At 03:16 PM 4/9/2010, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
Please excuse a rather tasteless attempt on my part to dissect a small sample of Abd's prose.
No problem. My prose is not part of my body, so it doesn't hurt when you cut it up.
Abd sez: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote: >http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/59867.Jeremy_Bentham > >I find myself speculating whether Bentham, had he existed in our >century, would he have come to the same conclusion that Pigliucci >arrived at. > Pigliucci has not arrived at some conclusion, I beg to differ.
One has not arrived at a conclusion when one reports what one has heard never had an occasion to question. He presents no evidence at all on cold fusion. He just repeats what are only common rumors; unfortunately, it's still common to see these rumors in print. Such as when a media source comments on the history of cold fusion, attributing it to Fleischmann and Pons, and then saying that nobody was ever able to reproduce the experiment.
It's possible to make skeptical arguments that discount the replications, but not to claim that there were no replications, unless you define the Fleischmann work in such a way that even Fleischmann rejected it. I.e, excess heat and neutrons. Fleischmann did not detect neutrons. Just heat, the neutron report was an error.
> ... he's just reporting what he's heard, over and over, without > actually reviewing any evidence. I think it would be more accurate to state that what Pigliucci heard "over and over" is precisely what he chose to conclude as being the truth.
I don't call something merely repeated without examination a "conclusion," though, in a sense, by writing it in the book he's making an assumption. Did he actually look at any evidences? As I mentioned, there is no sign that he did. He's just making a general comment about pseudoscience, with comments that may be sometimes true about real pseudoscience, then using (briefly -- I certainly hope he covers other stuff better!) cold fusion as a vague example, no specifics. I'd call it a mistake, not a conclusion. Technically, though, if someone repeats a rumor without attributing it, they can be considered responsible for having concluded that it's true. In reality, though, they may never have considered the possibility that it wasn't true. After all, doesn't everyone know that cold fusion was totally bogus? Except for a few "true believers," that is.
What would he say if asked, "Have you examined the recent evidence on cold fusion, and the recent reviews of the work going back to 1989, and did you conclude what you wrote about it? How would you respond to the 2004 U.S. Dept of Energy review by a panel of 18 experts which unanimously recommended further research, whereas you have given an opinion, as if it were obvious, that research in this field is a waste of time?"
If he's asked that question, and then he responds, then we might know more about what was merely a casual assumption (definitely sloppy, but not necessarily more than that), and what was true "conclusion."
"Conclusion" implies a reasoning process, and there is no sign of that.
It is what he subsequently chose to write about ever-so briefly in two pages of his book. The fact that Pigliucci apparently never actually reviewed the evidence only goes to show how uninformed his conclusion turned out to to have been based on what he chose to hear... over and over. Garbage in... garbage out.
Sure. And the media mostly fed the public -- which includes most scientists, as to fields in which they are not expert -- garbage, which they got from their colleagues earlier, found in the archives, which came from what was written earlier and which was passed on without new reporting. Except when some reporter decided to actually check things out anew.
I'm recommending that you not nail Pigliucci to the cross of pseudoskepticism until you know he's had a chance to do something better.
