On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
"Conflate" is the key word here. This is important! It is a mistake people > on both sides make. > Yes, definitely -- conflation is a critical mistake, but it is most likely to occur when it is convenient for one's position. Throw perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, polywater and cold fusion all into the same category. It does not matter that there appear to be basic differences that make the comparison strained, at best. Conflation is less likely to occur when it is inconvenient to the position you're intending to tendentiously pursue: plate tectonics, semiconductors and cold fusion are not in the same category and should be distinguished. Often conflation is a mistake. It is hard, for example, to keep in mind that there are Pd/D experiments, Pd/H experiments, W/D experiments, Ni/H experiments, etc., and that the results do not necessarily transfer from one to another. In this way it is easy to conflate conclusions made about one set of experiments with another set of experiments. We do that unintentionally all the time here; I certainly do. But sometimes conflation is a rhetorical device employed to advance a purpose unrelated to mutual understanding. I think a person would have to be mentally unbalanced to doggedly employ such a tactic intentionally in any more than jest, but there is an area of gray here between a commitment to intellectual integrity and a commitment to pursuing a strategic end which can make it hard to avoid such a device and easy to overlook that one is doing so. Eric
