Monday, August 27, 2007

Out Standing in his Field?

I've been asked to demonstrate that Dembksi uses terms in nonstandard and equivocating ways.

The first is easily demonstrated. Dembski's key term is "complex specified information" (CSI). This term is never used in the standard literature of information theory. He's had no influence -- none -- on information theory as such. (Just for yucks, I did a search on MathSciNet, the American Mathematical Society database, for CSI. Nothing. For Dembski's name? Just his own publications--TDI, NFL, and two articles from the early 90s, none of which has been cited a single time in the mathematical literature. And on Project Euclid. Nada. ACM digital library? Zip. IEEE Explore? Nope.)

If his usage were standard, someone else in the field would use it. Yet there is no evidence of that. In short, in mathematics, statistics, and information sciences, Dembski's work has sunk without a single ripple. He is utterly ignored in the scientific disciplines to which he claims to make a contribution, and the key term he has contributed, CSI, is used by no other person in mathematics.