I love Melvyn Bragg. Just in time for when our first year module looks at the philosophy of science, he's just broadcast, and podcast, a discussion of Karl Popper.
What a guy B-))
a £30 kettle lead
This week in our level one module 'Studying Communication', we're looking at what it means to study language and communication scientifically. Part of this involves looking at how we reach conclusions in everyday life, and at conclusions which are not backed up by research, e.g. that sporting success is down to anything other than luck, that the scarf you've been wearing to every match your team has lost is 'lucky'.
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is a great place to find examples of dodgy 'science'. This week he's following up an earlier piece about dodgy 'science' in the world of hi-fi.
The world's top public intellectual?
A poll in Prospect has just voted Noam Chomsky the world's top public intellectual. As ever, there is also an article arguing that he's great and an article arguing that he's awful. I hate these things as they can never give you enough info to begin to form your own opinion and the authors are always tempted to say things that are at best a bit misleading. For example, Oliver Kamm's essay says that:
'His theories have come under criticism from those, such as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who were once close to him'
Technically, that's true, but what are you going to make of it if you're a student in our first year module who has been reading Pinker's The Language Instinct and Geoffrey Sampson's Educating Eve/The Language Instinct Debate? Surely you will begin to understand the debate by thinking of 'nativists' like Chomsky, Pinker and others on one side and non-nativists like Sampson on the other. And Kamm's comment will make you think you might have misunderstood and that Pinker has actually been arguing against Chomsky. The truth is that the differences between Pinker and other 'neo-Chomskyans' are tiny compared to the difference between all of them and Sampson.
Arguably, this is not a big deal if you're a student as it's typical in academic discourse that things are not as simple as they might seem at first and you have to do some work to understand the details of the various positions. But most people who read the articles in Prospect won't have the time to go and do more research of their own. So they'll end up either unsure of what to think or with an inaccurate picture. I often have people say things to me like 'Funny, isn't it, that Chomsky isn't really relevant to linguistics any more?' I can't see how anyone who's paying attention could say that seriously. There are plenty of people who would say he isn't that relevant to their own linguistics, which is obviously not the same thing.
Billy
