Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Hear, hear ...

... Living in denial: Questioning science isn't blasphemy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

As philosopher Edward Skidelsky of the University of Exeter, UK, has argued, crying denialism is a form of ad hominem argument: "the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives". The expanding deployment of the concept, he argues, threatens to reverse one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment - "the liberation of historical and scientific inquiry from dogma".

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