Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

is the idea here that a publication should never retract an article? or that people should never ask a publication to retract an article?

that would be absurd, obviously. but it seems that a good faith effort accepted via the normal peer review process is not something that rises to the level of a retractable scholarly offense. it seems pretty disheartening that the first response of fellow scholars was not to write a response or a refutation, to be published in the next issue, but to move as quickly and publicly as possible to take the author and the journal down with a political/power move.

a good faith effort accepted via the normal peer review process is not something that rises to the level of a retractable scholarly offense

but wait, by that standard when could a publication retract a peer-reviewed article, or be called upon to do so? if i understand you right the only case would be if it was not "a good faith effort," which might be tough to prove. what if it's just "mea culpa, this is bad scholarship and we totally dropped the ball on reading it closely, this reflects badly on us as scholars" or w/e?

also, seems very likely to me that many or perhaps even more scholars probably set out to write responses or refutations to be published in the next issue? do we know that this did not also happen? perhaps their thoughtful refutations influenced the decision of the board to take the rather rare and serious step of issuing a retraction?

not weighing in on the merits of the case as i haven't read the full article - just think these line of argument need a bit of tightening up.

if the article passed through the typical peer-review process then to retract it is either to tacitly admit that their peer-review process is flawed or to admit that it's being retracted for non-scholarly reasons. if I ran a journal I'd be pretty hesitant to admit either of those things.

Why "tacitly"? In one of mordy's block quotes above they explicitly state "It is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices." Presumably they took making a statement like that pretty seriously or else they wouldn't have made it, precisely because it's not the kind of thing you want to admit as a scholar running a journal.

Didn't catch that.

it was my post & sorry for such long block quotes :(

Oh sorry! That was sloppy attribution on my part (though somehow appropriate, I guess, given the subject matter!) - sorry to both of you.

(er, that is, sloppy attribution is appropriate to a discussion of peer-review - not saying the attribution to Mordy was especially apropos or sth)

these materials are political from the beginning. it's not like a STEM journal retracting a paper that used bad data or misunderstood/misstated a mathematical/scientific model. the jargon used and what expressions are permissible or not is inherently political. the journal is pretending like there's some platonic truth about transracialism/transexualism or about the way it should be discussed, that is not just mediated by politics (including the politics of who gets angry at what material and demands a retraction) but that's obv v naive about how language + disciplines are mediated. the best they could say if they were trying to lay claim to some sort of objectivity is that the author didn't consistently use the tropes + parlance of practitioners in the field she chose to write (tho by her own account there are other scholars that she was relying upon) but that's a far cry from "we didn't review this well enough." it seems transparently like ass-covering to me in the wake of a political "scandal" and a natural response in an environment where language is being policed (yes, i know, it's not literally being policed, none of this is as bad as whatever suffering etc etc etc it's just still shitty behavior esp for scholars to behave in - the outcry should've always been limited to scholarly responses - but of course a scholarly response in a dispassionate tone might reveal that this entire controversy is full-of-shit i.e. the intervention only works if you get to use language like "violence" to describe words leaving someone's mouth).

the best they could say if they were trying to lay claim to some sort of objectivity is that the author didn't consistently use the tropes + parlance of practitioners in the field she chose to write

otm

but wait, by that standard when could a publication retract a peer-reviewed article, or be called upon to do so? if i understand you right the only case would be if it was not "a good faith effort," which might be tough to prove. what if it's just "mea culpa, this is bad scholarship and we totally dropped the ball on reading it closely, this reflects badly on us as scholars" or w/e?

fraud or misconduct would be the standard reasons; and aside from ownership of ideas i'm not sure these would cover most philosophy scholarship (e.g. it's typically not even possible to falsify or massage data, since there is none).

some scientific articles are retracted for error, i assume because the error is discovered to be so significant that the conclusion is no longer supportable (not even in amended form). but again, i don't think that sort of error is obviously relevant in most cases of philosophy scholarship.

in science, a publication is also considered to be part of the record of knowledge, so i think it makes a certain amount of sense to officially retract things that are found to be false or not factually reliable. but in philosophy (despite the way some philosophers may act about it) publication is part of the extension of the ongoing conversation; anything and everything published in the past may suddenly be in play again, and nothing anyone ever thinks to 'take back' or consign to the dustbin can ever be assumed to be definitively out of play. trying to force a retraction of something that was published in a procedurally above-board way seems like it has to play philosophy's scientific self-image against the reality of its relation to its own history of publication.

i suppose they could attempt to produce similar grounds for retraction that were strictly ethical/political, since it makes more sense then that e.g. a community of social praxis would have discretion to let certain things said stand or not, not for the sake of their historical legacy but for the sake of the ongoing present/future they will continue to play a part in. but outside of avowedly political (and JUST political) contexts, where i can imagine a group's deciding in a totally arbitrary way that it would or would not, henceforth, recognize something it had given its approval to in the past (a statement, a manifesto, whatever), it seems like forcing a retraction would require that the thing to be retracted is shown to be somehow beyond the pale, ethically speaking. i think pointing to the good-faith scholarly intentions here goes to establishing that the paper was not at all beyond the pale in that way.

(and i guess i should add, despite the things i've read about their review process, i don't think citing a scholarly failure in the review process passes the smell test. you can read people in some of the blogs discussing this case, complaining about mediocre argumentation or whatever. but philosophers read papers for which they have little but contempt CONSTANTLY, our 'industry' would fall apart if people didn't continue to publish all that garbage. if there was a failure here it was not a failure of a 'review process' in the sense of a quality control. it was a shortsightedness in the editorial oversight of the journal, presumably abetted by some degree of hands-off automatic operation of the journal per usual, that allowed their process to produce a publication that rankled their readership and thus presumably thwarted the editorial staff's best intentions. so they should take all the blame themselves for not getting their ideal outcome, not cast aspersions on the duly-participating scholar.)

you'd think in this field provocations + controversy would be prized but i guess only some kinds and this was the wrong kind

that's a tough line to draw because when, as j. mentioned, "ongoing conversation" is the implicit value-judgment driving the discourse then any paper which continues to produce responses/interpretations is "valuable"...but to take this logic to its extreme would produce something like the dicourse on, say, twitter.

but yeah as j. also mentions garbage work is published CONSTANTLY in the humanities, sometimes specifically because it is "controversial."

it seems like we're going through an actual paradigm shift in the Kuhn sense where knowledge and discourse no longer belongs to the the academy; the people who lead it may be employed by the academy as often as not, but scholarly journals are just as fucked up about what matters as any other serialized publication right now. It's all the bazaar all the time.

btw let's compare and contrast the reaction to this with the reaction to bret stephens in the NYT - which is more "overblown?" who really deserves the ire of the woke? how can we make society more better in the long run, by getting this person fired, or by pointing out that yet another hateful ignorant straight white man is getting paid real cash to be the actual worst in the pages of a so-called great american institution?

xp yeah, i think there's something to that. and even the most staid 'truth only' scholar realizes that the door was opened by the relentless drive to self-sales encouraged by the academy's incentives structures. as long as you write something that satisfies basic and un-substantive criteria, and wins some approval of some appointed credit-givers, then anything that is part of an 'intellectual project' or offers a 'perspective on an open issue' etc. all flies.

jesus I think the left may be its own worst enemy. should write a book about this.

what i don't understand about the bret stephens hire is that the NYT basically poached him from the wsj bc they felt in the wake of the trump victory that their op-ed pages weren't diverse enough... so they hired another right-wing anti-trump rino??? there weren't any pro-trump pundits they could bring in to fulfill the purpose of ideological diversity??

not literate ones

the journal is pretending like there's some platonic truth about transracialism/transexualism or about the way it should be discussed, that is not just mediated by politics,

as far as i can tell the purpose of a non-STEM academic journal is to help establish the leading ideas of the day in a particular subject of study. it does this not as an objective member outside of space and time, but as a subjective member within a broader academic community. in this case, other members of that community found a particular article published by the journal to be illegitimate, and so they said so, publicly. the journal then responded in turn. and now we're discussing it here. in my opinion, this seems like common enough discourse. someone makes a claim, others disagree and make a counter-claim, and the first party either stays course or reconsiders. in this case they reconsidered.

is it political? is it subjective? of course. i don't see how it couldn't be. but so is the decision to center Shakespeare in English literature, or Adam Smith in economics, or whoever else in whatever else.

i mean eugenics was once an enlightened idea, regularly appearing in respected journals. now it's not. whether that was accomplished by polite articles written in the proper channels or by activists pressing a point seems besides the point to me.

that sounds fairly disingenuous.

xp I'm interested in whatever your point is, and why you think the "non-STEM" distinction is necessary - legal and medical journals also apply, right?

well, i'd include STEM too (a geo-centric worldview was once thought right, et al), but i figured the point would be cleaner if i sidestepped STEM altogether.

@j. how do you mean? i may be way off, but i don't think i'm being disingenuous. or i'm not trying to be.

it's not as if no one acknowledges the subjectivity, or political partiality, or whatever we call it, in the response; or as if anyone denies that it would always be a factor. but some of the voices calling for retraction don't even seem to be adhering to the sort of norms they otherwise profess to, as philosophers. and it's the criteria of adherence that are at issue.

mordy's remark was actually making that point in the other direction, i think - that the matter is contested and contestable and it's bad faith to be asserting discursive norms as if they hold some firmer authority than that. ('ok so stop doing so!' would not be satisfactory, either, since i think some of the parties involved are committed to having a stronger basis for their position than 'so we say'.)

I appreciate the way you couch mordy's comment, it helps me feel better about agreeing with it. the right way to attack this argument is with debate and not by asserting norms through tendential accusations and shouting down

it seems to me that there's a running theme through this thread that the censors are mistaking voices that are open to debate with voices that aren't, and that creates all the little gaps that FREEEEE DISCOURSE HEROZ like Jon Chait need to opine endlessly about how -

methinks myself doth protest a little loud for a monday night. fuck it, the people who want to have their voices heard over shouting need to learn how to stop shouting other people down. I hate the fucking high road but jesus goddamned christ on a camel get out of your own fucking way, for once, kids

they're not in their own way. this is their strategy.

they want to consolidate power wherever they can. dissenting voices aren't welcome in the spaces they want to control -- in this case an academic journal. the same thing happens with ideologues on the right, to much worse effect. it just is not the case that everyone is interested in the free and productive exchange of ideas or even thinks such a thing is possible.

it's not right or wrong, just illiberal.

the dissonance comes in when you agree with the goals of the censors -- in this case, protecting transgender people from violence and discrimination. when someone invokes the difficulties transgender people face in america you'd have to have a heart of stone to dismiss them. but like, i think sometimes this is invoked disingenuously, to support causes that won't ultimately help society become freer and more tolerant.

or safer.

that makes a bit more sense, thanks j.

i guess for me the discursive norms of the academy, which admittedly i am not very familiar with, seem abstract. whereas the defense of transracialism does seem to be based in anti-blackness, as the letter states. i'll need some time though to further unpack why i think that.

tuvel links to this piece by kai green on the subject that i think treats the question w/ the nuance + sensitivity it deserves tho does that thing where it more "raises questions" than it does try to answer them: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/06/race-and-gender-are-not-the-same-is-not-a-good-response-to-the-transracial-transgender-question-or-we-can-and-must-do-better/ --

Just want to point out that one of the sides of this battle is literally getting murdered in frightening numbers.

But everything about this scandal is still garbage :(

But in a lot of ways I think 'fuck philosophy', basically. Not everything is fit for the same discourse.

Zzzz

otm

jesse singal's summary of the situation, very supportive of tuval:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html

highly critical thread from zoe samudzi:

A whole gender studies professor wrote this article, y'all. pic.twitter.com/wpXTzPG0Lw

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) April 28, 2017

should note that in second pic-quote, tuval does explicitly say that if we are to be pro-trans we should also be pro-dolezal, which is, uh, hoo boy

whoa when did ilx start doing that with tweets??

do feel like sometimes political correctness gone mad is a thing. like if you were someone who saw the negative reaction to dolezal and thought "this is transphobic" you should probably go and bile yer heid

easy there or youll be put in the corner with me n mordy

I haven't read the article, so for all I know it may just as bad as its critics say. The title doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage. Seeing people circulate that as a credible take on a philosophy article, even a really bad philosophy article, is disheartening.

so is the error in seeing it from the perspective of society (they changed their sex) rather than the person's perspective (they found the true sex they always were) it is like a collision of realities. but one reality is one we have been living with for thousands of years that your identity is at least partially shaped by your role in society and hence not entirely up to you to decide. isn't that part of the social contract?

that there is the taste of distilled ad bru my friends

adam how dare you even ask such a thing

i signed nawhin

But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage.

It mostly made me think of a "what is up with THAT?" sort of standup routine.

to circle back on my comments from yesterday, i think there could be a nuanced discussion of transracialism, of what that is and what it could mean and how it might relate to transgenderism. here's an article from the new inquiry from last year that i think does just that.

the problem in Tuvel's case is that she uncritically centers her understanding on Rachel Dolezal while largely ignoring the contributions of black and trans academics on the topic. here's an article from 2015 that sums up some of the problems of such an approach.

i think it's a worth examining too why a white woman (Tuvel) should be able to use another white woman (Dolezal) and an array of white sources (see Zoe Samudzi's analysis goole linked too) to make a claim on blackness.

how could these things be examined if the article's “continued availability causes further harm"?