In touch with reality.

 

It really doesn’t take a scientific education to make reasonable assumptions.  If a new virus causes many people to become sick in Wuhan and you are asked to guess the source, which option would you pick:

• 1.       A market in Wuhan that sells live animals, or
• 2.       A laboratory in Wuhan that does research on dangerous viruses.

Without a degree in biology, chemistry, or math, would anyone pick #1? 

Follow-up question for extra credit: members of the media denounce anyone who picks #2 as a conspiracy theorist.  What is their motivation?

Has anyone ever calculated the odds of a deadly virus coincidentally originating in the same neighborhood as a virology lab doing related work?

How many neighborhoods have that kind of lab? 

When the evidence is murky and there are plenty of experts lining up on both sides, but one side is excessively concerned with shutting down the discussion, I tend to think that side is more likely than not to be wrong.

Senator Kennedy got Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins to admit that Biden’s administration never even consulted top health officials before they killed the probe the Trump Admin started to find out where COVID came from.

Smell a cover-up yet?  What does it take?

Motte and Bailey Doctrines

One of the difficulties of getting people to behave better epistemically is that, whilst intellectual dishonesty is wrong, it is difficult to convict people of intellectual wrongs. As David Stove showed in his wonderful paper ‘What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?’ (The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies Chapter 7 ), there are indefinitely many ways of cheating intellectually and for most there is no simple way to put one’s finger on how the cheat is effected. There is just the hard work of describing the species in detail.

Some time ago I wrote a paper entitled The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (here or here or here ) in which I described and named a number of such cheats that I detected in postmodernism. One of these I named the Motte and Bailey Doctrine. There has recently been a flurry of use of this concept to analyse ethical, political and religious positions (e.g. here, here) so I am taking the opportunity to have a look at it again.

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of pleasantly habitable land (the Bailey), which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier, such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the Bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

Read the whole thing.