Sorry, no. This is bullshit. Look, I like xkcd, but this is bullshit. It’s the exact same bullshit t
Sorry, no. This is bullshit. Look, I like xkcd, but this is bullshit. It’s the exact same bullshit that gives us these right-wing grifters like Jimmy Concepts (remember, those assholes didn’t start by attacking critical race theory. They started by assuming feminist theory is just meaningless buzzwords and anyone could get published. Guess what? It’s not, so they didn’t). Just try what this comic suggests. I want to see how long you can really go farting out meaningless work and get it published. I bet it’ll be way less than eight papers and two books. It’s not that peer review is a perfect system. I could talk at length about its myriad problems in my own discipline (philosophy) alone. But it is an absolute crock of shit for scientists to pretend that getting published in a humanities journal is easy, let alone something you could do without knowing anything about the discipline. Again the comparison to these grifters comes to mind: this is exactly what happened with them. Their crap was rejected, and they kept rewriting in order to bring in the concepts and framework of the feminist theory they don’t like. Or as one philosopher put it on Twitter, what they call a hoax is just not actually believing what you’re arguing for. In other words, these assholes only proved that peer review can work. And incidentally, Sokal got published in a journal that apparently didn’t have peer review at the time, so don’t even start.Merely because you don’t understand what a work outside of the sciences is saying does not mean it’s badly written. That political philosophy paper I once read in a seminar that buried the thesis on page three? Kinda terrible (and importantly, its being bad writing had nothing to do with using too many big words, but with being badly structured and meandering). But literary criticism is not fake simply because some people need to shorten their sentences or use smaller words (that’s what you should be criticizing here. Bad writing in all its forms, and yes that includes using difficult-to-parse sentences, but that’s not the same thing as attacking a whole discipline). And it’s certainly not fake because some comics dude with a science background doesn’t understand an argument being made in a paper entirely outside his area of scientific expertise. And believing that literary criticism is fake will not save your precious science either, because the people you inadvertently help, in attacking one academic discipline, will eventually come for you too.There is a very real new atheist to anti-woke (whether that’s the alt-right or scumbag leftists) pipeline, because those people cannot understand that a concept being social doesn’t mean it’s not real (to call a concept social is to say how it is real). Every other day on Twitter, there’s some dipshit who thinks science is some pure form of knowledge, and refuses to even engage with philosophy of science. But philosophy of science remains vital to science regardless of what somebody who’s wrong on the internet thinks, and literary criticism remains a real discipline, regardless of how poorly written some sentences are, regardless of what some internet cartoonist or Tumblr blogger thinks. -- source link
#academia