Author Archives

• The Context of the Current Conflict Between Iran and the US, Sam Arman

  By SERRC on March 11, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  Iran and the US have charted two divergent and hostile paths over the last 30 years. Under Reagan and the successive US presidents, Saddam Hussein, firstly, and then the neighbouring countries in the region were armed to the teeth …… Read More ›

• Review of Pankaj Sekhsaria’s Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory, Vivek Kant

  By SERRC on March 5, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  Pankaj Sekhsaria’s Instrumental Lives: An Intimate Biography of an Indian Laboratory presents an important study at the intersection of contemporary issues in Science and Technology Studies (STS), instrumentation and knowledge, and Indian Science and Technology (S&T) practice. The book provides… Read More ›

• CFP: Weak Scientism and the Future of Philosophy

  By SERRC on March 3, 2020 • ( 0 )

  CFP: Weak Scientism and the Future of Philosophy Topic areas Metaphilosophy General Philosophy of Science Philosophy of Science, Miscellaneous Details The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) invites contributions to a dialogue on Weak Scientism, which will then serve… Read More ›

• Weak Scientism and Triviality: A Response to Moti Mizrahi, Matthew Damore

  By SERRC on March 2, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  The crux of Mizrahi’s essay is the thesis that scientific knowledge is the best kind of knowledge. It is quantitatively the best because of the sheer volume of its published research (output) and citations (impact), as compared to other non-scientific… Read More ›

• Dismissive Incomprehension Revisited: Testimonial Injustice, Saving Face, and Silence, Matthew Cull

  By SERRC on February 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  Manuel Padilla Cruz has written an excellent response piece (Padilla Cruz 2019) to my initial article (Cull 2019) on dismissive incomprehension, where he raises a number of interesting issues and has put forward a number of excellent ideas for avenues for… Read More ›

• Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 3, Michael Nylan

  By SERRC on February 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  One of the best things about reading this particular masterwork of Li Zehou—several of his writings have secured that status—is Li’s steadfast refusal to ignore the material basis for realities in the remote past. Li’s history may be the perfect… Read More ›

• Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 2, Michael Nylan

  By SERRC on February 24, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  The historian in me surveys the academic fads of the last forty years in her field, including the overblown and rather dubious celebrations of cultural memory and cultural representation. Come and gone is the craze for the digital humanities (merrily… Read More ›

• Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 1, Michael Nylan

  By SERRC on February 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  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 ›

• Intellectual Vice and Social Networks? Cailin O’Connor

  By SERRC on February 19, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  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 ›

• When Is it Right to be Wrong? A Response to Lewandowsky, Kozyreva, and Ladyman, Neil Levy

  By SERRC on February 17, 2020 • ( 0 )

  

  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 ›