rhetoric
oracknows | July 18, 2016Back in December, I wrote about a phenomenon that I had observed from the very beginning of my sparring with those who promote antivaccine pseudoscience and thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. It was a phenomenon that seemed to get a lot worse last year, almost certainly due to the impending passage and then passage of SB 277 in California, a bill that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the state beginning this month. So it was that I came to describe the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, complete with examples of such rhetoric, as well…
milhayser | March 6, 2014It's been a frigid winter in much of the United States, but Greg Laden notes that the country covers only 1.5% of the Earth's surface, and overall the planet just experienced the fourth-warmest January on record. Meanwhile global warming denialists are resorting to every rhetorical trick in the book, such as comparing their increasingly outnumbered position to that of Galileo. While it's tempting to recount the history of science as that of a few brilliant mavericks overthrowing established consensus, Greg writes "Science hardly ever gets Galileoed, and even Galileo did not Galileo science…
vlicata | January 22, 2011A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying, because liars know the truth, while bullshitters just yak away without regard for the truth or non-truth of what they are saying; and 3) that since a person cannot ever really know him/her self, any sincere expression of one's feelings is bullshit.
This…
amillikan | December 23, 2008The advent of the science blogger is changing the way people talk about science. But along with new modes of communication and new rhetoric come new questions and opinions about how this evolution is affecting the scientific process. ScienceBlogger Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock posted his views about why both scientists and science journalists sometimes rant about science bloggers, and why this is a good thing.