The blog of a systematic botanist of German origin, now working in Australia. It covers botany, phylogenetics, cladistics, science in general, freethought, and occasionally sillier issues.
one of the biggest things that stands out is how I realized even big-name philosophers often produce arguments so awful that it’s hard to even say anything interesting about why they’re bad. [...]Another area comes immediately to mind in which similar problems appear to exist is economics, also known as "the dismal science". In contrast, physicists, chemists, climate scientists, astronomers and geologists agree virtually unanimously on virtually anything of importance in their disciplines. It becomes a bit fuzzier in ecology, evolutionary biology and biogeography but the fact of evolution, for example, is in no doubt whatsoever, something that cannot be said, as Hallquist points out, for any of the major issues in philosophy, nor for a question as fundamental as how to deal with a financial crisis in economics.
A big part of the problem is that nobody seems to know how to resolve any of the major disputes in philosophy. This is closely related to the fact that, as philosopher Peter van Inwagen once said, “philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of.” [...]
The total lack of agreement among philosophers on just about anything is problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, many people would like to be able to settle philosophical disputes by looking at what the experts say, an approach that can make perfect sense on issues where the experts genuinely are agreed. But for any given philosophical dispute, while there may be many philosophers who take a certain position, there will pretty much always be many other philosophers who disagree. It’s safe to assume that anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to pull a fast one.
Another problem, which I detailed in retrospective part 1, is that the lack of agreement on what good philosophy is makes it hard to filter the good philosophy and reward the philosophers who produce it.
But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not."
It is easy to believe the first part - surely one cannot expect somebody from outside the field to know the good journals. But in my own area I know nearly all the relevant journals, and I surely know how to judge a scientist's output by looking at the names of the journals in their publication list. Are they getting into the ones that publish high-quality research? Are they taking the path of least resistance, always submitting to the same two or three journals, one of them published by their own employer? And the names of predatory open access journals have a kind of method to them that makes them relatively easy to spot in most cases. If it is the Journal of XYZ, it is most likely legitimate. If the name is something convoluted like International Research Journal of XYZ your alarm bells should be going off. So if you let resumes be evaluated by a competent peer of the scientists in question you should have no problems there.Researchers also say that universities are facing new challenges in assessing the résumés of academics. Are the publications they list in highly competitive journals or ones masquerading as such?
This article gives the false impression that charging academic authors to publish is unusual, or limited to dubious upstart journals. In fact, the vast majority of academic journals, including the most respected ones in many fields, have long charged authors to publish, and reaped substantial profit from enforcing such charges. This is the bread and butter profit of many respected publishing houses. Publishing academic papers costs money, but since they are read by almost nobody, a charge the reader approach (even with libraries as the main 'readers') does not work. Thus, academics pay to publish their research, just like bad novelists do. Of course this payment is generally covered by their government grants, so in fact it is the taxpayer that pays in the end.That is a fairly odd view of things. I have no great love for the profit-making of certain science publishers, and yes, ultimately the taxpayer finances all non-profit research. Well, duh. Perhaps it would indeed be better to have scientific journals treated as utilities, financed directly from taxes and run as non-profits.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.Sounds reasonable, right? At least at first sight, and from the perspective of an armchair philosopher. But do you actually reason like that, as we say these days, in real life? What would you say if you met a well-educated adult who argued, well, I have no evidence that smurfs exist, but I cannot disprove their existence either, so they may well exist? Would you consider that reasonable? No, you would rightly consider that person to be an idiot, or at a minimum to be somewhat unsound of mind.
Absence of evidence where we would reasonably expect to find evidence is tentative evidence of absence.Does not roll off the tongue quite so easily but it has the advantage of not being as stupid.
