Academic Petitions and Open Letters

Noah Carl at Aporia has just put up a research article Academic Petitions and Open Letters. It is fairly brief, and I am appreciative that he is making an attempt to put them all in one place and look at what they have in common. I have seen a few over the years, and have had people throw them at me about someone I have quoted as if they proved something. 

 In 1931, a large group of German scholars published a book titled A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, criticising the theory of relativity.¹ This was an early example of academics getting together and leveraging sheer numbers to try to discredit a colleague’s work.² Einstein, for his part, was unfazed. Commenting on the book, he’s reported to have said, “Were I wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”

Precisely. I am seldom well-versed in any of the topics covered - I am at best a talented amateur - but even I can notice on sight that "This has been disproven many times so the author must have terrible character" is not an intellectual argument unless the disproofs are identified.  It is a social argument, "We are the experts and we can exclude you just by saying so." Such statements undermine the concept of expertise even more than everyone being simply wrong. It is mere hand-waving to claim that "all the best people simply know" that something or other is true. The things that "everyone knows" are in fact a good source for identifying those things which need immediate examination. They are beliefs everyone wishes were true and doesn't want to discuss. They want only to dismiss you with a killer exit line and have done with you. 

At one level I sympathise with them.  Having been in mental health for decades, I am familiar with the usual myths people believe, and it is wearying to constantly re-explain to Townswoman #5 why her belief does not hold up. People assure me in the narthex some claim about the field I made my living in.  It is usually from some self-help book that was fashionable a few decades ago. Yet it is still unfair to dismiss the argument with the essentially social assertion that anyone who knows anything rejects the idea.  You have to give people something more. What I usually do is present some real research or discovery as if it is a refinement or recent improvement on that very idea, even if in reality it goes in another direction. 

There is a second level of this, a set of arguments that the hidebound have become fond of putting up when challenged that look at first to be an improvement but are not. I encounter them about the supposed egalitarianism and nonviolence of early man, or the association of language and thought, or anything that mentions standarised testing.

I have gone on too long and am keeping you from Carl's article which is much better than this.