A note on blog scholarship

Sometimes on this blog I post reading notes, and other times I post original research that draws on existing scholarship.

When I first started this blog, I thought that the right way of proceeding would be to cite sources in an impeccable and academic way, to prove I’ve done the work, and to let interested readers know how to pursue the research on their own. It is always possible that some readers are in need of a study guide for existing texts, and for them I am very pleased to provide whatever reasonable support I can. Presumably, many other academic bloggers feel the same way.

But as an online tutor, I’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that there is a very real threat that students will plagiarize online materials without giving proper credit. This is a serious enough problem in academia itself, as even appropriately credentialed scholars will behave badly, but made all the worse in a neo-liberal context.

So, I am not in the habit of providing precise page citations in my original research. I will provide them only when I provide reading notes, just in case readers would benefit from a literary sherpa. But if you want precise citations for original research, you will have to ask, or offer a little push back in comments. That, anyway, is my policy going forward.

Link roundup

PROOF

I’m an alpha tester at Proofmedia.io, which is using market-based social epistemology to ferret out false news. I can’t say whether or not it works or not. The jury is still out as to whether the service is a success in helping correct the public record.

But what I find interesting and refreshing about the experience is that it has exposed me to the diverse lunacy of the human condition. So, e.g., a plausible post about Kanye having his Twitter account taken away from him turned out to be mere satire (contrary to my first-blush expectations). And a post that seemed implausible to me — of an overenthusiastic secularist Principal who mistakenly thought that schools were obliged to ban candy canes because their J-shape stands for Jesus — was verifiably true. (That is, it’s true that the Principal existed and banned candy canes because of an odd belief about their shape, and probably not true that candy canes really are shaped for that reason.)

Which is just to say that I’m skeptical of memes that tell me what to believe about what real people believe. Real token human beings believe all kinds of nonsense, and our meta-beliefs about what people believe turns out to be, sometimes, way off base.

GENOCIDE PREDICTION

The BBC reports here on research conducted on genocide. “Two research projects are attempting to predict the early rumblings of genocide and spread the information more widely so that world leaders and others might be able to stop it.” The contention is that there is a kind of etiology to genocide, a definite step-wise process, that can be monitored and noted. Especially interesting is that the precursors to genocide mostly involve the spread of information, leading to group polarization.

DEPOLARIZATION

Considered as a method, philosophy involves the use of rational arguments in order to persuade people working in good faith of the reasonableness of certain passages of thought. Hence, medieval scholars used the term of ‘dialectics’ to refer to the art of logical disputation — contrasted with overly credulous appeals to textual sources (e.g., the scholasticism of the Church) or the use of rhetoric for the sake of persuasion without regard for its rational character (e.g., the sophistry of Gorgias). The medieval sense of dialectics makes pretty good sense of the argumentative practices of philosophy, be it Socratic dialogues and Aristotelian screeds, and is frequently articulated as the core deliverable in an education in critical thinking.

This article reminds us of the role of such critical dialogue in resolving disputes peacefully. It takes a lot of patience and searching in order to work, along with many of the agonizing costs of disputation. But history tells us that, in the long-term, the agonies of polarization are worse.

MARKETS AND MERIT

I hesitate to write about the academic job market. At the moment, I am in an especially precarious position; and, perhaps worse, I would be very embarrassed to write something that I later find is doused in sour grapes. I will say that it is a topic that requires a lot of patience, careful thought, and consideration of the changing “neo-liberalized” economy. It is easy to get wrong. But I thought this piece struck the right balance.

Blogroll

Here are some of the blogs I follow and enjoy (in no particular order):

• Daily Academic Freedom – Shannon Dea’s semi-updated blogging about academic freedom in Canada and beyond.
• Understanding Society – Daniel Little posts regularly about the philosophy of the social sciences. While it is generally more expository than creative, I find his blogging is relentlessly useful.
• Department of Deviance – I don’t know Amy Olberding personally, but she comes across as perfectly funny, smart, and kind.
• Footnotes to Plato — Massimo Pigliucci’s blog, which mixes science with philosophilia.
• The View from the Owl’s Roost — Nomy Arpaly is one of those people who is so obviously a bonefide philosopher that one is tempted to pass over the fact that she’s also super funny.
• Lawfare – professional and topical blawg.
• Crooked Timber — though I’m mainly a fan of read Holbo & Waring, tbh.
• Butterflies and Wheels — Ophelia Benson is controversial and curmudgeonly, but principled. I like reading her hot takes even though it’s toss-up whether I’ll agree with her on any given thing.
• Feminist Philosophers
• Restricted Data: the Nuclear Secrecy Blog — by Alex Wellerstein, author of infamous NukeMap.
• Semper Viridis — Les Green’s blog; I’m always interested in what he has to say, about legal philosophy and other matters.