There are many conferences and many opportunities for collaboration. I wouldn’t say I’m boycotting UK academic or their institutions – just that given the choice, I’d rather not invest my time and energy collaborating with bigots.

Abb1 – the Roundheads put the English and Scottish head of state on trial, found him guilty and then executed him. The Irish were willing to kill and to die to try to get rid of the English government. It doesn’t matter what you think about their attitudes, what matters is the evidence.

Tracy, if you think every journal checks all the sources of every paper it is sent, you are living on a different planet. Remember, these sources are in a basement in Germany, in 1933 when travel was expensive.

I don’t think that every journal does that. I think that every journal should do that, given the levels of academic fraud (carried out by far more varied people than Nazi Germans). Mine is a normative, not a descriptive, statement.

Plus I do understand that every reputable scientific journal does send every article it is considering accepting to reviewers for a peer review. An expert on German-Jewish history should have gone over the paper.

If it’s uneconomic for a journal to check the paper in any way then it shouldn’t publish it. After all, it may be a hoax like Sorkal’s paper.

I am simply arguing that the relative worth of different academic cultures can be assessed on the basis of what we know of their scholarly activities.

Sg, you have shifted the debate from the cultural biases of the academics to assessing work based on what we know of their scholarly activities. Of course if we know that an academic’s work is based on ignoring any evidence that doesn’t fit their hypothesis, or making figures up, or that they’re relying on data in good faith but the data itself was not reliable for its used purposes (like say pre-1967 Australian GDP data), then we should ignore their work (or point out how it was wrong). But you seemed to earlier be arguing that we could reject academic work not based on flaws in their processes but on the culture it came from without needing to find any evidence of bias in the actual work.

In the case of Soviet Union genetics during the time of Lysenko, the flaws are pretty darn obvious – anyone who produced evidence contradicting Lysenko would have most likely been shot or sent to the gulag so the research can’t have taken account of any contradictory evidence. But no one has produced any evidence that Israeli academic research is flawed in any equivalent way.

I don’t agree with you that an academic boycott would have been worth doing to overthrow Nazi Germany because I don’t know if it would have worked. And, even if it had have worked, I would have been opposed to a boycott if it would lead to boycotting other countries as it seems a process without end.

Well what an interesting start.

Let’s just look up Norman geras on your little search engine thingy…

http://crookedtimber.org/index.php?s=Norman+Geras

Well… aren’t we just looking a little foolish now?

Chris – you must get over your consuming intellectual envy of Norm Geras. FOr your sake rather than anyone elses…

The confusion here has arisen because people seem to think i’m arguing that the truth of a position can be judged by the politics of its author. I’m not. I am simply arguing that the relative worth of different academic cultures can be assessed on the basis of what we know of their scholarly activities. By constructing the epiphet “soviet science”, zdenek implies that he has done this with Soviet genetic science. We all know he hasn’t read every paper ever published in Soviet genetic science and assessed it on its relative merits; he has assessed that they mostly depend on Lamarckian genetics (probably by reading articles about the history and philosophy of Soviet Science), which is bad theory, and therefore he concludes that most soviet genetic science is bad, and that the worth of this scientific culture is so limited that he can turn it into an epiphet. I would wager in fact that he has never read an article from a Soviet geneticist.

We all use this process all the time. I was simply pointing out that it may be possible to apply the process when determining who to boycott. you obviously agree with me that it would be worth doing to Nazi germany if it would actually have worked (in whatever pure sense one choses to mean this).

So I think my case rests on this. Rest assured zdenek that if you submit a paper on the philosophy of science to me, I won’t be assessing its relative worth on the basis that you disagreed with me. If, however, I see your paper in a collection published by the “Creationist University of Fascist Philosophy”, you can be fairly confident I will assume, without reading it, that it’s crap. As you, I, Tracy and Abb1 would all do if we saw a history of Israel published in the “David Duke Journal of neo-Fascist history studies”.

I really don’t get the controversy about all this…

For that matter, 10 thousand years ago people probably regarded frying and eating their parents as normal and acceptable. Times change, you know.

Abb1 – do you have some moral objection to checking any of your statements?

What do you mean? I’m not sure.
No I don’t have any objection, moral, immoral or amoral, to checking any of my statements. Please do. Let me know what you find.

Are you not here using logic to identify the sources of cultural bias and to criticise Windshuttle’s work, thus clarifying which sources are better?

You are of course not using any pure logical process, you are instead referring to facts such as the “idea of the dying race” (when I say “fact” here of course I mean that there was such an idea, not that such an idea was right), you also mention the institutions the individuals are working in, which could be explored more thoroughly. So it strikes me that you are starting a process of attacking cultural bias based on a combination of logic and historical evidence that will hopefully improve the state of knowledge about the history of Australia.

Of course all results in science are tentative and it’s useful to keep in mind that they may be overturned in the future. But it strikes me that cultural bias can be dealt with in ways other than ignoring the work, and that you are doing so.

Given the history of fraud in history, a journal should be checking at least some of the sources of every article it publishes if it wants to be making a good quality contribution to human knowledge. If you don’t have the resources to do this, then why are you publishing a journal at all? This is why scientific journals use peer review.

And of course readers should take it with a grain of salt. I have no objection to the “I’m gonna fact-check your ass” emotion, and it’s far easier to do something thoroughly when you really want to do it.

I am not certain what you are arguing now overall. Are you arguing in favour of boycotting academics or in the favour of analysing every article based on its cultural biases? In the case of Nazi Germany, there were far cheaper ways of stopping it than an academic boycott, for example if France had sent troops to oppose the reoccupation of the Rhine. Of course if an academic boycott was known to be the only way to stop WWII and it was known that it would work, and it was known that the boycott would not then expand to cover numerous other bad governments, then I would have supported it in that case. But in reality we can never know that a boycott is the only way, nor that it will have the desired effect, nor that the intended boycotters will stop there and not go on to boycott other countries they wish to change, leading to a collapse of academic science in favour of a futile pursuit of moral purity. Speculating about what should be done if you knew that something would work isn’t of help in political decisions since politicians can’t see into the future. Better to stick to a moral principle that academic research should aim to be best it can be and not subordinate it to other aims of dubious practicality.

Abb1 – …English government in the 17th and 19th centuries was a criminal, oppressive…

The problem with your argument now is that we don’t live in the 19th century. What was considered quite normal in the 19th century has become unacceptable in modern times, post WWII, with the UN charter etc.

Why do you think that people in the 19th and 17th centuries regarded the English government as acceptable? The 17th century in England was the time of a civil war in England and a rebellion in Ireland, so people actually killed in attempts to change the English government. I don’t know how one can regard a situation as more unacceptable than killing people to try to change it.

And in the 19th century the Irish managed a few more violent rebellions against the English government. Meanwhile many of the English people were agitating for expanding suffrage to more of the male population and to women. This didn’t break out into another civil war, but I think that has more to do with the 19th century governments being less pig-headed than Charles I than people regarding the then government system as acceptable.

People in 17th and 19th century England may have regarded their government as normal, but they didn’t find it acceptable.

Abb1 – do you have some moral objection to checking any of your statements?

Similarly I haven’t dismissed Statman’s paper on the basis of his ideology; I have argued that it is straight out crap on its own lack of merits, and that this is the sort of thing a sick academic culture might enable to float to the top. You are correct to point out that in and of itself the paper is right or wrong on its own merits, but when I decide to boycott a whole institutional culture (for whatever reason) my judgement of the cost to myself or society is going to be based on what I think that culture is going to produce in general, not whether Dr. A’s essay on slaughtering Palestinian children is logically meretricious. And that is exactly what you have clearly done with Nazi/Soviet science, whether or not you think it is because the science was effected at the stage of Justification or Discovery.

And yeah, I probably am confusing CJ and CD: I am no philosopher, as evidenced by my unwillingness to support targeted assassinations and the legal removal of the right to be an atheist. But I still think you’re naive if you don’t believe that people’s logical decisions and interpretations of evidence and sources aren’t influenced by the prevailing academic and political culture; and if this really is Discovery and not Justification, then the difference seems effectively irrelevant.

I am starting to think that you do not grasp the dif. between CJ and CD.

You on the other hand cannot coherently tell the diference between good and bad because on your view politics are crucially involved in CJ. So for you Soviet science is as good as any other science.( I am not saying you said this only that you are committed imo to a view like that ).

But if that is the case your criticism of Australia , Israel or any other country is without any force because it is just a disguised political criticism.( because you do not have a meaningful account between good a scientific practice and a bad one ).

Mine on the other hand is not so emptied of content because I take the distinction between CJ and CD seriously.

I hope that helps.

Also you are still insisting on portraying my whole argument as being about analysing individuals work from the view of their politics, even though I have tried to clear that up with my 1, 2 and 3 post above.