Dr. Ravetz, captured
“Dr. Jerry Ravetz – on Willis, epidemics, rough & tumble debate, and post normal science“. Dr. Ravetz returns to the politics of Anthony Watts’ blog, but after some self-referential meanderings only manages to stick his other foot in his mouth while trying to ingratiate himself into the denialist good books by making an unsupportable reference to the “corrupted science of the CRU“.
Dr. Ravetz, please keep you mouth shut unless you know what you’re talking about! Better to be thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it.
Wott's Up With That? 
Honestly, what I’ve read reminds of post-modernist thought. It’s all deconstruction and viewing knowledge as a by-product of political interest.
By sticking the word “post” in front of a word they are hoping to sound all learn’ed.
Epistemological relativism?
From the denial movement? Who’d of thunk of that?
Here’s some background on our friend, he claims to be a “philosopher at large”:
http://www.jerryravetz.co.uk/index.html
How he describes himself:
“Jerry Ravetz is an independent scholar who works on problems of uncertainty and policy-critical ignorance in contemporary science, with a focus on quantification, its uses and its abuses. With S.O. Funtowicz, he developed a notational system, “NUSAP”, for the representation of uncertainty in quantitative information…”
http://postnormaltimes.net/wpblog/?page_id=2
He *claims* to be a “Visiting Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science & Civilization at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, England…”
Here is a list of people on their site:
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/insis/people/Pages/default.aspx#R
Here is the James Martin School. I’ve searched the site, here is the list of their people: http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/about/people.cfm
Again he is NOT there.
There are some scattered references to to a Dr Jerome Ravetz:
http://www.bep.ox.ac.uk/our_people/mark_sheehan/mark-collaborations
Did someone just have soem conversations with him?
BBC Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8388485.stm
Dr Jerome Ravetz is an independent scholar affiliated to the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at Oxford University
So what is his association? Methinks someone should be asking Oxford, as he is playing up his association!
Lost post I promise! I think I’ve got him, have contacted the school. As best I can tell he *may* have been there briefly in 2004-05.
Typical denialist tactic: inflate the credentials of your “experts”. I’ll report here and on my blog.
Also,really do love this site.