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content/post/a-forgery-of-knowledge-yet-another-academic-hoax.md

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 Several years ago, shortly after I first started this blog, I made a decision not to engage in de jour commentary on current events and politics. One reason for that, was that I wanted the blog to be a record of my intellectual growth, and repository of whatever actual insights or knowledge I was able to produce during my formal study of philosophy. I wanted it to be a *record of actual knowledge production*, on my part, however meager and unimpressive that might be, as an amateur and a student.
 
-Today, I’m breaking that pattern in order to have a look at a highly publicized article at Areo[^1], now making the rounds in academic circles, and beginning to surface in public political commentaries (in the predictably cynical forms you might expect). The reason I’m doing this, is because this article touches a deep nerve, for me, even as a layman looking in from the outside.
+Today, I’m breaking that pattern in order to have a look at a highly publicised article at Areo[^1], now making the rounds in academic circles, and beginning to surface in public political commentaries (in the predictably cynical forms you might expect). The reason I’m doing this, is because this article touches a deep nerve, for me, even as a layman looking in from the outside.
 
 Because of my background, and my perspective on life in general, I would love nothing more than to see politically partisan bad actors in academia get their long-deserved comeuppance. That is, admittedly, one of my cognitive biases. It would be painfully easy to publish an article on my blog, pointing and laughing at elitist pinhead intellectuals, and bathe myself in the schadenfreude of their humiliation at the hands of their own colleagues. Indeed, dozens of other bloggers and video commentators are already pumping out the “gotchas”, and giving virtual high-fives to the three academics involved. If I were still doing current event posts, I probably have done the same.
 
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ But I have another confession to make. I also have another bias. This one, is a
 
 ### The Hoax, In Brief
 
-The “hoax” itself is a full-blown expansion of the “Conceptual Penis” project[^2], published in a pay-to-play journal in April of 2017, by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (Boghossian under the pseudonym “Peter Boyle”). It is a team of three this time. Hellen Pluckrose, the editor of the magazine in which the report of this new hoax is an exclusive feature, joined the two. In this instance, they made a nearly year-long project out of studying, emulating, and submitting for publication, academic works in various social fields they’ve labelled with the umbrella term “grievance studies”. The “experiment” would have gone on for longer (two years, by their own reckoning), but NewRealPeerReviews initiated their outing, in August of this year.
+The “hoax” itself is a full-blown expansion of the “Conceptual Penis” project[^2], published in a pay-to-play journal in April of 2017, by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (Boghossian under the pseudonym “Peter Boyle”). It is a team of three this time. Helen Pluckrose, the editor of the magazine in which the report of this new hoax is an exclusive feature, joined the two. In this instance, they made a nearly year-long project out of studying, emulating, and submitting for publication, academic works in various social fields they’ve labelled with the umbrella term “grievance studies”. The “experiment” would have gone on for longer (two years, by their own reckoning), but NewRealPeerReviews initiated their outing, in August of this year.
 
 The team claims that their motivation for this project derived from the following assertions:
 
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ So, they became grievance studies scholars, in effect. But, under a ruse. Again,
 
 > Second, we amassed what appears to be significant evidence and sufficient expertise to state that we were correct in claiming there is a problem with bias in fields influenced by critical constructivist approaches and assumptions.
 
-Why, yes. There is a bias. That bias is to apply a critical constructivist standard of evidence, and to work from critical constructivist assumptions when doing research. Did we need the hoax to point this out? Indeed, every academic discipline has a bias toward it’s particular approach to evidence, knowledge, and truth. The discipline of history has a very different standard from economics, and the discipline of biology has a slightly different standard than archeology, to offer two examples. So, it’s not clear to me why a bias, as such, is something we need to worry about. Again, it would be great to have a debate about critical constructivism, it’s assumptions, it’s approaches to evidence and knowledge, and why it is lacking. But again, that’s not what was done here. All they did was point and accuse.
+Why, yes. There is a bias. That bias is to apply a critical constructivist standard of evidence, and to work from critical constructivist assumptions when doing research. Did we need the hoax to point this out? Indeed, every academic discipline has a bias toward it’s particular approach to evidence, knowledge, and truth. The discipline of history has a very different standard from economics, and the discipline of biology has a slightly different standard than archaeology, to offer two examples. So, it’s not clear to me why a bias, as such, is something we need to worry about. Again, it would be great to have a debate about critical constructivism, it’s assumptions, it’s approaches to evidence and knowledge, and why it is lacking. But again, that’s not what was done here. All they did was point and accuse.
 
 ### Conclusions
 
@@ -72,11 +72,11 @@ The authors of this hoax have engaged in precisely the kind of disingenuous scho
 
 It will be objected, I am sure, that what Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are doing is trying to rid the journals of pollution, by exposing low standards. But as they admit in the article, they could not get published just by assembling buzzword straw-man examples of the scholarship they wished to lampoon. Instead, they admit, they actually had to *engage* with the literature on its own terms, understand the claims and arguments being made, and *emulate them* in their own published papers. But isn’t this precisely how the academic method is supposed to work? Bearing this in mind, all we can say, is that the three have simply learned how to do work in “grievance studies”, and then did some.
 
-As philosophers all trained in the methods of philosophy, any one of them should have been able to take any piece of scholarship they studied in order to engage in this “experiment”, and tear it to shreds honestly, and *on its own terms*. THAT is what getting rid of the pollution looks like: not by repeating the same errors, but by correcting the existing ones. This is how Descartes and Hume overturned the “schoolmen”, this is how Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper overturned Logical Positivism, and this is how these three could have up-ended the fallacious nonsense of “feminist” philosophy.
+As philosophers all trained in the methods of philosophy, any one of them should have been able to take any piece of scholarship they studied in order to engage in this “experiment”, and tear it to shreds honestly, and *on its own terms*. THAT is what getting rid of the pollution looks like: not by repeating the same errors, but by correcting the existing ones. This is how Descartes and Hume overturned the “school-men”, this is how Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper overturned Logical Positivism, and this is how these three could have up-ended the fallacious nonsense of “feminist” philosophy.
 
 They didn’t do that. Instead, they spent a year engaging in “pwnage” for its own sake. That’s not going to fix anything. It’s just going to make doing real criticism even more difficult. Why? Because, as with the Sokal affair, its further driving the disciplines into their own little walled-gardens of special language, and diverging standards of truth and knowledge, out of self-defense against maneuvers like this one. The whole point of the “university” (it’s built into the name, you see), is to UNIFY our understanding of the world. That requires periods of divergence and convergence. Often, those periods of divergence are littered with loads of incorrect nonsense. That’s OK, because you have to fail in order to succeed, and you succeed by *honestly arguing out the nonsense*. When correction turns into pillory, or worse — disingenuous mockery, the mission of the university is dead.
 
-This is not to say that there are not bad actors in the disciplines they were criticizing. I believe there are, and I believe they do have political ends that go far beyond the scope of what a university’s mission should be, and I believe their actions — engaging in political activism via disingenuous scholarship — is incredibly dangerous and damaging to society. But this is a different question, and requires a different kind of criticism than what went on here. What we need, is another Allan Bloom. Not another Alan Sokal.
+This is not to say that there are not bad actors in the disciplines they were criticising. I believe there are, and I believe they do have political ends that go far beyond the scope of what a university’s mission should be, and I believe their actions — engaging in political activism via disingenuous scholarship — is incredibly dangerous and damaging to society. But this is a different question, and requires a different kind of criticism than what went on here. What we need, is another Allan Bloom. Not another Alan Sokal.
 
 ```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 29 November 2021]```