On fraud

Preferably scientific investigations would promote true rather than false beliefs. The phenomenon of fraud represents a standing challenge to this veritistic ideal. When scientists publish fraudulent results they knowingly enter falsehoods into the information stream of science. Recognition of this challenge has prompted calls for scientists to more consciously adopt the veritistic ideal in their own work. In this paper I argue against such promotion of the veritistic ideal. It turns out that a sincere desire on the part of scientists to see the truth propagated may well promote more fraud rather than less

Is Peer Review a Good Idea?

Pre-publication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behavior of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing pre-publication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo

The Head and the Heart:Incentives and Norms

We wager that on reflection most philosophers would reject any crude dichotomy between reason and passion. We don’t really think Newton unweaved the rainbow, we don’t really think one should ignore the learn’d astronomer to go gaze at the stars - or avoid gazing at the stars because after all you have the star charts. One simply doesn’t have to choose between these ways of accessing the world, and an appreciation for what is humanly significant can be combined quite comfortably with an analytical frame of mind. However, in more sophisticated guises, something of this contrast will find its way into philosophers’ analyses, and we think to their detriment. This contribution is about something that seems to us an example of such, and we shall try to set out where we think it goes wrong and why we think this is important to realise

Logical empiricists on race

The logical empiricists expressed a consistent attitude to racial categorisation in both the ethical and scientific spheres. Their attitude may be captured in the following slogan: human racial taxonomy is an empirically meaningful mode of classifying persons that we should refrain from deploying. I offer an interpretation of their position that would render coherent their remarks on race with positions they adopted on the scientific status of taxonomy in general, together with their potential moral or political motivations for adopting that position

Logical Nihilism Suggests Evidential Nihilism

Logical nihilism is the view that all claims of the form A logically entails B are false. I argue that if this is true its consequences (if you will excuse the pun) cannot be limited just to philosophical logic, but it would undermine all presently accepted analyses of evidence. I.e. if logical nihilism is true it suggests that evidential nihilism is true, nothing is evidence for any hypothesis. I end by suggesting that this suggestion may be welcomed as part of a reappraisal of the task of epistemology, if logical nihilism is accepted

White Psychodrama

I analyse the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that have given rise to persistent political disputes about race (known colloquially as “the culture war”) among a subset of Americans. I argue that they point to a deep tension between widely held normative aspirations and pervasive and readily observable material facts about our society. The characterological pathologies this gives rise to are discussed, and a normatively preferable path forward for an individual attempting to reconcile themselves to the current social order is suggested