Tom

I do not see anything here to disagree with - except perhaps to say that
human
beings deal badly with probability and have a well trained socially
constructed
desire for truth to be absolute. When scientists and scientific
commentators
stop shielding the non-scientific public from uncertainty and
probability then
we may get somewhere. 'End infantialism now'

People don't need reassurance, truth or lies, they need information and
the
chance and ability to make up their own minds. economic justification
for
science seems an extremely poor justification.

regards

sdv

Tom Hoover wrote:

>  without undulating like a snake...
> >
> > However - The lie exists in the continuing statements that a) GM foods are
> safe
> > - rather than the true statement that 'we do not know if they are safe but
> they
> > probably are' -
>
> This falls under the category of opinion and not true statement in the sense
> of true knowledge.
> Another *true* statement would read rather something  more like, 'We do not
> know if they are safe, some may be and some may not be,' with of course the
> proviso being safe for what or whom, the profits of the GMers, environments,
> human body systems, and maybe a lot more other provisos.
> But perhaps the truest statement would just simply have a period where the
> first comma is..., thus:   We do not know if they are safe.
> We have only hypothetical suppositions and opinions, which may end up being
> right or wrong nad certainly no conclusive repeatable experiments on the
> hypotheses, as I understand it.  We have only experiments skewed for certain
> socioeconomic and political ends.
>
> and of course we are back to the original philosophical question:   what is
> truth?
>
> We have that  study that attempts to show that Kepler could not have made
> many of the observations that led to his elliptical theory.   Such an
> observation seems somewhat relevant to the present question.