If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
- Carl Sagan

Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel 'threatened' by science-studies scholars. My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots.
- Alan Sokal

1. Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
2. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
3. Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.

Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film, rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the comparison is ludicrous.

Sun Dec 22, 1:12 PM ET

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Today's claims about Iraq could become tomorrow's call to arms. But not all the statements coming from the Bush administration have been supported by evidence, and some that haven't are central to the question of whether Americans should go to war.

The overarching claim, that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, may have the weight of probability behind it, but it has yet to be backed by proof shared with the public.

Behind that is a cast of supporting allegations, some veering off into murky territory.

Ever wonder what your children might be learning when they hit the books in the New York City public schools?
A kinder, gentler definition of jihad. It really means "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

An error-filled version of global geography. The equator actually passes through Florida, Texas and Arizona.

A saga of a swashbuckling hero of today who can be compared to ancient historical heroes dating to the Trojan War: Indiana Jones.

Those are my principles, and if you do not like them, ... ... well, I have others.
- Groucho Marx

Reportedly there is a group, backed by Microsoft, called the Initiative for Software Choice, that opposes the emphasis on open-source software.
Those living elsewhere in the world may not appreciate the way local political groups in the US use doublespeak. I live in California, where there are yearly initiatives to create laws that the citizenship get to vote on. If one group puts an initiative on the ballet (an initiative to reduce cancer, for example), the opposinggroup never puts up a counter initiative (for example, an initiative to increase cancer). Instead, they typically launch an initiative for "Freedom of Choice."

The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark
Carl Sagan
Copyright 1997