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 ›
“And so I said to them, why don’t we just call it education?” This statement, delivered with an exasperated laugh and the tiniest of smirks, came from a former colleague who had recently returned from an interdisciplinary conference. He was… Read More ›
David Coady (2019), in his contribution to this issue, joins a small but growing number of people expressing misgivings about the current hype surrounding fake news, alternative facts, and other post-truthy phenomena in society and academia (cf. also Habgood-Coote 2019)…. Read More ›
The neoliberalisation of Higher Education has led to the creation of a landscape where students are increasingly perceived by both university administration and themselves as consumers of a product, while metrics are sought to quantify teaching quality in the form… Read More ›
On 25 September 2019, Steve Fuller gave a Codex Talk at the Royal Society of London, commemorating the ‘world’s top 50 innovators’ on the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci authored the ‘Codex’ in question,… Read More ›
The intense “audit culture” and digitally enhanced monitoring of faculty’s production resembles the “pre-neoliberal” or “feudal university” as much as the neoliberal university (Cruickshank 2019). Is higher education no different from other institutions plagued by the neoliberal regime of economizing… Read More ›
The recent special issue of Social Epistemology (33.4, 2019) and the ongoing debates in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) point to many of the challenges faced by universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination situated both… Read More ›
The stress occasioned by constant demands for academics to submit to evaluation has been well documented (Loveday 2018, https://bit.ly/316NfXU; Morrish 2019, https://bit.ly/2XQD8Jr), nevertheless the bureaucratic appetite for surveillance is fed by the ease of accessing quantifiable data. This post looks… Read More ›
Conspiratorial ideation—as I will call the disposition to be accepting of unwarranted conspiracy theories—is widely regarded as a product of irrationality or epistemic vice. I argue that it is not: the dispositions that underlie it are not rationally criticisable. Some… Read More ›
Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Gaining understanding, then, requires some amount of inquiry. Much of our inquiries… Read More ›
There is a growing body of literature, both popular and academic—including Alfano and Klein and Meyer’s contributions to this special issue—that holds that the world (or at least the Western World) is facing a new and growing problem that goes… Read More ›
