I wonder if there are historical precidents for the gross misuse of
skepticism concerning AGW?
I know of a few examples from a broad philosophical prospective.
Probably the greatest applied skeptic of all times was Al Ghazali. He
is credited with stopping Islamic scientific progress around 1000 AD,
playing a key role in starting a dark age that the Islamic world has
not yet emerged from. Al Ghazali accepted mathematics as truth, but
he took on Aristotle and Plato using their own logical tools. He
attacked the very idea of cause and effect as being unprovable. He
advocated mysticism and maintained that the concept of cause and
effect was blasphemy since it limited the power of God.
The Pragmatist philosophical school argued that skepticism was often
misused in philosophy. They thought that the skeptical pose of
Descartes and Hume was artificial and was not really that useful a
tool in the theory of knowledge. They advocated more of a "take your
best shot" approach to knowledge.
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