[FRIAM] "Saving Social Constructionism

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Boghossian is a troll.  I don't know the other two.  I'm glad they're out there doing this.  One way to raise the bar is to out-game the system, making that system more complicated and more expensive, thereby pricing out those who can't muster the resources to engage (like me).  It's a well honed tactic to simultaneously burden and starve the system so that it *seems* to fail under its own weight.

Trolling journals to get phony papers published merely *proves* postmodernism and makes its primary point more poignant. [†] Trolls like Boghossian are *everywhere* and will do anything to offend whoever they can.  (Following up by writing books that pretend to deliver the real knowledge ... that you can't get anywhere else but from their clique.)  Ignoring the troll doesn't work, despite the popularity of that recommendation on the internet.  Hell, I even recommended one of Boghossian's books to a worried liberal the other day at the brewery, with a heavy dose of "read it with skepticism".  The response to the trolling, by Wilson and Shaw, is a good response, I think.


[†] This was a good essay: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html

On 11/8/18 9:35 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> David Sloan Wilson’s evolution institute has weighed in on the implications of those phony papers that were published in social science journals.
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> https://evolution-institute.org/saving-social-constructivism/
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> Here, FWIW, was my contribution:
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> */The problem we are having in academia relates to a schism that occurred in American Pragmatism between that based on the ordinary language use of the word, pragmatic, and that based on the rigorous scientific PRACTICE of 19th Century chemists sponsored by Charles Peirce, which Peirce himself ultimately called PRAGMATICISM. In the 1950’s, in the Eisenhower years, we shared a Deweyan consensus about Truth and Democracy which the last 60 years has served to tear down. That consensus, regrettably, arose in part because of the powerful negative examples of the Nazi’s and the Soviets. Absent these totalitarian examples to oppose, we are becoming them. Society cannot precede without some common faith in rules of engagement, both intellectual and governmental, that lead to the truth. Over my lifetime, we have seen the erosion of institutions (eg,the Departmental Colloquium, the real oral defense? The dreaded Outside Member?) designed to check faddism in scientific research. For
> those among you who think that the history of scientific thought has something to do with its present problems, I strongly recommend reading some of Peirce’s work. It’s not easy going, and it is given, unfortunately, to the very vicissitudes of interpretation that Peirce would have deplored. But in this day when we have lost faith that there is a truth of any matter, or if there is, that we will ever share it, Peirce’s faith in the convergence of opinion through rigorous research by community of inquiry is wonderfully bracing./**//*
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> Is it possible that in FRIAM we have the model of the New Academia? 


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