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from the won't-be-fooled-again,-or-will-they? dept.
Portland State University has initiated disciplinary proceedings against their philosophy professor Peter Boghossian for conspiring with colleagues to submit more than two dozen satirical papers to feminist theory and race-studies journals in an effort to prove those disciplines are academically fraudulent. The hoax papers, some of which were accepted by journals and which were revealed back in October, made Boghossian and his cohorts the international toast of "free thinkers" concerned that college campuses have become paralyzed by political orthodoxy.
After their ruse was revealed, the three authors described their project in an October article in the webzine Areo, which Pluckrose edits. Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars' worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable.
Sources:
The Chronicle of Higher Education : Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor (archive)
Willamette Week : Professor Who Authored Hoax Papers Says Portland State University Has Launched Disciplinary Proceedings Against Him (archive)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:14PM
WTF how can you be so blindly naive?
"no arguments for why we should take these fields of "study" seriously, otherwise they would surely have presented them by now."
It is not true that because you haven't read good arguments, that none have been presented, or that none exist.
"And that's no surprise, considering the ridiculous non-scientific methodologies they employ and the borderline non-sequitur conclusions presented as "facts" in many of these papers."
You're so close! So close. "many of these papers" is really close! But you've missed the mark, which is that SCIENTIFIC and reputable journals have ALSO been hoaxed like this. Nature Whatever publishes retractions. Mistakes and fraud happen; bad analysis and flawed instrumentation, too. But would you say "let's get rid of the physics journals, since some have been hoaxed - look I found an example of one printing a perpetual motion machine!" hmm? No, of course not.
Stop conflating existence and universality. There are bad papers and journals in every field, and just because these fields have had that problem doesn't mean the fields of study are not useful. You are welcome to try to make such an argument, but if you do and you use flawed logic like this, you look pretty stupid, like the yokel who says "aww, y'll have a helluva time getting horses hitched t'that!" at an RV.
Finally, your linked article reveals ANOTHER chink in your knowledge: in Canada, defamation can be using true statements, and if you publicly accuse me of calling people Hitler, I can sue you. (Of course, the people I called Hitler, if I was public, could sue /me/, that's the magic of law, it's blind. Peterson is stupid for suing them for defamation, when they commented in private and were unwittingly recorded and played back publicly; intent is clearly lacking.) So. Is it a funny scenario? Yeah! Is it absurd? No, not really! Not in any way. Them's the laws, and if two cars were double and triple parked you wouldn't say it's weird to ticket the tripleparker *and* the doubleparker.
Ugh - you posted under a techy name. I hope you don't write code as full of holes as your arguments are here. Frustrating.