I was listening to Alan Colmes on the radio tonight and he had a caller near the end accuse him of "intellectual dishonesty" due to Colmes' propensity to demand a definition of "intellectual dishonesty" from callers who accuse him of being intellectually dishonest. In general, Colmes' claims that those who toss out the phrase really mean, "You don't agree with me."
The caller asked if Colmes could ever think that a person truly is "intellectually dishonest." Could he even define the phrase? Colmes came up with "hypocrisy" and while I agree with Colmes' basic premise (most people who claim "intellectual dishonesty" really mean "You don't agree with me"), I don't agree with his definition.
To me, "intellectual dishonesty" is when a person takes a position that is clearly incorrect, treats it as correct, and makes an argument based upon that faulty premise.
F'rinstance, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that radiometric dating is flawed on a fundamental level. This is because for that claim to be true, a whole slew of independent processes must all come up with the same wrong answer in repeated trials where their errors cannot possibly match.
As an example, suppose you wanted to measure how big a room is.
One method would be to take a meterstick and physically measure it. A possible error that can come into this process is that if you have to pick up the stick and move it in order to get all the way across the room, you need to be very careful to make sure that you're keeping on a straight line. Little deviations from each time you pick the stick up introduce errors in the final calculation.
Plus, you need to eyeball the measurement at the end. Those ticks on the meterstick only go so far and if the length of the room falls between the ticks, you need to estimate where it actually falls.
A second method would be to use an acoustic method. You put a sound source on one end of the room and measure the amount of time it takes to get an echo from the other side of the room. By comparing the time to the speed of sound, you can calculate the size of the room. Possible errors in this method, however, deal with the variability of the speed of sound. While we can be fairly certain that in a typical room with static air that the sound will travel uniformly, variations in the air will affect the measurement.
A similar method would be to use an optical method. You put a light source on one end of the room and measure the amount of time it takes to get a reflection from the other side of the room. By comparing the time to the speed of light, you can calculate the size of the room. Possible errors in this method, however, deal with gravitational effects. The speed of light is not nearly as sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure as the speed of sound, so that isn't much of an issue. Instead, we have gravitational effects to worry about.
Now, if we find that each of these methods comes up with a length of the room of about 5.67 meters give or take a centimeter at worst, by what right can we claim that the concept of "measurement" is invalid? Each of these methods has a way to introduce an error in the result, but the sources of those errors are independent of each other or so vastly different in scope as to be independent.
The only way to claim that "measurement" is wrong and yet still have each method arrive at the same answer is to claim that each method was wrong precisely such that they all arrived at the same wrong answer.
But if we then use each method on different rooms of many different sizes and they all agree with each other within a centimeter, how can it possibly be that they're all wrong? The errors introduced will scale with the various room sizes.
For example, the Farenheit scale and the Celsius scale do not have the same size of a degree of temperature. However, the Farenheit scale and the Celsius scale do share a common point: -40. When it is -40F, it is also -40C. But other than that single point, the two do not match anywhere else.
The point is that while we might say that the various methods for measuring a room might all incorrectly agree on a certain size, there is no way that they could all incorrectly agree on every size. The degrees of error introduced by each method are not on the same scale nor are they triggered by the same events.
This is what I mean by "intellectual dishonesty." I would contrast this with "hypocrisy" such as those who claim that genetic analysis of organisms cannot be used to determine that species A is an ancestor of species B (thus denying evolution) when those same people don't have a problem with paternity testing. Since the techniques used are based upon the same premises, how is it a process that can determine who the father is cannot be used to determine who the ancestor is?
What say you all? What do you think "intellectual dishonesty" is?
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!
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