post up debunking Stephen Meyer on the history of science and the value of peer review. I’ll pile on here: even if scientific revolutions are important, this isn’t a problem for peer review. I work in philosophy, where people often try to strike out in radically new directions (say, in [...]
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Degrees of intellectual awfulness
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 14, 2009
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Pierre Duhem was, among other things, a physicist, a philosopher, and a Roman Catholic apologist for the persecutors of Galileo. From this last point, I expect most of you readers would assume I despise him, but I honestly have more mixed feelings: while I think he’s dead-wrong to say that sound philosophy supports Galielo’s persecutors [...]
Idiots and fools
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 12, 2009
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Letser Hunt recommends bringing back the concept of fools and folly with the example of figuring out how to describe the late brilliant chess player and total nutcase Bobby Fischer. I agree that the concept is potentially very useful, though I don’t know if I’ll be able to introduce it much in my own speaking. [...]
Carnivalia
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 12, 2009
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The 45th Humanist Symposium is up at Confessions of a Catholic Atheist The 129th Carnival of the Godless is up at Nonreligious Nerd The 99th Philosophers’ Carnival is up at The Extended Cognition Blog The 123rd Skeptic’s Circle is up at Blue Genes.
The third son convention
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 9, 2009
3 comments
In a not-so-famous passage in his famous paper “The New Riddle of Induction” (which gave us the words Grue and Bleen) Nelson Goodman claimed that: That a given piece of copper conducts electricity increases the credibility of statements asserting that other pieces of coper conduct electricity, and thus confirms the hypothesis that all copper conducts [...]