And right now, the problem isn’t that people aren’t challenging ExxonMobil’s lies, the problem’s that the challenges don’t matter much if the people with vested interests in perpetuating these lies currently hold the reins of power.

The question is, why are honest people of good will seemingly so powerless or feckless in the face of the liars of Exxon, Fox News, the Republican leadership, the WSJ editorial page?

Once upon a time there were intellectuals who knew the difference between an honest person and a liar. Now we have intellectuals who teach that there is no such thing as honesty. I think that that is part of the problem. If people don’t believe in truth, they are defenseless against falsehood.

PPS- the 101 most dangerous profs have nothing to do with it. My favorite blogger, Berube, knows a liar when he sees one. So do Eric Foner and Victor Navasky, among others.

PS- I put the “Left” in scare quotes because I believe that many on the self-identified left in academia are not leftists at all. They are quietists whose lives and work are entirely outside any sort of practical politics.

This remark, however, seems to imply a straw man of its own —It’s as true to say of Quine and Laudan as it is of Mach (who by the way was at least as much philosopher as physicist) that their views about science were/are worthy of respectful attention because those views were underpinned by real knowledge and understanding of science.” Which amounts to saying, “their understanding of science deserves attention because they understand science.”

How nice for them—but not a compliment, I think, that Quine or Lauden or any of the names you cited would find very convincing. Bogus accolades like that ease us into the habitual ridiculous denunciation of post modernism, and so on.

Now, the real argument here re global warming is not that we shouldn’t be sceptical of scientific institutions. The history of the twentieth century is replete with official scientific institutions abusing science—suppressing and distorting information. The AEC is a perfect example—for forty years, it simply lied about the dangers of the testing of nuclear bombs.

But we know why they lied, and we can follow the suppressions. The bad faith in accusing climatologists of following an ideological agenda is that the interest, here, is very weak, and the actual institutions with material interests are, of course, the polluters. I’d say that your pragmatism is in fact the best way to regard the pronouncements of the scientists—not a bad faith skepticism, or a faith based one, and not a blind faith in Ph.Ds, either.

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.”

Somehow, though, I’ve never heard the accusation made that analytic philosophy leads to the development of an “anti-science” cultural elite (except, perhaps, in Chomsky’s essay on Davidson).

As for mainstream philosophy of science, can you get more mainstream than Nancy Cartwright’s work on models? Nancy Cartwright isn’t inclined to quote Lyotard—they don’t do that at the LSE - but she did publish a famous book entitled, How the Laws of Physics Lie. Hmm, now, isn’t that interesting.

As for your idea that Mach, being a scientist, deserved infinite respect that we should never give to those Frenchy amateurs—well, many think Mach’s mockery of the atomic theory led to Boltzman’s suicide. Mach’s effects on science have been debated, but nobody debates that in many ways, especially in his belief that atoms were a myth, he had a powerful negative effect on physics.

So, here’s the case:
1. Lyotard and Derrida are introduced merely as names. Nothing they say is quoted, no attempt to compare what they might have said to what other, “mainstream” philosophy of science people have said—instead, they speak through the mouths of nutty English professors;
2. When attempting to at least get the charges right – which are, more properly, attached to Latour and the SST people—suddenly the ground shifts from English professors to sociologists, who can’t, after all, have a philosophy of science.
3. So, one pursues the avenue of the philosophy of science and finds it loaded (as, in my opinion, it should be) with a lot of statements that can only be construed relativistically, and a lot of statements, such as those by Quine, that are question the status of the sciences as radically as anything produced by that Devil Derrida. And at that point, the conversation lapses. As you should know, since you are citing him, Laudan is especially concerned with revision in science, which definitely makes problematic any idea of science as the linear accumulation of facts. It would be misleading in the extreme to say that Laudan believes that science is an advance from one truth to another – and his model has been accused of epistemic relativism by many other philosophers of science. So it goes. That debate is blessedly free of pundit-like smears.

OTOH, jr certainly seems to be claiming that The Left Caused ExxonMobil, presumably because its spin merchants were corrupted by America’s 101 most dangerous professors.

And… so what roy belmont is saying is that it’s perfectly OK to distort the truth to suit one’s own ends. Thank you, roy belmont, you’ve just proven that you’re a baby-raping serial killer.

Here’s the deal. Systematically distorting science, misrepresenting science, putting words into science’s mouth, just so that one can earn profits that are more insane than one’s insane profits, is simply wrong, wrong, and wrong. Funding ‘independent’ groups to be one’s mouthpiece is wrong. And being short-sighted enough to destroy the same earth which we live on—possibly destroying ourselves in the process—what, that’s not wrong?

Derrida and Lyotard, those frisky outlaws, were nothing in their skepticism compared to, say, Ernst Mach. And guess what? Einstein found Mach’s work, in spite of the skepticism about atoms, useful. I wonder why.

P.S. Mainstream philosophy of science is practiced by the likes of Kitcher, Bunge, Laudan, Sober et hoc genus omne. Your comment does not contain the name of a philosopher of science (Latour is a sociologist).

Fascinating thesis. How has this influence been measured empirically?

What has happened is that the influence of “the left” in the universities has created a class of educated people who have no belief in truth and therefore have no defense when faced with genuine liars.