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About
Omri Ceren is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.
Email: omri@iconindexsymbol.com
Skype: omricerenAIM: iisblog
ICQ: 426677773
gTalk: iisblog@gmail.com
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MSN: iisblog@hotmail.com
Rhetoric of Science Archive
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Lifeworld Colonization Meets Mass Communication, Global Warming Edition
Democratic theory 101: there is a technical sphere and a public sphere, and the two are by design separate and unequal. Where they do come into contact, scientists are charged with providing grist for the deliberative mill via epistemic descriptions of risk pegged to measures of sociological consensus. Legislative bodies and argumentative forums take the [...] -
Scientist Who Doesn’t Understand Judgment Tries To Persuade People To Drink Own Waste, Produces Rhetorical And Psychoanalytic Train Wreck, Comedy Gold
Orange County has just launched a Toilet To Tap water program to reclaim flushed waste, distill it, and return it into the drinking supply after a few years. The scientific side of the debate is a crush: even ignoring the Southern California water crises, the tap water is cleaned until it’s near-bottle quality and certainly [...] -
Severity Bias In Doctor-Patient Relationships Unhelpful To Glib, Non-Rhetorical Medical Ethics
We really don’t have much to say about this beyond the obligatory “this is why it’s important for doctors to have rhetorical and argumentative training.” But it’s about a fallacy that affects judgment in the context of a medical science controversy, ergo: This is a preview of Severity Bias In Doctor-Patient Relationships Unhelpful To Glib, Non-Rhetorical [...] -
Greek Version of Scientific Instrumentalism Was Particularly Instrumentalist
There are at least two ways that science is circumstantially practiced. One is as a heavily mathematical search to understand the basic structure of the universe and what’s in it – what David Deutsche refers to as “revealing and explaining the fabric of reality.” (3) The other is as fairly straightforward instrumentalism – the theory [...] -
It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
We used to call this the naive, self-congratulatory bench-scientist version of science. But we’re becoming inclined to think of it as the Chris Mooney version science: It has fallen to those of us who oppose the direction the country has been heading to simultaneously champion a way of thinking that would have averted so many blunders [...] -
Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings – Medical Studies Edition
Fetishized social scientific methodologies from dissimilar fields are adapted by grant-hungry researchers and applied to unrepresentative samples of 18-21 year olds in large Midwestern universities before being coded by untrained and apathetic work studies – and you’re saying this doesn’t produce robust results? This is a preview of Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings – [...] -
Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
The Burkean pentad has a bad reputation for lending itself to cookie-cutter “this is the agent, this is the scene, etc” pseudo-book reports. But there are at least a couple of interesting ways to do pentadic analysis, one which is to try to emulate Burke by analyzing rhetorical moves from within pentadic ratios. The manipulation [...] -
A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
Anti-cognitivst curmudgeon David Gelernter has a sustained critique of digital AI in Technology Review: I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly [...] -
Bacteria Seem To Be Doing A Lot Of Thinking These Days
Physics is sometimes taken as the “hard problem” for rhetoric of science – if you can find rhetoric in physics, which is ostensibly the least rhetorical of the sciences, then you can find it in the other sciences too. In that sense, bacteria might be the hard problem for scholars of cognition – if bacteria [...] -
Pre-Darwinian Empiricism Read Through Peirce
On one hand, we’re always nervous about the “science doesn’t work the way scientists think it works” narrative – it sounds too much like a setup for the inevitable “also, science is just another narrative” punchline, and is kind of trivial to everyone who’s not a scientist anyway. That said, the recent work on pre-Darwinian [...] -
Particle Physicists Do It Transparently Through The Rumor Mill (Plus: Promote NCA Open Bar Transparency!)
Jim Brown has a little blurb up over at The Blogora about a new Rhetoric and Composition Job Wiki. It’s MLA-centric instead of NCA-centric, but the idea is certainly right – give people a place to post where their schools are in the hiring process, from the initial job posting through offers/rejections until an offer [...]
