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 ›
When I reread Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought (published in Chinese in 1980), I am struck by three things: (1) How much more we know about early China now, in 2020, than we knew forty years ago,… Read More ›
In “Fake News, Conspiracy, and Intellectual Vice” Marco Meyer (2019) presents findings from an investigation of the role of intellectual vices—intellectual arrogance, intellectual vanity, boredom, and intellectual fragility—in the uptake of conspiracy theories and fake news. Using online survey tools,… Read More ›
In “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” (Levy 2019) I argued that conspiratorial ideation—defined as the acceptance (not the generation) of conspiracy theories—might be much more rational than we tend to think. I suggested such ideation might be subjectively rational—rational for the… Read More ›
Neil Levy (2019) provides several new angles on the long-standing question about the rationality, or lack thereof, of people who accept objectively unwarranted conspiracy theories. Levy’s position rests on two arguments. First, accepting conspiracy theories is subjectively rational for many… Read More ›
As I commit my thoughts to ink on paper, I hear a fly buzzing around my ear. The fly happened to fly from a workshop about relativism, and its varieties, as it occurs in today’s society. Needless to say, I… Read More ›
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
This response builds on some of the issues that Jason Tyndal raises in ‘Public Reason Liberalism and the Certification of Scientific Claims’ (2019b), itself a reply to my paper ‘What Facts Should be Treated as ‘Fixed’ in Public Justification?’ (Reid… Read More ›
After the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani near Iraq’s international airport, many pundits have suggested that a dead Soleimani is more dangerous for US hegemony in the region, than a living Soleimani. Why? Below I highlight the political theology of… Read More ›
Scientism is defined by those who reject it as a brace of theses: 1. The unwarranted confidence in the methods of science as the only way to secure knowledge; 2. The unwarranted acceptance of the implications of contemporary natural science… Read More ›
Richard Healey makes four useful comments on my paper (2019a) where I criticized Bas van Fraassen’s positions. The four comments concern the issues of whether ‘disbelief’ is appropriate or inappropriate to characterize van Fraassen’s position, what the relationship between a… Read More ›
