Kickoff of the Cognitist Movement

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This is an attempt to develop a new model of open "scientific' communication - to replace the presently failing science peer-review-copyright-journal system of reporting research and ideas. See the current climate change debate for a classic example of that failure. That started this.

This aims to be a forum for half-baked ideas about the real world. All the best and most popular ideas started somewhere, half-baked. So, we may as well get systematic about it. With luck, here the baking can go the rest of the way. Then said bit of inspiration can be tasted and either go towards immortality or into the rubbish bin.


This lot also aims to try to set a general human philosophic head-shift going, from the silly certainties implicit in "science" which claims "I know" to "cognience," which in contrast is a bit more modest, and merely says "I think."

If interested, this is your invitation to join. You start as a guest. If you get into being insulting and impolite with no redeeming wit attached, you do not get further. And you soon stop being a guest. Also if, in the utterly undemocratic view of me, you are not contributing anything useful, that's it also.

When people claim that what they are saying is scientific, or based on science, or is science, what they are claiming is that what they are saying is true. When you are guessing about reality in some new way, you cannot know that what you are saying is "true". You can in fact never know, as something may come up, long after you kick the bucket, that clearly shows you were wrong. Others may find what you claim to be useful or interesting, but that is it.

So the oft-repeated recent claim, (coming far more often from journalists and politician than from scientists) that, on the matter of climate change "the science is settled" is an amusing contradiction in terms. The science is never settled. It would not be science if it was. It may be that "the religious dogma on climate change is settled" but even that claim is dubious. Religious dogma settles in the mud every now and then, as eels do, but like them, the slightest disturbance will sets it flailing off in some unpredictable new direction.

All posts here about real world issues are and will remain in the public domain. If you want to maintain some sort of medieval licence to sue, otherwise known as copyright, in any of it weird shades, we thank you, and you best be on your bicycle. Start your own forum.

Conversely, whoever you are, you are free and very welcome to use anything you find here for whatever purpose you like, private, commercial, political, just plain daft, whatever. If you want to say that something says the exact opposite of what it actually said here, go for it, but you may have your leg pulled if you do.

Enough for now. More to follow. We expect and hope for very slow start to this movement. We are stalking the eel called reality. It is very skittish, as well as very slippery.

Have fun all,

Peter.