- Beautiful Evidence
Resource Type: Book
How to produce and consume evidence presentations. How seeing turns into showing, empirical observations turn into explanation and evidence.
- Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
- Conspiracies or Institutions: 9-11 and Beyond
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2002
Why and how does much (but not all) conspiracy theorizing create a tendency for people to depart from rational analysis?
- 'The Death of Evidence' in Canada: Scientists' Own Words
Data distorted for 'propaganda' and other complaints against the Harper government made at last week's Ottawa rally
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2012
- Decision not file charges in CIA video destruction deals new setback to right to information
Sources News Release
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2010
The decision not to file charges against any of the CIA officers who destroyed 92 videos of interrogations in secret CIA prisons has dealt a new blow to the search for truth in a matter of public interest and to the public’s right of access.
- Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1998
The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
- A field guide to critical thinking
Resource Type: Article
- Harter's Precept: Review of The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1997
Hamilton gives three major examples of erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absence of evidentiary support: (1) Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant Ethic spurred the advance of capitalism; (2) the widely accepted thesis that Hitler's main electoral support came from the lower middle classes (the despised petit bourgeoisie of Marxism); and (3) Michel Foucault's thesis that the modern prison evolved not as a more humane alternative to the cruel physical punishments of earlier centuries, but as part of a wide-ranging scheme by sinister forces to enforce a pervasive social conformity.
- Judging Authority
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2004
We are often required to accept the word of another person, but how can we best judge whether or not that person is a legitimate authority?
- Life Sentence
Stories from four decades of court reporting - or, how I fell out of love with the Canadian justice system (especially judges)
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2016
Through an examination of notable trials she has covered, Chrisitie Blatchford makes the case that Canada's judicial system is out of control and often inept. Judges, she says, are the new senators, unelected, unaccountable and overly entitled, while lawyers are often self-satisfied and contemptuous of anyone who is not a member of the club.
- 9/11: Debunking The Myths
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2005
Popular Mechanics special report on September 11 conspiracy theories.
- 911Myths
Resource Type: Website
Skeptical analysis of conspiracy theories about September 11, 2001.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
Science and its enemies
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2016
Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
- Panoply of the Absurd
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2006
Conspiracy theorists are filling bestsellers with their supposed evidence about September 11.
- Post 9/11 Conspiracism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2006
The tendency to explain all major world events as primarily the product of a secret conspiracy is called conspiracism. The antidote to conspiracism is Power Structure Research.
- Postmodern Disrobed
Review of Intellectual Impostures
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1998
An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
- Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
Resource Type: Book
- Rationality/Science
Resource Type: Article
Published: 1995
Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
- Science for Peace Opposes Cancellation of the Long-Form Census
Sources News Release
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2010
The decision to cancel the long-form census represents an attack on evidence-based research and is undemocratic. Science for Peace urges the government to reverse the decision.
- Screw Loose Change Video
Resource Type: Website
This is a counter-video of the famous "Loose Change 2nd Edition". Using their own video and words, "Screw Loose Change" debunks the theories and statements made in Loose Change 2nd Edition.
- The September 11 X-Files
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2002
One problem with conspiracy theorizing is that it can distract from the true and (sometimes mundane) misdeeds and mistakes of government.
- Towers of Deception
The Media Cover-Up of 9/11
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2006
- The Truth About the "9/11 Truth Movement"
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2006
A rebuttal of some of the claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
- The Visual Evidence of Quantitive Information
Resource Type: Book
A classic book on statistical charts, graphs, and tables.
- Visual Explanations
Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
Resource Type: Book
About pictures of verbs, the representation of mechanism and motion, process and dynamics, causes and effects, explanation and narrative.
- The Walk and the Kiss
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1973
A book about a sensational murder trial that shook Toronto in the early 1940s. After two hung juries, a third produced a conviction of airforceman Bill Newell, for the murder of his wife on Toronto Island. Publishing originally as This Man Hanged Himself.
- When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2002
Aren't these conspiracy theories too silly to address? That should be the case. But, sadly, they do attract people.
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