Historic Heston, by Heston Blumenthal

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

If I hadn’t already got this book, it would definitely be on my wish-list for Christmas. Historic Heston is the ultimate book for anyone interested in the history of food and cooking, and it’s a sumptuously luxurious book of ‘food porn’ into the bargain.  Unabashed by Wayne Macauley’s clever satire The Cook,  we here chez The Spouse et Moi are devoted to Masterchef Australia, and always look forward to Heston Blumenthal’s appearances for the extravagance of his creations and his humorous adaptations of staples like hamburgers.

Historic Heston is a generous (i.e. hefty) book of 430-odd pages, printed on expensive high-quality paper with a silky bookmark – and the witty graphics by Dave McKean and photography by Romas Foord are superb works of art in their own right. The still life for eggs in verjuice is worthy of a place in the National Gallery.  I am sorely tempted…

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The Philosophy Book, edited by Sam Atkinson

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It’s taken me a good while to read this book because it’s not something to hurtle through, but The Philosophy Book is excellent for a generalist reader who wants to know what philosophy is about.  It covers all the major thinkers in philosophy, summarising their ideas in graphics and easy-to-comprehend flowcharts, and explaining further in the text. Artworks often accompany the text and it’s bright, colourful and cheerful, as DK books usually are.   Some philosophers depending on their importance get 3 double page spreads, and others get only one single page, but the overall effect is a broad overview of how philosophy works.

I particularly like the before/after context box on the LHS of each philosopher that shows how each ‘new’ philosophy builds on the ideas of philosophers of the past, and then becomes the building blocks for philosophy of the future. Page references also make it easy to go…

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Where’s the proof in science? There is none

By Geraint Lewis, University of Sydney

UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? Those people looking for proof to come from any research in science will be sadly disappointed.

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As an astrophysicist, I live and breathe science. Much of what I read and hear is couched in the language of science which to outsiders can seem little more than jargon and gibberish. But one word is rarely spoken or printed in science and that word is “proof”. In fact, science has little to do with “proving” anything.

These words may have caused a worried expression to creep across your face, especially as the media continually tells us that science proves things, serious things with potential consequences, such as turmeric can apparently replace 14 drugs, and more frivolous things like science has proved that mozzarella is the optimal cheese for pizza.

Surely science has proved these, and many other things. Not so!

The way of the mathematician

Mathematicians prove things, and this means something quite specific. Mathematicians lay out a particular set of ground rules, known as axioms, and determine which statements are true within the framework.

A statue of Euclid with something very interesting added to his scroll. (Source: Garrett Coakley)

One of best known of these is the ancient geometry of Euclid. With only a handful of rules that define a perfect, flat space, countless children over the last few millenia have sweated to prove Pythagoras’s relation for right-angled triangles, or that a straight line will cross a circle at most at two locations, or a myriad of other statements that are true within Euclid’s rules.

Whereas the world of Euclid is perfect, defined by its straight lines and circles, the universe we inhabit is not. Geometrical figures drawn with paper and pencil are only an approximation of the world of Euclid where statements of truth are absolute.

Over the last few centuries we’ve come to realise that geometry is more complicated than Euclid’s, with mathematical greats such as Gauss, Lobachevsky and Riemann giving us the geometry of curved and warped surfaces.

In this non-Euclidean geometry, we have a new set of axioms and ground-rules, and a new set of statements of absolute truth we can prove.

These rules are extremely useful for navigating around this (almost-)round planet. One of Einstein’s (many) great achievements was to show that curving and warping spacetime itself could explain gravity.

Yet, the mathematical world of non-Euclidean geometry is pure and perfect, and so only an approximation to our messy world.

Just what is science?

But there is mathematics in science, you cry. I just lectured on magnetic fields, line integrals and vector calculus, and I am sure my students would readily agree that there is plenty of maths in science.

Albert Einstein. (Source: Wikimedia/Doris Ulmann)

And the approach is same as other mathematics: define the axioms, examine the consequences.

Einstein’s famous E=mc², drawn from the postulates of how the laws of electromagnetism are seen by differing observers, his special theory of relativity, is a prime example of this.

But such mathematical proofs are only a part of the story of science.

The important bit, the bit that defines science, is whether such mathematical laws are an accurate description of the universe we see around us.

To do this we must collect data, through observations and experiments of natural phenomena, and then compare them to the mathematical predictions and laws. The word central to this endeavour is “evidence”.

The scientific detective

The mathematical side is pure and clean, whereas the observations and experiments are limited by technologies and uncertainties. Comparing the two is wrapped up in the mathematical fields of statistics and inference.

Many, but not all, rely on a particular approach to this known as Bayesian reasoning to incorporate observational and experimental evidence into what we know and to update our belief in a particular description of the universe.

The only way is down for these apples.
(Source: Flickr/Don LaVange)

Here, belief means how confident you are in a particular model being an accurate description of nature, based upon what you know. Think of it a little like the betting odds on a particular outcome.

Our description of gravity appears to be pretty good, so it might be odds-on favourite that an apple will fall from a branch to the ground.

But I have less confidence that electrons are tiny loops of rotating and gyrating string that is proposed by super-string theory, and it might be a thousand to one long-shot that it will provide accurate descriptions of future phenomena.

So, science is like an ongoing courtroom drama, with a continual stream of evidence being presented to the jury. But there is no single suspect and new suspects regularly wheeled in. In light of the growing evidence, the jury is constantly updating its view of who is responsible for the data.

But no verdict of absolute guilt or innocence is ever returned, as evidence is continually gathered and more suspects are paraded in front of the court. All the jury can do is decide that one suspect is more guilty than another.

What has science proved?

In the mathematical sense, despite all the years of researching the way the universe works, science has proved nothing.

Mark the spot where nothing was proved. (Source: Flickr/Rob)

Every theoretical model is a good description of the universe around us, at least within some range of scales that it is useful.

But exploring into new territories reveals deficiencies that lower our belief in whether a particular description continues to accurately represent our experiments, while our belief in alternatives can grown.

Will we ultimately know the truth and hold the laws that truly govern the workings of the cosmos within our hands?

While our degree of belief in some mathematical models may get stronger and stronger, without an infinite amount of testing, how can we ever be sure they are reality?

I think it is best to leave the last word to one of the greatest physicists, Richard Feynman, on what being a scientist is all about:

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.”

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This article is part of a series on Understanding Research.

Further reading:
Why research beats anecdote in our search for knowledge
Clearing up confusion between correlation and causation
Positives in negative results: when finding ‘nothing’ means something

Geraint Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council, including a Future Fellowship.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Contingency in the natural sciences

By Tim Harding

In Chapter Three of his book ‘The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking (1999:63-80) discusses three ‘sticking points’ or topics of dispute between social constructionists and scientific realists.  He calls these sticking points contingency, nominalism and explanations of stability.  I would like to briefly analyse the sticking point of contingency.

As I understand it, contingency in this context refers to the possibility of science arriving at alternative sets of scientific theories or explanations of observed phenomena.  The significance of contingency in a discussion of social reality is that the particular set of scientific theories accepted can influence the course of further scientific research.  This is somewhat analogous to different scientific paradigms as described by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (Kuhn, 1962).  According to Kuhn, ‘normal science’ operates within scientific paradigms that not only determine which scientific theories are acceptable, but define scientific communities and even the areas of research undertaken (Kuhn, 1962: 10-11).

I suspect that Kuhn’s work may have influenced the social constructivist view, as described by Hacking, that scientific knowledge is essentially a social construct (Hacking, 1999: 65).  This thesis implies that scientific paradigms control the process and therefore the products of science – a claim that is apparently troubling to scientific realists, especially physicists.  To illustrate the scientific realist view, Hacking cites the thesis of the Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow, that physical science is an assemblage of ‘eternal, objective, ahistorical, socially neutral, external and universal truths’ (Hacking, 1999: 78).  For instance, Glashow claims that an alien scientist (from another planet) would arrive at the same system of fundamental physics that our scientists have arrived at on planet Earth (Hacking 1999: 74-75).

Interestingly, Hacking steers a middle course between these polar opposite views – not in any sense of compromise, but because he believes (as he explains in Chapters one and five of his book) that something can be both real and a social construction.  The best argument I can see for this middle view is that of another physicist, Richard Feynman who discusses three different mathematical formulations of what we now call the law of gravitation: ‘Newton’s law’, ‘the local field theory’ and ‘the minimum principle’ – which each give exactly the same consequences (Hacking, 1999: 76-77).  This is a good illustration of how science can arrive at different explanations of the same phenomena, or contingency, yet not quite going as far as the social constructionist view.  In this way, Hacking maintains that ‘the contingency thesis itself is perfectly consistent with such scientific realism” (Hacking, 1999:80).

Bibliography

Hacking, Ian (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Kuhn, T.S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 3^rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Copyright notice: © All rights reserved. Except for personal use or as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act, no part of this website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the copyright owner, Tim Harding at tim.harding@yandoo.com, or as attributed on individual blog posts.

If you find the information on this blog useful, you might like to consider supporting us. 

Searle’s construction of social reality

by Tim Harding

In his book ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ (Searle 1995:1) and later works, John Searle [1] discusses the problem that ‘there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement’.  He describes these objective facts as observer relative features of reality, or components of ‘social reality’, as opposed to the intrinsic features of physical reality or ‘brute facts’, such as rocks, water and trees.  He then asks the question ‘how is a socially constructed reality possible?’ and then devotes much of this book to providing some answers.  In this essay, I propose to go further and suggest that because these observer relative features are more relevant and important to our daily lives than intrinsic features, for many people social reality seems more ‘real’ than physical reality.  In other words, rather than being hard to account for, observer relative features ‘have a grip on us’.

Prof. John R. Searle

Before presenting this thesis, I need to describe in summary form, the conceptual tools that Searle provides to construct the edifice of social reality.  One of key philosophical concepts is that of intentionality, meaning ‘the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs’ (Jacob, 2010).   The term refers to the ability of the mind to think about the external world, but should not be confused with the meaning of ‘intention’.  Searle argues that humans and other higher animal species have a capacity for collective intentionality – the sharing of intentional states such as beliefs, desires and intentions – which is essential to understanding social reality.  He uses the expression ‘social fact’ to refer to any fact involving collective intentionality (Searle 1995:23-26).

Searle draws a distinction between objectivity and subjectivity in two different senses: an epistemic sense and an ontological sense.  In the epistemic sense, we speak of judgments as being subjective when we mean that their truth or falsity cannot be settled objectively because of different attitudes or values.  For example, ‘Rembrandt was a better artist than Rubens’ is epistemically subjective; whereas ‘Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam’ is epistemically objective.  In the ontological sense, a pain is subjective because its existence depends on being felt by subjects; whereas a mountain is ontologically objective because its existence is independent of any mental state (Searle 1995:8).

Searle then distinguishes between features that exist independently of our representations of them, which he calls intrinsic to nature; and those features that exist relative to the intentionality of observers, which he calls observer relative features.  He gives the example of a screwdriver as an observer relative object only because people recognize and use this particular object as a screwdriver; whereas intrinsically it is a rod of metal with a narrowed blade at one end and a widened wooden or plastic encasing at the other end.  A useful test of whether an object is intrinsic or observer relative is to imagine what the nature of the object would be without the existence of humans.  Observer relative features exist only relative to the attitudes of observers; whereas intrinsic features exist independently of observers.  The existence of the screwdriver is ontologically subjective; whereas its existence as the unnamed object I have described above is ontologically objective.  On the other hand, some of these ontologically subjective features are epistemically objective.  Everybody agrees that this object is a screwdriver – it is not a matter for subjective judgment.  Searle claims that social reality in general can be understood only in the light of the distinction between intrinsic and observer relative features (Searle 1995:9-12).  I would also draw the conclusion that the epistemic objectivity of ontologically subjective features provides a rational foundation for the concept of social reality.

Searle then builds his account of social reality using three elements: collective intentionality (as discussed earlier), the assignment of function and constitutive rules.  Declarative acts and deontic powers are also relevant, as will be discussed later.

He makes the point that in our daily lives, we experience things such as chairs, tables, cars and houses by the way we use them, rather than simply as material objects.  In other words, we assign functions, not just to things made by humans, but also to natural things such as trees and rivers.  The important thing is that functions ‘are never intrinsic but always observer relative’ (Searle 1995: 14).   Searle makes a further distinction between agentive functions that are intentionally assigned to objects, such as using a stone as a paperweight, and non-agentive functions that are independent of our use of objects, such as hearts pumping blood.  Agentive functions require continuous intentionality by humans, whereas non-agentive functions operate independently of humans, despite being recognised as functions by humans (Searle 1995: 20-23).

Searle’s next building block of social reality is his distinction between what he calls ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’ rules.  Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity, for example, cars could be driven without road safety rules, but such rules serve to make driving safer.  On the other hand, the rules of chess actually define or constitute the game of chess – the game could not be played without them.  Or to put it positively, the rules of chess enable the game of chess to exist.  Constitutive rules characteristically have the form ‘X counts as Y in context C’ – for instance, rendering the opponent King unable to move without being taken counts as winning the game of Chess.  In this way, the constitutive rule assigns a new status to some phenomenon, known as a status function, which in turn creates a new fact by human agreement, known as an institutional fact (Searle 1995: 46).  Status functions require collective intentionality, both for their initial creation and their continued existence (Searle 2010: 59)

Searle claims that institutional facts exist only within systems of constitutive rules (Searle 1995: 28).  For example, the institutional facts of money, property and government exist only because we have rules constituting them.  If there were no rules regarding the recognition and enforcement of property rights, there would be no property.  This brings us to one of the most important powers of language – the power to create a reality by declaring it to exist.  Searle has called such speech acts  ‘status function declarations’ – declarations being one of several categories of speech acts (Searle 1975: 16-20).

Searle’s next step is to claim that language necessarily involves social commitments to the truth of utterances, if it is to form the foundation of human society in general.  Searle says that ‘When I make a statement I not only express a belief, but I also commit myself to its truth’ (Searle 2010: 81).  I assume that the basis of this claim is that truth telling is the social norm and lying is an aberration.  Indeed, the capacity to create rights, duties and obligations via status function declarations is dependent on such declarations being accepted as true.  This capacity known as a deontic power (Searle 2010: 80-84).

Having now described how Searle attempts to answer the question ‘how is a socially constructed reality possible?,’ I would now like to turn to my thesis of this essay, which is that not only is a social reality possible, but for many people social reality is more ‘real’ than physical reality.

Most of us live in a human-created world rather than the natural world.  The most obvious human creation is the urban environment, but except for wilderness areas, most of our rural environments have been modified by humans as well.  In Australia, even our natural-looking forests have been modified by wild fires started by humans.  The grip that observer relative features can have on us can be so strong that some people believe that all of reality is a human creation (Searle 1995:2).  Children are brought up in a culture where they simply take aspects of social reality such as homes, schools and money for granted (Searle 1995:4).  Many adults find it hard to imagine a world without humans, which as I indicated earlier, is a useful test of whether something is intrinsic or observer relative.  People with a science background, especially in geology or paleontology, would usually be an exception to this generalisation, because they would be aware that humans have existed for only a tiny fraction of the total life of the Earth.

In Chapter Seven of Searle’s ‘The Construction of Social Reality’, he discusses whether the ‘real world’ of brute facts exists.  He refers to ‘the current philosophical scene in which it is common to deny the existence of a reality independent of human representations and to deny that true statements correspond to facts’ (Searle 1995: 150).  So it seems that even some philosophers may be in this ‘grip’ of observer relative features, to the extent of denying intrinsic features.  On the other hand, there are some prominent theoretical physicists, such as Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, who claim that only the physical world is real and that philosophers are irrelevant (Pigliucci, 2014).

The philosophical view that the (non-social) world exists independently of our representations of it is known as ‘realism’.  Searle proposes several arguments in favour of realism and against what he thinks are the most powerful arguments in opposition to realism (Searle 1995: 153-176).   Whilst I happen to largely agree with Searle’s arguments on these points, they are peripheral to the topic of this essay.

In conclusion, I think that Searle has built a strong case for the concept of a social reality consisting of observer relative features existing alongside a physical reality consisting of intrinsic features.  This case is primarily relevant to those philosophers (and some theoretical physicists) who deny the existence of either physical reality or social reality.  For many other people, social reality has such a grip on them that it seems more ‘real’ than physical reality.

Endnotes

[1] John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

References

Jacob, Pierre, ‘Intentionality’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Viewed 10 September 2014.

Pigliucci, M. ‘Lawrence Krauss: another physicist with an anti-philosophy complex’ Rationally Speaking Blog URL = <http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html> Viewed 10 September 2014.

Searle, John R. ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’, in: Günderson, K. (ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge, Minneapolis, vol. 7. 1975

Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Searle, John R. ‘What is language: some preliminary remarks’, in: Tsohatzidis, S. L. (ed.), John Searle’s Philosophy of Language. Force, meaning and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Searle, John R. Making the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Copyright notice: © all rights reserved. Except for personal use or as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act, no part of this website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the copyright owner, Tim Harding at tim.harding@yandoo.com, or as attributed on individual blog posts.

If you find the information on this blog useful, you might like to consider supporting us.

Argumentum ad Monsantium

by BRIAN DUNNING, Nov 08 2012

It’s my favorite new logical fallacy, the “Appeal to Monsanto”, the world’s largest producer of biotech agriculture seeds. This is the logic that compels many anti-GMO activists to reply to any argument in support of biotech crops with “So you love Monsanto?”

It’s so wonderful because it combines many other logical fallacies into one, and is thus a great time saver. For example:

• It poisons the well (cloaks a viewpoint with negative weasel words) by associating the scary, evil word Monsanto.
• It’s a non-sequitur (a logical association that does not follow). IF (a) THEREFORE (b). IF (genes can be used to confer traits such as drought resistance) THEREFORE (I love Monsanto).
• It’s a straw man (misrepresenting what I said into something that’s easy to argue against). If I had actually said “I love Monsanto”, then plenty of rational arguments are available to show that’s a bad idea.
• It’s an ad hominem attack on my argument (the argument is wrong because of who the person is that made it). Whatever I said about biotech must be wrong since “I love Monsanto”.
• It’s a red herring (an irrelevancy to distract from the subject under discussion). Monsanto does not necessarily have anything to do with any given science-based discussion of the merits of what can and should be done with direct genetic manipulation.

Also, the Appeal to Monsanto comes in many different forms. Here are some Appeals to Monsanto from my first episode on organic food (skep.us/4019), which did not mention Monsanto at all:

Brian is basically an uninformed apologist for big agro-business. I would not be surprised if he is pulling a salary from Monsanto or Cargill.
G William Shea, 2/2/2008

well, actually [Brian] is very very very uninformed on a lot of subjects, including the scientific method! anyway, another one to see about GM and a real eye-opener in my eye 😉 “The world according to Monsanto”
Pindar, 2/10/2009

check out the documentary, “The World According to Monsanto” you can find it on the popular video sites out there for free.
Justan, 2/24/2009

But the problem is not to justify the status quo; the problem is dealing with the implications of monoculture, the ownership of biological processes, the desertification or sterility of fertile land, the multifarious effects of carbon-intensive cultivation, and the implications of unfair government subsidies for certain crops (which hurt the farmer, especially the corn farmer, the most, and help Cargill, Coca Cola, and Monsanto, the most).
Jay, 2/24/2009

I will gladly pay more for organic food if it means I’m not a lab rat for Monsanto.
Erin, 10/2/2009

Its not a matter of IF but WHEN it hurts [Brian] and his family will something be done. I’d try to see his point of view but I just cant put my head that far up my A**! I wonder if he is being paid by Monsanto.
Paul, 2/24/2010

i dont know what you are trying to accomplish by this blog but you seem to have all ur facts skewed. who do you work for monsanto?
MATT, 5/2/2010

Claiming that organic foods are less healthy is the most obvious farce in your article as well as your blind belief that pesticides and herbicides are healthy and biodegradable.  They might biodegrade, but not within a million years.  If you are a “skeptic” then why would you believe monsanto funded studies.
Tyler K., 12/12/2010

You don’t work for someone like Monsanto do you?
Phi, 4/6/2011

I have heard that often farmers who buy genetically modified seeds enter into a contract with Monsanto and are only allowed to use Roundup products.
J.O., 9/20/2011

If genetically modified foods are that much better than why has just recently been articles about the fact that the corn that Monsanto has produced having problems with the very pests that it was modified to not be affected by.
Steve, 10/21/2011

“To feed a growing population …” This is an argument used by corporations such as Monsanto.
Eric B, 10/27/2011

Couldn’t have written a more obviously emotionally biased article if Monsanto covered your expenses.
Samuel, 7/18/2012

Monsanto is owned by the zionist jews
AmericanPower, 9/9/2012

The Appeal to Monsanto was also employed in response to my episode ondetoxification (http://skep.us/4083) did not mention Monsanto at all:

Cam, I like how you say [Brian] is promoting “diet” and “water” as if he has some sort of patent on fruits and vegetables (like GE corn from Monsanto) and water which can only be bought from him.
Joe Shmoe, 1/25/2011

Even my episode on genetically modified organisms (http://skep.us/4112) did not mention Monsanto at all, as I was trying to stick with the science and avoid readers’ obvious ideological complications:

My major concern is a legal concern with such giants as Monsanto.
Justin Zimmer, 2/15/2012

A must see, The World according to Monsanto” on you tube.  A bit unsettling and disheartening.
Betty Bate, 10/13/2012

An acquaintance of mine who works with a scientific testing company has heard numerous first-hand reports of Monsanto’s threatening to stop funding university agriculture departments [i.e., withhold grant money] if they did any health/safety testing on GMO technology.
John, 10/18/2012

My episode on aspartame (http://skep.us/4127) did not mention Monsanto at all, mainly because the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Yet:

Aspartame is poison period. It’s made by the biggest bunch of criminals in the world. Monsanto is determined to rule the world and might be. I get Gout as soon as I use and Aspartame.
Dean Slater, 8/27/2009

Even my episode on high fructose corn syrup (http://skep.us/4157), which was basically a chemical discussion and did not mention Monsanto, came down to hitting me with the Appeal to Monsanto:

You totally miss the point, HFC is made with GMO corn and is helping to eliminate biodiversity. Not to mention the downright evil business practices of Monsanto et al.
Mark, 3/24/2011

My episode comparing organic vs. conventional agriculture (http://skep.us/4166) did not mention Monsanto at all, as it was about the comparative sciences:

I couldn’t afford organic food for the life of me. But what about good old Round-Up Ready crops like Soy and Corn? Monsanto is taking over the bloody world, and they are going to soon OWN our food supply and all patents to it.
Kimberly, 8/12/2009

I wonder what you would think about our food supply if you had to shut all the windows in your home and flee the area several times a year while the crops are being sprayed with round up and other poisons.  I wonder if you would appreciate Monsanto and their schemes to dominate every farmer you know.
kadie, 11/21/2009

we’re all gonna die if this path is follwed much longer, but thankfully many people unlike yourself are waking up to the REALITY of chemical agriculture and not just stupidly DEFENDING it for no reason like you are. thanks for nothing, and thank goodness not everyone blindly defends monsanto and big AG like you and your fellow skeptoids.
mike, 12/17/2010

My episode on morgellons disease (http://skep.us/4206) had nothing remotely to do with Monsanto. Yet:

Who pays you to be such an idiot? Monsanto?
Colleen, 9/25/2012

My episode on the things we eat (http://skep.us/4216) was a discussion of the basic building blocks of nutrition and so, naturally, did not mention Monsanto:

The vast majority of our food (whether plant or animal) comes from factory farms. This is not healthy and it’s a business model that cannot sustain itself. Thanks to WalMart, Monsanto, and other mega-giants for that debilitating trend!
Joe Boudreault, 7/30/2010

Somehow even my episode on the Bilderberg Group (http://skep.us/4225) conspiracy theory fell prey to the dreaded Appeal to Monsanto:

This problem started in 1930 with President FDR signing a treaty allowing the taking of a limited amount of human specimens for research purposes. In exchange the Grey’s gave us the perfected “sonar technology” in exchange. Since that time they have taken over our Dem & Rep parties. They have managed to infiltrate our manufacturing facilities, have bought out Proctor & Gamble and created the Monsanto Company.
David Kaas, 6/19/2011

There was a listener feedback (http://skep.us/4232) episode that made one mention of aspartame (which has nothing to do with Monsanto) and yet got this:

We live in a messed up world…we all better open our eyes and make a stand…because our health is in the hands of Monsanto and other giants…maybe we should look at Bill S510 but I’m sure everyone here is in favorite of that one lol
BJ, 11/18/2010

It would never have occurred to me that the Appeal to Monsanto can even be used to justify the antisemitism of the Zionist Conspiracy (http://skep.us/4271), but so it can:

Brian, your opening statement on this subject says that “anti semitisim is institutionalized by world super powers” ? ??   Brian you are blind,  what would you call Aipac?, ADL? IDF? Mossad? Monsanto? ect ect (all Zionist owned.)
Jim White, 10/13/2012

And finally, the Appeal to Monsanto can even be used to stain the reputation of those who are already stained, like Joe Mercola who was featured in the episode on the 10 worst anti-science websites (http://skep.us/4283):

Have you heard about Mercola’s link to an Indian company that makes pesticides, fertilizers, and bisphenol A and invests in Monsanto seed products? 😉
ejwillingham, 11/8/2011

So, blog commenters, keep this tool handy. The Appeal to Monsanto can apparently be used anytime, anywhere, to argue anything, and it need have no relationship to biotech at all. Enjoy.

Ven (Hven)

Steve's Travels and Other Stuff

The tiny island of Ven (Danish: Hven) lies between Sweden and Denmark, at the northern end of the strait of Oresund. Oddly, it seems to have no strategic value, despite being placed bang in the middle of the only viable exit from the Baltic Sea. There are no fortifications or guns, etc.

We got the ferry from Landskrona for the 30-minute journey. It was the height of summer and there were hordes of tourists. Very soon the island was clearly delineated, and you could see it, too.

This view of the Ven lighthouse, only three kilometres across the water from Landskrona, contrasts the industrial mess of the mainland with the cute holiday mode of the island. We sailed into its little port.

Now. (click on the above picture) You see the green bus coming down the steep hill – the grey roofs directly above that, on the horizon and among…

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Are pharmacists are trustworthy as they’d like us to believe?

By Michael Vagg, Barwon Health, 12 September 2014

Pharmacists are consistently held up as among the most respected and trusted of professionals. They fulfil an important role within the health professions of being the gatekeepers of medication dispensing and the link between the community and their medication use. For more than one hundred years, there has been a very clear and ethical distinction between doctors (who prescribe medications) and pharmacists (who sell them). That way, the argument goes, doctors have no direct financial interest in drugs they prescribe, and pharmacists have no direct financial interest in recommending any of the drugs on their shelves directly to patients. So far, so good.

There has been a bit of role creep over the years, with calls from some doctors to be allowed to sell their own concoctions directly to their patients, as well as a much more concerted push by pharmacists to play a bigger role in health care, including providing immunisations and health checks direct to consumers. Naturally this is of concern to GPs as such proposals have the potential to fragment primary care even further. Not to mention taking the critical role of diagnosis and putting it into the hands of those who are underqualified, underinsured and undersupported to handle it.

What concerns me particularly is not so much that these health checks will take work away from GPs. If anything I suspect they will increase GPs workloads, sorting out the advice already given to patients by wannabe GP enthusiasts like pharmacists and their associated naturopaths. This month’s Skeptic magazine from Australian Skeptics highlights the problem quite well.

I think it’s time for pharmacists to decide if they want to keep the trust placed in them by the community to give sound advice. If they want to remain a trusted source of advice they need to lift their game and get all the ear candles, homeopathy, magnets, herbs and supplements out of their shops, along with the iridologists and other fairground ‘health professionals’. In short, they need to start acting like they deserve the trust and respect that is accorded them. We have heard nothing of the training and CPD requirements for pharmacists who want to diagnose and treat patients, let alone how they will be insured. I would want to see all this detail before I let my croupy baby or breathless grandmother within a bull’s roar of a pharmacist’s diagnostic skills.

The protectionism involved in the business of running pharmacies is breathtaking. Like dentists, only pharmacists are legally allowed to profit from running pharmacies, and they have defended this with all the bitterness and vitriol you might expect from a group who know they are onto a good thing. Health Minister Peter Dutton seems all for the pharmacists’ ambitions and has been on the media trail vowing not to wind back their protected status.

So it seems the pharmacists will have all they want. I wonder if they deserve it? I hope they take the opportunity to lift their game as a profession and use their protected status to raise standards, not profits. A good place to start would be to stop advertising and selling shonky devices and products that would be considered fraudulent in any other context. Too hard? Then get out of the expanded responsibility game for good.

Michael Vagg does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Republished with permission). Read the original article.

Fluoride conspiracies + activism = harm to children

By Michael Vagg, Barwon Health, 2 September 2013.

I’ve discussed in an earlier piece the origins of fluoride conspiracy theory in post-war Europe. Other articles on The Conversation have set out the science behind our understanding that optimising levels of fluoride in drinking water is a safe and effective intervention (albeit one with a modest effect size) for the good of public health.

What I didn’t put into that earlier piece was a few personal anecdotes. The SMH article was completely consistent with them, so I might as well add my bit of anecdotal colour to the debate.

The region where I live has been one of the last in Victoria to add fluoride. This has partly been for logistical reasons, but also because the region is home to one of the better organised and more vociferous anti-fluoridation groups. In fact, my Letters to the Editor of the local paper pointing out the numerous factual errors of these groups ended up getting me personal nasty replies from the Editor herself, along with solemn and binding commitments on her behalf never to publish my ill-formed opinions again.

As a Pain Specialist, many of my colleagues are anaesthetists, and they have for years never looked forward to the paediatric dental lists here. So many children getting general anaesthesia for multiple extractions due to decay. The children wake up dazed, in pain, crying, vomiting and bleeding. Even though they bounce back pretty quickly afterwards, it’s not a very rewarding job to do. Anaesthetic trainees rotating down from big city hospitals where they rarely see such lists are about the only ones who benefit from such a cavalcade of needless misery. The risks of general anaesthesia are not to be idly contemplated for children, and far outweigh the virtually nonexistent risk from fluoridation.

Since fluoridation was introduced to Geelong in 2009, my colleagues are much happier, as severe dental abscesses requiring tricky anaesthetic techniques are much less common, and tend to mainly come from areas in the region which still aren’t fluoridated. A quick chat with one of our local dentists confirmed they had the same belief. The rate of kids needing GAs for dental work is approaching that of their metropolitan counterparts, though the list remains disappointingly long.

The other anecdote I wanted to share was that one of my colleagues who had worked in Europe for a few years went away with 3 children under the age of 6, who were the same age and social demographic as our own children. When they returned from living in a non-fluoridated European city 3 years later, 2 of his 3 children had needed dental treatment under GA and all 3 had fillings compared to none of any of their peers in our social circle who stayed in Australia. That’s a nice little case-control study right there, as if any further anecdotal evidence was needed to add to the overwhelming scientific evidence for fluoride optimisation.

So again, please don’t buy into fluoride conspiracy-mongering. Let’s not voluntarily give up the advantages of access to first-world public health measures because of manufactured scare campaigns. Maybe many anti-fluoride activists are sincere and reasonable people at heart. They certainly seem to hold their views with conviction. It’s just that on this issue, they couldn’t be more demonstrably wrong. The consequences of their misguided support for non-fluoridation are causing direct and measurable harm to children who deserve better than wilful ignorance and ersatz health consciousness.

No, you’re not entitled to your opinion

By Patrick Stokes, Deakin University

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Firstly, what’s an opinion?

Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. But “opinion” ranges from tastes or preferences, through views about questions that concern most people such as prudence or politics, to views grounded in technical expertise, such as legal or scientific opinions.

You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. I’d be silly to insist that you’re wrong to think strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate. The problem is that sometimes we implicitly seem to take opinions of the second and even the third sort to be unarguable in the way questions of taste are. Perhaps that’s one reason (no doubt there are others) why enthusiastic amateurs think they’re entitled to disagree with climate scientists and immunologists and have their views “respected.”

Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Ms. Dorey has no medical qualifications, but argues that if Bob Brown is allowed to comment on nuclear power despite not being a scientist, she should be allowed to comment on vaccines. But no-one assumes Dr. Brown is an authority on the physics of nuclear fission; his job is to comment on the policy responses to the science, not the science itself.

So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion?

If “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion” just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true, but fairly trivial. No one can stop you saying that vaccines cause autism, no matter how many times that claim has been disproven.

But if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. And this too is a distinction that tends to get blurred.

On Monday, the ABC’s Mediawatch program took WIN-TV Wollongong to task for running a story on a measles outbreak which included comment from – you guessed it – Meryl Dorey. In a response to a viewer complaint, WIN said that the story was “accurate, fair and balanced and presented the views of the medical practitioners and of the choice groups.” But this implies an equal right to be heard on a matter in which only one of the two parties has the relevant expertise. Again, if this was about policy responses to science, this would be reasonable. But the so-called “debate” here is about the science itself, and the “choice groups” simply don’t have a claim on air time if that’s where the disagreement is supposed to lie.[1]

Mediawatch host Jonathan Holmes was considerably more blunt: “there’s evidence, and there’s bulldust,” and it’s no part of a reporter’s job to give bulldust equal time with serious expertise.

The response from anti-vaccination voices was predictable. On the Mediawatch site, Ms. Dorey accused the ABC of “openly calling for censorship of a scientific debate.” This response confuses not having your views taken seriously with not being allowed to hold or express those views at all – or to borrow a phrase from Andrew Brown, it “confuses losing an argument with losing the right to argue.” Again, two senses of “entitlement” to an opinion are being conflated here.

So next time you hear someone declare they’re entitled to their opinion, ask them why they think that. Chances are, if nothing else, you’ll end up having a more enjoyable conversation that way.

Read more from Patrick Stokes: The ethics of bravery

Patrick Stokes does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

Reblogger’s note: 

[1] This is a fallacy known as false balance.