About this site

Grain of Salt is an independent reference on skeptical thinking: how a claim is examined, what counts as evidence, and how reasoning goes wrong.

Plainly stated

This site sits at a web address a different publication used years ago. Grain of Salt is not that publication, is not written by or connected to its author or to any previous owner of this domain, and makes no claim of continuity with either. No former brand name is used here.

What this site does

It explains the method. Each page defines one instrument, shows it working on an example, says where the same move is not a fault, and ends with a test you can run yourself. The pages are written to be read one at a time by someone who has just been handed a claim.

What this site does not do

It does not settle contested public questions, and four subjects are out of bounds on purpose: party politics and elections, religion, medical and treatment claims, and climate policy. A site that teaches how to test claims loses the plot the moment it starts ruling on them. It also names no living person as an example of poor reasoning, so every example here is invented, historical, or drawn from published research.

How the pages are made

Every page is written for this site. Where a real study or a real person belongs in the account, such as Karl Popper on falsifiability, Bertram Forer on the personality sketch, or Abraham Wald on the returning aircraft, they are named and described as accurately as the record allows. No quotation, statistic or date is invented. Where a figure is not certain, the direction is described in words instead. Every illustration is drawn here rather than photographed, for the same reason the examples are invented: a photograph of the object a claim arrives inside is somebody else's printed page.