Carleas wrote:Well, we have Mundane Babble and Rant House for acknowledged nonsense, i.e. things that aren't intended as any sort of philosophical sense, or aren't expressed for their sense but for expression's sake (some rants make points, but they're designed to vent). The problem with going farther than that is that calling something "nonsense" is too value-laden for a website where an analysis of "sense" makes sense.
Well you can call it whatever you like, conspiracy, imaginative paranoia, self induced hysteria involving circular affirmation by people who live in their basement have metal walls and wear tinfoil hats, the search for the "truth".
Science boards are all well and good, for what they are, but a lot of science glosses over problems that are central to philosophy. They can call things 'nonsense' because there is a scientific establishment that defines sense and nonsense within the scope of science; they take certain things for granted, and anything that is contrary to those things is nonsense. But topics here are ostensibly philosophy, so they aren't bound by that establishment even when they are commenting on it. Furthermore, there is no philosophy establishment to which one can appeal.
The weakness and the strength of philosophy is that you can't take much for granted (at least not for long). And making a 'Nonsense' forum, or even a 'Conspiracy Theories' forum that would divide, e.g., between the accepted and the fringe accounts of 9/11, is taking too much for granted.
Indeed, scientists are an academic amorphous organisation, although they behave like a bag of cats, the consensus being what they appeal to. In philosophy a resort to authority or consensus is considered a potential fallacy, in science it is good form. Gaining consensus like there is in say a theory of evolution or 100% agreement is almost impossible though and if I can use the analogy of cats again: it's like herding cats, as the AGW issue shows and the ToE (Theory of Everything) in physics or GUT. In science though nothing gets you more noticed than overturning prevailing wisdom, in fact assassination of the mainstream is derrigeur even amongst the mainstream. Cats have sharp claws, and a very competitive nature.
