Philosophy & Ethics

In the former USSR there was a popular joke: When two people sit down to conspire, one of them is a KGB agent and the other is a fool. Behind many conspiracy and denial theories is a common flaw, which I shall attempt to show using the experimental method. An experiment to prove that humans have landed on the moon.You will need:A finger.At least one eyeball, preferably your own.At least one brain.Optional:An office-type swivel chair.and / orA railway train or a road vehicle. Method:Experiment 1    Hold a finger vertically in front of you.  Repeatedly close alternate eyes…

Undergraduates are getting another free pass, ethically, and blame is being shifted to educators because apparently confusion about what constitutes plagiarism,  not malicious intent, is the leading cause of plagiarism at the graduate school level, according to George M. Bodner, a chemistry professor at Purdue University who serves on the Ethics Committee of the ACS, at their meeting in Salt Lake City. His presentation was part of an ACS initiative to educate the larger scientific community about ethics in chemistry. Confusion about what constitutes plagiarism may be rooted in…

 Assignee's Prerogative vs. Value: A.P. (for short) could be the root of value. A.P. is defined as "the decided worth you assign to your paradigms." (notice I said "your" paradigms, they must have been evaluated and authenticated.) But Value is immesurable from a place of Paradigm Ignorance or Paralysis. How can one evaluate the unsubstantiated? To quote myself, "To contemplate the ancient concept of self with a being that is truly “not-self” without even the ability to conceptualise having rules put upon you is to perpetuate ignorance and demonstrate the absurdity of modern human…

 This began as a response to a comment made on my Blog: Conservatism is Unnatural.  It grew.  People look back on the societies of the past with an amused superiority. They wonder how people could ever have been so silly. Without even a consideration of what it means to live in the present they have no doubt as to their perfection. What may be required is nearly a perfect opposite: A great loss of trust. It has to come from the final exhaustive admittance of how our horribly inept past has us contemplating a hopeless future.  I became aware of paradigm through my…

Scientific Hedging A favourite theme in disaster movies is the political figure who tries to keep the local population from being alerted to some impending catastrophe.  Usually, the political figure tries to impede the publication of findings by one or more scientists.  In real life, it is more commonly the scientists themselves who create a barrier that stands between them and non-scientists. That barrier, the 'hedge' is a linguistic device. The scientists who deal with aspects of the human environment are probably the most cautious, the greatest exponents of the hedge.…

Terminally ill patients and their family caregivers often feel abandoned by their doctors and feel a sense of "unfinished business" with them, according to a new study by an oncologist at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The study results, published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine, identified two themes: before death, abandonment worries related to loss of continuity of communication between patient and physician; and at the time death or after, the patient's family's feelings of abandonment from a lack of closure with the physician.  For the study, the authors recruited 31…

I have been downloading a cartload of books on my new Kindle lately, since I really enjoy the idea of walking into the subway carrying a rather inconspicuous, very light, yet incredibly large library with me. One of these books is Samir Okasha’s Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m reading because I intend to review and promote it. Samir writes very clearly, and this short introduction is very useful for the general curious reader (and, frankly, some scientists of my acquaintance could use it too). Anyway, Samir devotes quite a bit of space in chapter 2 of his book…

In the past two years, University of Texas Southwestern researchers have used a computer-based text-searching tool they developed, called eTBLAST, to analyze millions of abstracts randomly selected from Medline, one of the largest databases of biomedical research articles. They turned up nearly 70,000 highly similar citations. Their subsequent analysis of a small sampling of these, including human inspection of the articles in question, revealed 207 pairs of articles with signs of potential plagiarism.  In a commentary appearing in Science, the UT Southwestern researchers outline the…

"I think, therefore I am." - Descartes. Are you impressed by this deep and meaningful insight into the human condition? Descartes also wrote, in his Discourse: "... philosophy affords the means of discoursing with an appearance of truth on all matters, and commands the admiration of the more simple." Now, did Descartes come up with "I think, therefore I am." before, or after pushing his tongue firmly into his cheek? In my first blog entry I mentioned the truth values (plural) of a sentence. What are the truth values of "I think, therefore I am."? Before even attempting to answer that…

Grammar is supposedly a holistic account of how meaning is expressed by using words in categories and in sequences. It is supposed to be a meld of syntax and semantics. Unfortunately, most writers on grammar focus on the syntax to the exclusion of the semantics. For me, that is like focusing on a carrier wave to the exclusion of the superimposed signal. Spoken language is meaning conveyed by the modulation of a sound signal. It is not the modulation, but the meaning that is master. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -…