Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
93
result(s) for
"McIntyre, Lee C"
Sort by:
Post-truth
How we arrived in a post-truth era, when \"alternative facts\" replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.Are we living in a post-truth world, where \"alternative facts\" replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of \"fake news,\" from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into \"information silos.\"What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples-claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote-and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism-specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth-in its attacks on science and facts.McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.
eBook
How to talk to a science denier : conversations with flat Earthers, climate deniers, and others who defy reason
\"In How to Talk to a Science Denier, Lee McIntyre tells the story of his own adventures in talking face to face with science deniers and their victims-including a Flat Earth convention in Denver, coal miners in rural Pennsylvania, and fishermen in the Maldives-and what he learned from the experience\"-- Provided by publisher.
Liars know they are lying: differentiating disinformation from disagreement
Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some scholars have questioned the utility of misinformation research altogether, arguing that misinformation is not sufficiently identifiable or widespread to warrant much concern or action. Here, we rebut these claims. We contend that the spread of misinformation—and in particular willful disinformation—is demonstrably harmful to public health, evidence-informed policymaking, and democratic processes. We also show that disinformation and outright lies can often be identified and differ from good-faith political contestation. We conclude by showing how misinformation and disinformation can be at least partially mitigated using a variety of empirically validated, rights-preserving methods that do not involve censorship.
Journal Article
A companion to public philosophy
The first anthology devoted to the theory and practice of all forms of public philosophy
A Companion to Public Philosophy brings together in a single volume the diverse practices, modalities, and perspectives of this rapidly growing field. Forty-two chapters written by established practitioners and newer voices alike consider questions ranging from the definition of public philosophy to the value of public philosophy to both society and philosophy itself. Throughout the book, philosophers offer insights into the different publics they have engaged, the topics they have explored, the methods they have used and the lessons they have learned from these engagements.
The Companion explores important philosophical issues concerning the practice of philosophy in the public sphere, how public philosophy relates to advocacy, philosophical collaborations with political activists, locations where public philosophy can be done, and more. Many essays highlight underserved topics such as effective altruism, fat activism, trans activism, indigenous traditions, and Africana philosophy, while other essays set the stage for rigorous debates about the boundaries of public philosophy and its value as a legitimate way to do philosophy.
* Discusses the range of approaches that professional philosophers can use to engage with non-academic audiences
* Explores the history and impact of public philosophy from the time of Socrates to the modern era
* Highlights the work of public philosophers concerning issues of equity, social justice, environmentalism, and medical ethics
* Covers the modalities used by contemporary public philosophers, including film and television, podcasting, internet memes, and community-engaged teaching
* Includes essays by those who bring philosophy to corporations, government policy, consulting, American prisons, and activist groups across the political spectrum
A Companion to Public Philosophy is essential reading for philosophers from all walks of life who are invested in and curious about the ways that philosophy can impact the public and how the public can impact philosophy. It is also an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the theory and practice of public philosophy as well as broader courses on philosophy, normative ethics, and comparative and world philosophy.
eBook
Dark ages : the case for a science of human behavior
Why the prejudice against adopting a scientific attitude in the social sciences is creating a new 'Dark Ages' and preventing us from solving the perennial problems of crime, war, and poverty.During the Dark Ages, the progress of Western civilization virtually stopped. The knowledge gained by the scholars of the classical age was lost; for nearly 600 years, life was governed by superstitions and fears fueled by ignorance. In this outspoken and forthright book, Lee McIntyre argues that today we are in a new Dark Age-that we are as ignorant of the causes of human behavior as people centuries ago were of the causes of such natural phenomena as disease, famine, and eclipses. We are no further along in our understanding of what causes war, crime, and poverty-and how to end them-than our ancestors. We need, McIntyre says, another scientific revolution; we need the courage to apply a more rigorous methodology to human behavior, to go where the empirical evidence leads us-even if it threatens our cherished religious or political beliefs about human autonomy, race, class, and gender. Resistance to knowledge has always arisen against scientific advance. Today's academics-economists, psychologists, philosophers, and others in the social sciences-stand in the way of a science of human behavior just as clerics attempted to block the Copernican revolution in the 1600s. A scientific approach to social science would test hypotheses against the evidence rather than find and use evidence only to affirm a particular theory, as is often the practice in today's social sciences. Drawing lessons from Galileo's conflict with the Catholic church and current debates over the teaching of \"creation science,\" McIntyre argues that what we need most to establish a science of human behavior is the scientific attitude-the willingness to hear what the evidence tells us even if it clashes with religious or political pieties-and the resolve to apply our findings to the creation of a better society.
eBook
Redescription and Descriptivism in the Social Sciences
In its quest to become more scientific, many have held that social science should more closely emulate the methodology of natural science. This has proven difficult and has led some to assert the impossibility of a science of human behavior. I maintain, however, that many critics of empirical social science have misunderstood the foundation for the success of the natural sciences, which is not that they have discovered the \"true vocabulary of nature,\" but—on the contrary—that they have realized the benefits of flexibility in \"redescribing\" familiar phenomena in alternative ways, in the pursuit of scientific explanations. In this paper I argue that this same path is open to the social sciences and that its pursuit would facilitate the prospects for the scientific study of human behavior.
Journal Article
Reduction, Supervenience, and the Autonomy of Social Scientific Laws
Many have felt that it is impossible to defend autonomous laws of social science: where the regularities upheld are law-like it is argued that they are not at base social scientific, and where the phenomena to be explained would seem to require social descriptions, it is argued that laws governing the phenomena are unavailable at that level. But is it possible to develop an ontology that supports the dependence of the social on the physical, while nonetheless supporting the explanatory power of genuinely autonomous social scientific laws? The aim of this paper is to show that reductive explanation is not a requirement of a 'naturalist' ontology, thereby defending an account of supervenience as a suitable framework within which to recognize a metaphysical relationship between the natural and the social that is consistent with the pursuit of autonomous nomological social scientific explanations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article