At Crooked Timber, a post regarding the Britsh Royal Society’s letter to Exxon pointing out that 39 of the organizations in their “Giving Report” have websites which make claims about global warming which are clearly out of sync with the current scientific consensus.

The comments (which are often worth reading at Crooked Timber), begin with a lovely attack on the use of the word ‘science’ to mean anything other than the sort of technolust because-we-canism embodied by the very Exxon of which we speak. Defence of the ‘pure’ meaning of the word ensues. I added this (with many single and double qoutes):

‘Science’ is one of those words like ‘love’ ‘ecology’ or ‘anarchism’. It has taken on mutiple meanings in use, which is what counts for words. Unlike love and like ecology and anarchism, individual folks often strongly believe they mean one thing or another, but won’t accept that they have come to mean both or all.

‘Science’ as John Quiggin was using it in this article probably does mean something like “understanding of physical phenomeon through observation”, but it’s striking that in this case it’s the British Royal Society who are championing it. I don’t know much about the BRS, but I do think that Victorian-era attitudes to the cultural centrality of the “scientific endeavor”, which presumably gave birth to the Society, were as much as anything responsible for conflating ideas of ‘science’, ‘progress’, ‘technology’ and ‘enterprise’.

Now ‘truth’, roy belmont, there’s a word that can really get you into the deep end.

Just for the record, I think that science means what I think it means, which is the usual “observation of physical phenomenon” thing. I’m just not sure exactly what that means.