Boghossian is no Sokal

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (henceforth B&L) have an article titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies” on Skeptic.com.  The article describes a nonsense paper submitted, and accepted, to the journal Cogent Social Sciences.  The authors consider it an indictment of gender studies and pay-to-publish journals.

This being a Sokal-style hoax, it’s worth recapping some of the strengths and weaknesses of the original Sokal hoax.  First the weaknesses:

  • Sokal’s paper was accepted to The Social Text, which is a journal of only mediocre impact.
  • Peer review isn’t intended to weed out bad faith actors, but to enforce some minimum standard.  The real test is later, when the academic community cites (or ignores) the publication.
  • Sokal only had N=1. Distinguishing between good and bad papers is in general a difficult problem, and one expects that in the perfect balance, some good papers would be rejected, and bad papers accepted.

Now the strengths:

  • The Sokal hoax is immediately compelling to general public, even when people don’t look into the details.  There’s value in bringing the issue to popular attention.
  • When I did look into the details last year, I found the paper’s content to be a damning indictment of the entire field:

    It’s not simply that Sokal liberally salts his article with absurdities, it’s that he quotes plenty of postmodern academics doing the same damn thing.

    Even if Sokal’s paper were rejected, one would have to account for all the nonsense already published and respected within the field.

  • There was a clear way that The Social Text could have avoided being hoaxed, if anywhere in the review process they had asked someone in physics, biology, or math to glance at it.

B&L’s and  attempt at a hoax falls short of Sokal, having worse weaknesses, and missing important strengths.

[Read more…]

How to actually avoid generalizations

“Don’t make assumptions.” “Criticize the idea, not the person.” “Avoid generalizations.”

These are a few common rules about polite conversation. But they are broken so systematically that it raises the question of whether the rules are any good. One may vocally oppose generalizations, and in the next breath make a sweeping generalization of their own.

It seems that when someone else makes assumptions or generalizations, we hate it. But when we ourselves have the opportunity, we suddenly remember that assumptions and generalizations have some redeeming value after all. And when we next hear someone else make a generalization, we again forget what that value was.

I assert that the value of a generalization is quite simple. People like to state opinions, they like to hear opinions, and they like to use them to inform behavior. They also like to consider opinions and even disagree with them. And if the opinion is stronger by way of generalization, then all the better.

The question for me is not why we like generalizations, but why some generalizations turn out so wrong. What is the source of our aversion? And how can we avoid the kind of generalizations that produce such negative reactions?
[Read more…]

I used to think Santa was a myth

I know I said I’m on blogging break, but I still want to do my monthly repost thing.  This is a classic I wrote in 2011.

‘Tis the season for anecdotes…

I didn’t ever take Santa very seriously when I was younger. Or at least, not as far as I can recall. And I thought that no one else took Santa seriously either.

I mean, kids believing in Santa, that’s just something that happens in the movies, right? There are countless movies depicting little kids who believe in Santa Claus. They’ll write letters to Santa. They’ll wait excitedly at the stairs for Santa to come, deliver presents, and eat the cookies and milk. Kids believe in all these elaborate legends and rituals, sometimes even in the face of disbelief from their parents or older kids.

Of course, in these movies, Santa also happens to be real. But Santa isn’t real. So why should I think that belief in Santa be real? For me, belief in Santa was all part of the mythos, along with the elves, reindeer, and red suit. [Read more…]

Made in Criticalland

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2014.  Relevant to my recent review of the Sokal paper.  Note that the blog Scientia Salon is now defunct.

Massimo Pigliucci started a new blog Scientia Salon, which is already bearing fruits.  I enjoyed this essay by Alan Sokal (yes, that Sokal) about academic postmodernists and extreme social constructivists.  In the 80s and 90s there were many such academics claiming that science was entirely based on prejudices.  Interestingly, Sokal claims that they have now backed off from the most extreme views, particularly because they were upset at the way the Bush regime used postmodernism to justify its anti-science policies.

Sokal’s primary citation for this is “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern” by sociologist of science Bruno Latour in 2004.  I thought it was worth a read. [Read more…]

Paper: The Sokal Hoax

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal was unhappy with the tendency in academic postmodernism to dismiss scientific work. So he submitted a bogus paper called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a journal in cultural studies. After it was published, he revealed it as a hoax. And now, it is one of the best known shots fired at academic anti-science.

While the hoax is a good conversation-starter, I would caution against thinking it’s a total slam-dunk. Journals are there to filter out shoddy work, rather than bad faith actors. Secondly, AFAICT Social Text is a journal of mediocre impact. Finally, Sokal himself said that academic postmodernism has now backed off from many of its previous excesses. (Sokal credits the Bush administration, which was more effective at satirizing academic postmodernism than he ever was.)

In any case, this is a paper report. To humorous ends, I will review Sokal’s paper as if it were a serious work.
[Read more…]

My take on burden of proof

While I’m criticizing Austin Cline, I also want to say something about his article on burden of proof in the context of the atheism vs theism debate.  Again, I have nothing against Cline, and in fact he brings up several points that I agree with:

A more accurate label would be a “burden of support” — the key is that a person must support what they are saying. This can involve empirical evidence, logical arguments, and even positive proof.

The “burden of proof” is not something static which one party must always carry; rather, it is something which legitimately shifts during the course of a debate as arguments and counter-arguments are made.

The part I disagree with Cline’s assertion that the (initial) burden of proof “always lies with the person who is making a claim, not the person who is hearing the claim and who may not initially believe it.”

This leaves open the question of who has the initial burden of proof when both people are making claims.  For example, what if the theist claims there is a god, and I claim there is no god?  According to Cline, atheism refers to people who make no claims about gods, and thus atheists don’t have the initial burden of proof.  However, I am part of the subset of atheists who positively claims there are no gods, so where does that leave me?

In my analysis, burden of proof is the answer to three different questions:

  1. Who wins if no further arguments are made?
  2. Who should win if no further arguments are made?
  3. Whose turn is it to advance the argument?

[Read more…]

How to argue

Correct argumentation is obviously a very broad topic, and I cannot hope to present any sort of ultimate guide on it. My goal here is more humble: to present principles that I personally have found useful, especially in the context of arguing on blogs and in the comments. This was initially an update of something I wrote in 2014, but I ended up rewriting the whole thing.

If you’d like to see any particular point expanded out, please express your interest!

1. Identifying Goals

90% of everything is crap, and that goes for arguments too. It is worth considering what you want in an argument, and whether the argument in front of you fulfills your purpose. Arguments that do not fulfill your purposes should be dropped. You could be spending that time on more productive arguments, or for that matter playing video games.

Truth vs Power

Some arguments are about finding truth, and others are about acquiring power.

Truth is the same for everyone, so truth-seeking arguments should in principle be cooperative. You don’t want to win every truth-seeking argument, you only want to win the ones where you started on the correct side. Being good at arguing means being good at losing arguments when you are wrong.

Power-seeking arguments, on the other hand, are competitive. The winner of such an argument usually gains legitimacy, or perhaps decision-making power. Since few people willingly give up power, these kinds of arguments rarely result in any participants being convinced.

Most of this post addresses truth-seeking arguments rather than power-seeking ones.
[Read more…]