ABSTRACT
In Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol,” Scrooge meets Marley’s ghost but cannot believe it is really Marley’s ghost. “Why,” the ghost asks, “do you doubt your senses?” “Because,” Scrooge replies, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You,” he says, addressing the ghost, “may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” This is where we begin – with the fragility of human knowledge, the vul-
nerability of our perceptions, the uncertainty of our methods of validation. And yet, for all that, these days whole dissertations and books are being written based on a very surprising assumption: that there is a deep and widespread consensus on what the facts are. I refer not to just any old facts. I refer to two specific facts: 1) facts estab-
lished by the scientific community, particularly about global warming, and 2) reported facts, or their absence, particularly concerning whether there was a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and whether Iraq in 2003 possessed weapons of mass destruction.
