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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The paper is indebted to the great books that have been published about ignorance in science and medicine, from the classics Impure Science by Steven Epstein and Agnotology by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, to the recent banger Pilules Roses by @ferrydanini.bsky.social

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It contains a clean version of this picture of a protest organised by #MECFSkinder in Berlin last year, in front of the Federal Ministry of Research. You can find out more about them here: www.mein-kind-kann-nicht-mehr.de (in German)

Photo of body bags laid out on the street in rows, with each of them having a name printed on it and a blue rose (the symbol by which people with ME honour their dead) deposited on top

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The second is the perhaps even more stigmatised fact of vaccine injuries. Vaccines are very safe and have played an essential role in massively reducing acute deaths from COVID, but in rare cases, they can trigger or worsen ME. Our community includes several pro-vax but vax-injured people.

Anti-vaxxers should not be confused with pro-vax but vaccine-injured
people. Although generally safe and effective, vaccines can in rare cases
cause a condition which bears striking resemblance to IACCs such as ME and
Long COVID (Bhattacharjee et al., 2025). Known ME triggers include a variety
of immune insults, including (viral, bacterial, and parasitic) infections, but also
physical traumas such as surgery and car accidents (Salit, 1997). This suggests
that any acute activation of the immune system, including vaccination, could
potentially trigger ME. Like almost every aspect of ME, this requires more
research.

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I am also proud to have included discussions of two especially controversialised aspects of ME, an already controversialised disease. The first is the impact of mould on disease, which is thoroughly stigmatised, especially in left-wing and liberal circles:

For example, some people with ME have noticed that their condition improves with mould avoidance, and reported back to institutional researchers so they might study this aspect of the disease:

I discussed mine and other patients' direct observations about how
toxigenic mold exposure impacts our conditions with patient-
researchers interested in the subject. In particular we’ve discussed
impacts of mold toxicity on PEM, immune dysfunction, and mitochondrial dysfunction in the setting of ME. We then prepared a
document to present to ME researcher Rob Phair, answering his
questions about how I experience PEM and how mold exposure, and
not just exertion, impacts it. I hope to continue formalizing patient
knowledge about mold toxicity so that it can be accurately and
proportionately represented in the scientific literature about ME, and
be investigated as a relevant and significant facet of and contributor
to the disease. (Lara Goxhaj)

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Why do people with ME claim to know more about the medical aspects of their disease than their doctors? Because the mechanisms that usually ensure doctors' knowledge fail in the case of ME, and sick people have created mechanisms of knowledge production and dissemination to pick up the slack.

Screenshot of the header of a published paper:

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Patient's knowledge, doctor's ignorance: The production of knowledge about myalgic encephalomyelitis

Chloé de Canson

Department of of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, Oude Boteringestraat 52, Groningen, 9712 GL, the Netherlands

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Kathleen Stock rehashing the old myth that ME is deconditioning just days after the publication in a Nature journal of a major study showing that mobile people with ME have muscle abnormalities that even people on strict 60-day bedrest don't www.nature.com/articles/s41...

These feelings may be frightening; but they also make you different, special, excused from the pressures of life, pleasingly fussed over by strangers. And if a person then spends a lot of time sitting or lying down, she will naturally become unfit, so that the next time she stands up or walks any distance she will feel even worse; and the cycle of confused self-interpretation will continue.

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

What it feels like trying to do history of philosophy

Blurred photo of Obama on the left which reads “original”, and non blurred photo of a generic white guy on the right which reads “result”. The implication is that some computer programme has “recovered” or “unblurred” the photo of Obama, but they have clearly missed the point

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Many Long COVID scientists fail to meaningfully draw on the insights of patient-researchers. In our Comment for @thelancetinfdis.bsky.social, we propose a solution: make all Long COVID papers undergo pre-publication patient review. 1/

THE LANCET
Infectious Diseases
COMMENT • Online first, March 31, 2026
The case for routine patient review in long COVID research
Letícia Soares . CH Romatowski . Gina Assaf . Chloé de Canson

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Charles S. Peirce on William James: “he so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract, a very snarl of twine”

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Alice James’s diary entries on the suicides of random people

A man has committed suicide in St. Paul's which I allow is inexcusably sloppy of him but it has caused a delicious fuss and fluster among the shovel hats. The Cathedral will have to be re-consecrated, they fear, but perhaps they may be able with their highly developed muscles of evasion to wash out the stain of blood by an "Act of Reconciliation!" I can never accustom

January 21st
How picturesque and instructive of the Duke of Bedford33 to commit suicide at this moment of frozen misery, showing his destitution, before the affluence of the slums, of that apparently inextinguishable animal appetite for simple respiration, without which all power and splendour are inoperative against the canker of weariness. It makes it a more perfect whole, that,

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Even after her death, Henry maintained his vicious assessment of her illness as something she imposed on herself, unconsciously, for what current ME psychologisers have called (alleged) “secondary gains”, and what he called “her only solution to the practical problem of life”

a strange, living richness. But it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime—that the extraordinary' intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a "well" person—in the usual world-almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life-as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Shortly before her death, she wrote to her other brother William James: “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born … I have always had a significance for myself”

You must also remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied; so when I am gone, pray don't think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

It’s an honour to have joined the @patientled.bsky.social as a contributor. The PLRC published the first study on long COVID, establishing the phenotypic characteristics of the disease doi.org/10.1016/j.ec..., and the most cited paper on LC, outlining its biomedical features doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Charles S. Peirce and Simone Weil

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Ramsey coming up with his mature theory of induction in the middle of a talk

The other possible account has only just occurred to me, and as I am tired I cannot see clearly if it is sensible or absurd. Roughly it is that a type of inference is reasonable or unreasonable according to the relative frequencies with which it leads to truth and falsehood. Induction is reasonable because it produces predictions which are generally verified, not because of any logical relation between its premiss and conclusion. On this view we should establish by induction that induction was reasonable, and induction being reasonable this would be a reasonable argument.

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

This entails that Bayesians, like Colin Howson, who think that conditionalisation can constitute a solution to the problem of induction, are wrong. This is a shame because the approach to the problem of induction these Bayesians take is very interesting

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

A number of highly anticipated Long COVID trials have recently reported negative results: see their phenotypic eligibility criteria and the outcome measures used in the table below. (2/12)

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Many Long COVID trials have reported negative results in 2024 and 2025. In our Comment for @thelancetinfdis.bsky.social we argue that inadequate outcome measures might have played a role. (1/12)

THE LANCET
Infectious Diseases
COMMENT • Online first, November 07, 2025
Negative results in long COVID clinical trials: choosing outcome measures for a heterogeneous disease
Lara Goxhaj • Lisa McCorkell • Femke van Rhijn-Brouwer . Letícia Soares . Julia Moore Vogel . Chloé de Canson

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Chloé de Canson @chloedecanson.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Peirce’s not-at-all dramatic take on subjective interpretations of probability

8 "Nobody can go further than I in condemnation of this way of using probability, which completely vitiates the theory and practice of Inductive and Abductive reasoning, has set back civilization, and has corrupted ideals" (CP 2.101, 1902).

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