David Sloan Wilson’s evolution institute has weighed in on the implications of those phony papers that were published in social science journals.
https://evolution-institute.org/saving-social-constructivism/
Here, FWIW, was my contribution:
The problem we are having in academia relates to a schism that occurred in American Pragmatism between that based on the ordinary language use of the word, pragmatic, and that based on the rigorous scientific PRACTICE of 19th Century chemists sponsored by Charles Peirce, which Peirce himself ultimately called PRAGMATICISM. In the 1950’s, in the Eisenhower years, we shared a Deweyan consensus about Truth and Democracy which the last 60 years has served to tear down. That consensus, regrettably, arose in part because of the powerful negative examples of the Nazi’s and the Soviets. Absent these totalitarian examples to oppose, we are becoming them. Society cannot precede without some common faith in rules of engagement, both intellectual and governmental, that lead to the truth. Over my lifetime, we have seen the erosion of institutions (eg,the Departmental Colloquium, the real oral defense? The dreaded Outside Member?) designed to check faddism in scientific research. For those among you who think that the history of scientific thought has something to do with its present problems, I strongly recommend reading some of Peirce’s work. It’s not easy going, and it is given, unfortunately, to the very vicissitudes of interpretation that Peirce would have deplored. But in this day when we have lost faith that there is a truth of any matter, or if there is, that we will ever share it, Peirce’s faith in the convergence of opinion through rigorous research by community of inquiry is wonderfully bracing.
Is it possible that in FRIAM we have the model of the New Academia?
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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