Debunking Scholarly Nonsense

Robert Hauptman

Description

Debunking Scholarly Nonsense is a diatribe against the foolish claptrap that serious and respected scholars sometimes foist upon their peers and the public. The material discussed here does not usually derive from extreme political notions, conspiracy theories, or the ruminations of those who accept astrological control, I Ching divination, crystal healing, or chariots of the gods. Rather, the progenitors are physicists, astronomers, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and philosophers. The topics under discussion include Holocaust denial, string theory, multiple universes, alien abductions, extraterrestrials, a simulated or non-existent world, non-sentience or poly-sentience, harmful therapies, denials of climate change and Covid vaccination efficacy, among other possibilities. The authors of these articles, essays, papers, and books are not merely ruminating in a void. Their words and ideas influence others and may have detrimental effects in a world already charged with extreme misery.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Éducation
• General
• Epistemology
• Education
• Social sciences
• General officer
• Sociologie, société et politique
• PHILOSOPHY
• Social Science

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680538618
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Debunking Scholarly Nonsense
Robert Hauptman
Academica Press Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hauptman, Robert (author)
Title: Debunking scholarly nonsense | Hauptman, Robert
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022931433 | ISBN 9781680538601 (hardcover) | 9781680538618 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 Robert Hauptman
Cover image credit: Walton (Reconstitution)
Today, scientists and doctors find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by vast armies of individuals who feel entitled to pass judgment on matters of evidence—an admirable aspiration—without troubling themselves to obtain a basic understanding of the issues.
—Ben Goldacre
Contents Preface Introduction* Evidence Nonsense Summative agury Notes Part I On the Periphery: Agenda-Ridden Abusers Chapter 1 Literary Misuse: Gravity, Uncertainty, Entropy, and the Heat Death of Reason Notes Chapter 2 Intellectual Charlatans: Postmodernism and its Deconstructors Deconstruction Chapter 3 Confused Ideologues: Holocaust Denial and the Attack on Science Holocaust denial The attack on science False research findings Notes Chapter 4 Political Correctness Run Amuck Ideological pitfalls Not out of Africa Notes Chapter 5 Distortions: Philosophy, Art, Music Philosophy Art* Music Notes Chapter 6 Shenanigans: History, Politics, Law History Politics Law Language Critical Legal Studies Notes Part 2 Extreme, Bizarre, and Improbable Contentions Chapter 7 Celestial Permutations: Alien Abductions and Anomalous spacecraft Chapter 8 Physics: String theory, Many-Worlds, Multi-Universes, and Computer Simulation String theory Many-worlds, multi-universes Computer simulation Notes Chapter 9 Psychology: Harmful Therapies and Consciousness Defrocked Therapies Consciousness defrocked Notes Chapter 10 General Science and Medicine: Scholarly Malfeasance Sowing doubt Medical misdirection and seduction Chapter 11 Ethics: Moral Responsibility Abdicated Critiques Notes Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Index
Preface
In order to fully understand and appreciate what I present below, it is necessary to have a basic idea concerning the standpoint from which I proceed, otherwise accusations will descend like threatening birds in a Hitchcock film. I am neither a rightist conservative nor a leftist liberal. I am not an ideologue operating under a controlling dogma. I do not consider matters in vacuo, whether divergent societies and their social systems nor philosophical, historical, legal, psychological, or scientific matters. The only constraining factor is real, tangible, empirically divined evidence, which may lead to justified belief. The opinions of the postmodernist, deconstructing, woke, ethically denying, feminist demagogues are disposed of with the trash. Hold on, though, before erupting. I became a feminist long before the current crop was even born. I am a feminist not an idiot. I do not denigrate the scientific professions and their honored historians nor do I condone abortion, even though government control of our bodies is anathema. I prefer empirically derived data over imaginative intuitions and use common sense when approaching or interacting with abducting aliens, extraterrestrial manifestations, or psychological therapies that harm and kill. I believe only that one should treat others (humans, animals, the environment) as one would hope to be treated and so I have been an ethical vegetarian for 65 years. I do good rather than evil. I do not accept everything that rolls off the scholarly (or popular) presses. I think—therefore, I do a better job than some of our well-known scholars do at describing the real world, the one that we inhabit, not the quantum, string-laden, computer-simulated, alternatively medicalized, morally irresponsible one that these ivory tower theoreticians foist upon an unwary public. Trust those who earn your trust.
Debunking Scholarly Nonsense may be thought of as a work of applied epistemology, not the kind that philosophers present in paper after ideologically motivated, complexifying, imaginatively intuitive paper or monograph after monograph. Trusting one’s personally derived empirical data and information has its own problems, but it is preferable to depending solely on unreliable authority (Herodotus, John Mack, Nick Bostrom) whose pronouncements and asseverations often cannot be verified. There exist epistemological tests for truth (coherence, correspondence, intuition) but they do not necessarily yield accurate results. Even in a closed system such as mathematics, one discovers inconsistencies, between Euclidean and Riemannian geometry, for example. Still, in the former system, things equal to the same thing are always (often, sometimes) equal to each other. In less precise disciplinary areas, one must depend on the word of the experts. The experts are often, as Wolfgang Pauli famously noted, “not even wrong.”
A major taxonomic distinction should be noted between those scholars who make claims for impossibilities such as abduction and alien/human congress or simulated or non-existent reality, on the one hand, and those whose claims have appeared to be legitimate and practicable such as Freudian theory and applied psychoanalysis (which is now in default) or postmodern and radical feminist attacks on science and its methodology (rather than on biased or harassing white, male scientists). Despite the differences that are apparent in these two niches, those involved are guilty of perpetrating gibberish.
And since at least some of the nonsense (that serious and committed scholars with good intentions perpetrate) is related to societal harm that results from sexism, racism, classicism, ableism, discrimination, harassment, and real abuse that derives from individuals, groups, and government representatives such as Georgia lawmakers who wish to delimit citizens’ rights to vote, it is mandatory that I point out that not everyone is guilty of these harms, not every white male is a racist, and not every Black women is an innocent victim. The difference between attitude and harms in Myanmar, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and in the US, Holland, or Sweden, on the other is so dramatic that they are incomparable: A Rohingya will confirm this as will an untouchable (a dalit) or a non-Moslem who visits Mecca and is about to be executed. This is not meant to diminish the hurt that some feel specifically or generally but rather to clarify the broad accusations that claim that all whites in the US are racists or that American Blacks cannot be racist. One day, almost half a century ago, I picked up a Black, female hitchhiker in Pittsburgh. We talked and she told me that she had a white boyfriend; I asked how her parents felt about that, and she replied, quite emotionally, that her father would be aghast: “He is prejudiced,” she exclaimed. In Vermont, with its small Black population, one can walk through semi-suburban neighborhoods and be greeted by “Black Lives Matter” signs on lawns, emplaced by people who may never have known an African-American and next door to one’s prejudicial neighbors.
Prejudice and its resultant actions vary dramatically depending on nationality, geography, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and upbringing. The US’s northeast and south or its coasts and the hinterlands are very different from each other when it comes to social attitude, prejudice, and discrimination. Everyone who happens to be white or Chinese or a good old boy cannot be put in a single discriminating or discriminated category. Many years ago, I happened to be part of a class action suit. When interviewed, I indicated that unlike virtually all of my colleagues, I had never been an official or inadvertent victim. Nevertheless, after the verdict was rendered, I received a large check. I wrote void on it and returned it to the sender, whereas others who had suffered minimally or who admittedly had not been harmed at all kept the money.
I use harsh (unprofessional) language in Debunking but I insist that this is warranted because when mad men and women inundate with nonsense, it is counterproductive to beat around a bush. When critics denigrate Enlightenment values (objectivity, reason, rationality, logic) and then apply these very modalities in order to convince us that science is socially constructed or its androcentric nature is harmful or when serious scholars contend that we are not conscious or that the world does not exist, then we must take a stand and decry the foolishness. It is ironic that excepting Derrida and his postmodern progeny and lawyers who write abysmally, most of those people discussed here present pristine and articulate prose, reasoned and rational arguments—the precise antithesis of what some claim to favor. Here is what Federico Nahuel Bernabé has to say in rational, lucid articulation:
In this work we will take up again the contributions of the feminist philosophy of science around androcentrism, with special emphasis on biology and biomedical sciences. We will propose that such contributions can be ordered according to three different senses of androcentrism, and that important tensions appear between these senses. Following the path traced by Longino, contextual critical empiricism, we will defend that the rational reconstruction of theories can help us to specify where patriarchal decision vectors crouch in scientific practice. To this end, we will present an alternative analysis to Longino’s and use it as an input to discuss the idea of type brains in the framework of the neuroendocrinology of behaviour (abstract).
Or again, Sarah S Richardson discourses reasonably and logically in the following abstract:
Feminist philosophy of science has led to improvements in the practices and products of scientific knowledge-making, and in this way it exemplifies socially relevant philosophy of science. It has also yielded important insight