The two-part article by Brian Martin contains two main points. The first is his argument of Conspiracy Theory Attribution (CTA) as a method of denigration, which I have little to disagree with. The second is the example given of the… Read More ›
In “Bad Social Science,” (2019) I pointed to the phenomenon of non-specialists in the social science domain making claims that fall very far short of what social scientists consider best practice. I identified “several facets of bad social science: ad… Read More ›
Author Information: Alan Sokal, New York University, sokal@nyu.edu. Sokal, Alan. “A Dialogue on a Paradigm Case of Bad Science: Comment on Brian Martin.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 36-47. The pdf of the article gives… Read More ›
Author Information: Susan Dieleman, University of Southern Illinois, Edwardsville, sdielem@siue.edu. Dieleman, Susan. “Against Ideal Theory Ignorance.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9, no. 5 (2019): 11-15. The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-48M Daniel… Read More ›
The career of Li Zehou has been shaped by its, at times, fortunate timing. He was able to establish his reputation as one of China’s leading philosophers during a time, after the death of Mao Zedong, when thinkers were allowed… Read More ›
It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their article, ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’ (2019), Holmwood… Read More ›
I am a year 12 high school student from Sydney, Australia. For one of my subjects, ‘Society and Culture’, I am currently completing a large scale major work, called a ‘Personal Interest Project’. For this project I have decided to… Read More ›
A little while ago, historian of science Nathaniel Comfort wrote a piece for Nature in which he gives an overview of historically shifting senses of identity—both human and personal—that have accompanied changes in scientific understanding of human biology. He argues… Read More ›
In “A Rational Reconstruction of the L’Aquila Case: How Non-denial Turns into Acceptance,” Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (2019) revisits the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, linking public dismissal of seismic risk to scientists’ failure to explicitly reject politicians’ misstatements. This analysis stems from… Read More ›
Gameplay is an intensive process that happens under the circumstances of exchange between a player on one hand, and the physical and virtual elements that structure a game on the other. At their core, games are ludic infrastructures that come… Read More ›
This year-end reflection will return to the state of social epistemology and how it might go forward in light of the post-truth condition. Its point of departure is threefold. First is the recent assessment made by our field’s ‘honest broker’,… Read More ›
The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence… Read More ›
Imagine receiving an invitation to be an author of a paper, intended for publication in a leading journal. The paper has several authors; you are listed as second author. Along with the invitation comes a copy of the completed paper,… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›
