whither science?
This September assistant Professor Peter Boghossian resigned from Portland State University where he has been employed for the last 10 years. He taught and researched atheism, critical thinking, pedagogy, scientific scepticism and the Socratic method. He is author A Manual for Creating Atheists and (with James Lindsay) How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
His position at the University had become untenable. In his resignation letter Boghossian called the university a "Social Justice factory", said that he faced harassment and retaliation for speaking out, and accused the university of limiting free speech in order to promote racial equity and social justice - a charge that some here in New Zealand might also feel they could make.
How did this state of affairs come about?
Boghossian teamed up with fellow academics James A. Lindsay (a mathematician), and Helen Pluckrose (a British English literature scholar, author and editor). The three were concerned about the direction being taken by certain social sciences and, in order to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding standards, they began what is now known as the “Grievance Studies Affair”.
“Grievance studies” is a term they coined that refer to academic areas where "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed and which put social grievances ahead of objective truth”. Such studies are generally associated with Critical Theory and broadly involve culture, race, queer, gender and sexuality studies. Basically they believed that any rubbish or antisocial views could be published in mainstream literature if it conformed to the liberal agenda. For example, their accepted paper “Maria Gonzalez, and Lisa A. Jones (pseudonyms). "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism". Is in part a rewrite of chapter 12 of Mein Kampf with feminist buzzwords inserted, where appropriate.
Beginning in 2017, the project entailed submitting nonsensical and deeply unethical papers parodying the language and contention of much of the “research” in the modern humanities. Of the 20 papers submitted, six were rejected, seven were accepted for publication and seven were still under editorial review when the project was uncovered and terminated in October 2018. Following the discovery of discrepancies in the paper "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon" published in Gender, Place & Culture in 2018, journalists from the Wall Street Journal found that the author “Helen Wilson” didn’t exist. This paper had won special recognition for “exemplary scholarship” from the journal that published it.
According to the Times newspaper, at the time of his resignation Dr Boghossian was under investigation by the University because he had studied "human research subjects" - a reference to the staff and peer-reviewers of the journals - without proper ethical approvals. There was also a charge relating to the falsification of data.
Why did they do it?
The three authors write in their defence *:
“For grievance studies scholars, science itself and the scientific method are deeply problematic, if not outright racist and sexist, and need to be remade to forward grievance-based identitarian politics over the impartial pursuit of truth. These same issues are also extended to the “Western” philosophical tradition which they find problematic because it favors reason to emotion, rigor to solipsism, and logic to revelation.
As a result, radical constructivists tend to believe science and reason must be dismantled to let “other ways of knowing” have equal validation as knowledge-producing enterprises. These, depending on the branch of “theory” being invoked, are allegedly owned by women and racial, cultural, religious, and sexual minorities. Not only that, they are deemed inaccessible to more privileged castes of people, like white heterosexual men. They justify this regressive thinking by appealing to their alternative epistemology, called “standpoint theory.” This results in an epistemological and moral relativism which, for political reasons, promotes ways of knowing that are antithetical to science and ethics which are antithetical to universal liberalism.
Radical constructivism is thus a dangerous idea that has become authoritative. It forwards the idea that we must, on moral grounds, largely reject the belief that access to objective truth exists (scientific objectivity) and can be discovered, in principle, by any entity capable of doing the work, or more specifically by humans of any race, gender, or sexuality (scientific universality) via empirical testing (scientific empiricism).”
*Read their full essay at “https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/”
