Reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate reminded me of most other polemical books I'd read that attempt to integrate some science into their works. In theory it's a science book, a longwinded defense of both evolutionary psychology and its obvious social implications. But in practice, it's mostly a political book; the science is provided only as a backdrop against which Pinker sets up his attacks on a host of social, political, and cultural notions that stand in opposition to crude evolutionary psychology (which I'll abbreviate as EP in the rest of this post).
Pinker frames his view as this of modern science, represented by such tools as genetics, neurobiology, and post-Williams Revolution evolutionary biology, versus this of three closely interlinked demons. The first demon, which he focuses on the most, is the view that at birth the human mind is a blank slate to be shaped by environmental forces. The second is romantic affection for the noble savage, uncorrupted by pernicious civilization. And the third is the dualist notion that people are ghosts inhabiting the machines that are their own bodies.
The problems with the book's thesis start right at the beginning, when Pinker claims that a) all three views are interlinked, and b) all three views were very respectable until the science of EP started to overthrow them. The best way of seeing why Pinker is wrong there is by looking at the three philosophical positions he associates with the three demons—empiricism for the blank slate, romanticism for the noble savage, and dualism for the ghost in the machine.
By and large, the philosophers who developed empiricism, romanticism, and dualism in modern times disagreed with one another. Descartes' dualism isn't a component of Locke's empiricism; on the contrary, they disagree on the fundamental issue of whether all knowledge comes from experience. Romanticism developed mostly after the Enlightenment, and was only associated with empiricism or dualism when it mythologized European progress rather than the noble savage.
Zooming in on empiricism, it's easy to see another error of Pinker's: Lockean empiricism does not strictly speaking say the mind is a blank slate, at least not in the way that is relevant to EP. The main point of EP is that the human brain is hardwired to be prone to certain forms of learning and modes of behavior. The EP-derived view that men are on average better than women at math is not that men are born knowing more math than women but that men are born with a greater aptitude for math than women. In contrast, Locke's main contention is that knowledge comes directly from experience. He never concerned himself with social learning, which only became a serious subject of study a century or two after his death.
More importantly, the people Pinker criticizes for distorting science by claiming that IQ is not meaningful or not hereditary, or even that the mind is indeed a blank slate, have nothing to do with the other two demons. Marxist theory, which the people Pinker labels radical scientists adhere to, is extremely anti-romantic and anti-dualist. Among all the radical ideologies in existence—libertarianism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, anarchism—it is certainly the most pro-modern. Lewontin's politics is largely doctrinaire Marxist: in Biology as Ideology, he trumpets the triumph of progress, even as he indicates this progress should come from accepting socialism more than from ordinary capitalist improvements.
The relationship between Pinker and Lewontin is an interesting one. Pinker notes that although Lewontin claims that he thinks the dominant force in evolution is the interaction between gene, organism, and environment, in terms of social implications he ignores everything but environment. On that Pinker is certainly right: Biology as Ideology is an anti-science polemic that distorts facts to fit Lewontin's agenda (my take on Lewontin was subsequently debated in length here). However, Pinker commits the same transgression: he says he believes in the sensible moderate view that human behavior is determined by both inborn and environmental factors, and goes on to not only ignore the implications of the environmental part but also defend racists and sexists who have used pseudoscience as cover.
For instance, he starts by ridiculing people who called Richard Herrnstein a racist for a 1970 paper about intelligence and heredity. Although the paper as Pinker describes it is not racist per se, Herrnstein was indeed a racist. The screed he published with Charles Murray in 1994, The Bell Curve, is not only wrong, but also obviously wrong. Even in 1994, there were metastudies about race and intelligence that showed that the IQ gap disappears once one properly controls for environmental factors, for example by considering the IQ scores of children born to single mothers in Germany by American fathers in World War Two.
The truth, or what a reasonable person would believe to be the truth, is never oppressive. If there is indeed an innate component to the racial IQ gap, or to the gender math score gap, then it's not racist or sexist to write about it. It remains so even if the innate component does not exist, but the researcher has solid grounds to believe it does.
However, Murray and Herrnstein had no such solid grounds. They could quote a few studies proving their point, but when researchers publish many studies about the same phenomenon, some studies are bound to detect statistically significant effects that do not exist. By selectively choosing one's references, one can show that liberals are morally superior or morally inferior to conservatives, or that socialism is more successful or less successful than capitalism. At times there are seminal studies, which do not require any further metastudy. There weren't any in 1994, while existing metastudies suggested that the racial IQ gap was entirely environmental. As I will describe below, the one seminal study done in 2003 moots not only Murray and Herrnstein's entire argument but also much of Pinker's.
To rebut claims of racism and sexism, Pinker invokes the moral argument—in other words, that to be against racism and sexism one need only vigorously oppose discrimination, without believing that without any discrimination there would be no gaps in achievement. In theory, that is correct. But in practice, that narrow view makes it impossible to enforce any law against discrimination.
Worse, Pinker invokes anti-feminist stereotypes that are born not of serious scholarship, but of ideologically motivated conservative thinking. He supports Christina Hoff-Sommers' spurious distinction between equity feminism and gender feminism. Although there are many distinctions among different kinds of feminists, some of which track the degree of radicalism, none of the serious ones has anything to do with Hoff-Sommers'. In theory, equity feminism means supporting equality between women and men, while gender feminism means supporting a view of the world in which the patriarchy is omnipresent. In practice, the people who make that distinction, including Pinker, assign everyone who supports only the forms of equality that are uncontroversial in the United States, like equal pay laws and suffrage, to equity feminism, and everyone who supports further changes or even existing controversial ones to gender feminism.
As a case study, take family law activist Trish Wilson. Wilson's activism focuses on divorce law; she has written articles and testified in front of American state legislatures against laws mandating presumptive joint custody, mainly on the grounds that it hurts children. In addition, she has written exposés of ways abusive men exploit legal loopholes, including presumptive joint custody, to gain custody of children. In pushing for equality in the courtroom, she is a liberal feminist's liberal feminist. And yet, her attacks on the men's rights movement for protecting abusive men have caused every conservative who makes distinctions between equity and gender feminism to deride her as a gender feminist.
Any reasonable distinction between a more radical feminist stream and a more conventional one would put Betty Friedan and her organization NOW on the less radical side. Friedan was anti-radical enough to devote much of her tenth anniversary afterword to The Feminine Mystique to attacking radical feminists, by which she means not Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, but Kate Millett. NOW has focused on legal equality, primarily abortion rights and secondarily laws cracking down on employment discrimination and sexual harassment. But Pinker assigns Friedan as well as Bella Abzug to the gender feminism slot, using entirely trivial statements of theirs to paint them as radicals. Friedan he attacks for suggesting extending compulsory education to the age of 2; Abzug he attacks for saying equality means fifty-fifty representation everywhere.
To his credit, Pinker never quite claims that there is no gender discrimination. However, he makes an earnest effort to undermine every attempt to counteract it, however well founded. For instance, he claims that it's absurd to say that women's underrepresentation in science in the United States is due to discrimination, on the grounds that they're even more underrepresented in math, and it's not likely mathematicians are more sexist than scientists. Instead, he suggests, women are just not interested in math and science.
However, it is legitimate to ask why this interest gap exists. There is no EP-based argument why it should be innate. On the contrary, independent evidence from, for example, the proportion of female mathematicians who come from families of mathematicians versus the proportion of male mathematicians, suggests it is environmental. Indeed, the educational system of the United States has long encouraged women to ignore the hard sciences. Other educational systems produce near-parity: while 13% of American scientists and engineers are women, many other countries, such as Sweden and Thailand, have percentages higher than 30 or even 40.
Furthermore, one of the most important pieces of information about biases in education, the stereotype threat, receives no mention from Pinker. It's an established fact that telling girls who are about to take a math test that boys do better will make them do worse. In fact, telling them that the test measures aptitude, or even asking them to fill out an oval for gender before the test, will hurt their performance. And yet somehow Pinker glosses over that fact in a book that purports to be about a combination of genetics and environment.
There is hardly a single thing Pinker gets right about rape in his book, except that Susan Brownmiller is wrong. His explanation of rape is that it is a male biological urge, as evidenced in the fact that in many species males rape females. However, that theory says nothing about why straight men rape other men in prison, or in general about the dynamics of male-on-male rape. He provides scant circumstantial evidence for his theory of rape; instead, he prefers to rant about how Brownmiller's feminist theories are dominant, even though in fact the dominant view among criminologists is that rape is simply a violent crime, rather than a case of passionate sex gone awry or a mechanism of reinforcing the patriarchy.
Pinker commits not only a sin of omission in writing about rape or violence in general, but also a sin of commission, in writing that nobody really knows what causes violence. In fact, criminologists have fairly good ideas about how social ills like poverty and inequality cause crime, although they know it about murder more than about other violent crimes. Still, the rates of all violent crimes are closely correlated; the major exception is the United States' murder rate, which is higher than its general violent crime rate predicts presumably because of its lax gun control laws.
Finally, Pinker quotes a 2001 study by Eric Turkheimer as showing that the Darwin wars ended and the gene-centric side, led by Richard Dawkins, prevailed over the more environment-based side, led by Stephen Jay Gould. Thence Pinker concludes that attempts to raise children in ways more conducive to growth are futile, since much of their future behavior is genetic, and almost all of what is not genetic is due to developmental noise rather than environmental influence.
However, in 2003 Turkheimer published another study, which sealed the questions of race and IQ and of environmental influences on children in general. Turkheimer's starting point was that earlier studies about the heritability of IQ often focused on adopted children in middle- and upper-class families, where environmental influences might be different from in lower-class families. By examining a large array of data spanning multiple races and social classes, he saw that on the one hand, within the middle class IQ is highly genetic, with a heritability level of 0.72 and no significant environmental effects. But on the other, within the lower class, which includes most blacks and Hispanics in the US, the heritability of IQ drops to 0.1, and environmental factors such as the depth of poverty or the level of schooling predominate.
Obviously, it would be futile to blame Pinker for not mentioning Turkheimer's 2003 study. The Blank Slate was published in 2002. However, all other facts I have cited against Pinker's thesis and its purported social implications predate 2002. The Turkheimer study does not show by itself that Pinker's book is shoddy; it merely shows that much of it is wrong. What establishes Pinker's shoddiness is the treatment of social problems like sexism, racism, and crime, which is based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker's say.
Even a cursory examination of the current mainstream social scene will show that the myths of the noble savage and the ghost in the machine are nonexistent. That fringe scholars sometimes believe in them is no indication of their level of acceptability; there are fringe scholars who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, too. Even the theory of the blank slate, at least in its most extreme form, is a phantom ideology. Lewontin adheres to it, but Lewontin is a contrarian; non-contrarian scientists do not publish books comparing modern biology departments to Medieval Christianity. Pinker likes to poke fun at theories that suggest everyone or almost everyone can succeed in life, but he never gets around to actually refuting them. All he does is attack extreme caricatures such as the blank slate and other phantom theories.
Did we read the same book? Alon Levy must of read the Cliff Notes version, in another language, maybe Hopi.
While very disturbing conclusions if one is a Marxist (and I personally think Mark has the best analysis of capitalism, and a good argument on time travel could be made on his predictions, as no one could be that right)--
To say that Turkheimer "makes Pinker wrong" is absurd- If anything he strengthens his argument. Ridley's The Agile Gene addresses this case in detail, if anyone wants to go beyond Cliff Notes in Hopi (Hopi would be a great language to discuss quantum mechanics in)--
It is amazing to dismiss The Ghost in the Machine argument--
Anyone who believes in a soul, etc is confirming belief in the Ghost--
Theses argument by Levi should be confined to the sandbox of analysis, and the adults can go on after playing with the children-
Posted by: Scott Ahlf | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 12:19 AM
a) all three views are interlinked
They are interlinked as received ideas, which is the point, even if their precise origins are not identical.
But in practice, that narrow view makes it impossible to enforce any law against discrimination.
But your presumption of exact proportional representation sets a ceiling that conflicts with the common conception of individual liberty. Most people do not think we should cap the percentage of blacks in the NBA to the percentage of blacks in the wider population. Nor should we worry that Jews are underrepresented amongst the population of convicts in Montana. The presumption of equality is bad because it necessarily implies a simplistic and reductionistic view of a complex multicausal world.
What establishes Pinker's shoddiness is the treatment of social problems like sexism, racism, and crime, which is based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker's say.
This is not only a fallacious appeal to authority; it is also repugnant. There is no reason to presume that researchers at think tanks are of lower quality than social scientists with tenure at a university or working in government. Often the same class of persons moves out of academia into the think tank world into government and back out into academia. That the same person is a hack when working at a think tank but in the mainstream when teaching at Princeton is elitist trash.
Although the paper as Pinker describes it is not racist per se, Herrnstein was indeed a racist.
Yes, but Pinker's argument is that attacking the paper is different than attacking the person. A racist can produce a study that is methodologically sound.
However, it is legitimate to ask why this interest gap exists.
That doesn't mean it is illegitimate not to ask why it exists. It would only be illegitimate if one is presuming that exact proportional representation makes us better off or is more desireable. That, of course, is bias. Your bias.
Posted by: Jessica | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 07:27 AM
For instance, he claims that it's absurd to say that women's underrepresentation in science in the United States is due to discrimination, on the grounds that they're even more underrepresented in math, and it's not likely mathematicians are more sexist than scientists. Instead, he suggests, women are just not interested in math and science.
However, it is legitimate to ask why this interest gap exists.
That doesn't mean it is illegitimate not to ask why it exists. It would only be illegitimate if one is presuming that exact proportional representation makes us better off or is more desireable. That, of course, is bias. Your bias.
It might also be illegitimate not to ask (or at least mention) that question if it is highly relevant to the subject on which Pinker is writing - which it is. The question is, are women naturally less interested in math, or does some consciousness of the gender stereotype that they will be bad at it cause them to be worse at it or less interested. Levy quotes studies which suggest the latter. Pinker's silence on that question is an omission on his part which might well diminish the quality of the book. Alternatively, there could be a much worse effect in that Pinker might be implying that lack of discrimination within math departments means that the lower numbers of women in math are an example of an inborn tendency on the part of men to be more interested in math.
Posted by: Lynet | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 11:12 AM
//There is no reason to presume that researchers at think tanks are of lower quality than social scientists with tenure at a university or working in government.
most gov't sponsored 'think tanks' operate by some political agenda which can - and often does - skew any attempt at unbiased empirical research...
witness the 'scientific research' that the oil companies have conducted which conveniently lessens the severity of the problem of global warming...which we know to be tainted by oil industry's need to maintain profits via a manipulated public perception of the problem...
this doesn't leave university research off the hook as they are also funded by organizations who apply 'pressure' in the right places to shape and manipulate information...but I'd question the data coming out of a gov't think tank with more scrutiny than data from a university research center...
Posted by: anechoic | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 01:20 PM
It might also be illegitimate not to ask (or at least mention) that question if it is highly relevant to the subject on which Pinker is writing - which it is.
Maybe I missed Jessica's point, but as a matter of logic "it is legitimate to ask" never necessarily implies "it is illegitimate not to ask". A high degree of relevance would only prove it would be legitimate to ask. Because there is an illogical gap in Levy's thinking, something other than logic has to explain the jump.
The question is, are women naturally less interested in math, or does some consciousness of the gender stereotype that they will be bad at it cause them to be worse at it or less interested.
Perhaps this was Jessica's point, but this question isn't relevant if your definition of discrimination excludes the presumption of equality. Disinterest due to "self-inflicted stereotype threat" is not discrimination. Nor is there any particular reason for us to care about such a phenomenon unless we buy into Levy's presumption. But Pinker doesn't buy into that presumption. So that leaves us with Levy blaming Pinker for not begging the question. I think Jessica was right.
but I'd question the data coming out of a gov't think tank with more scrutiny than data from a university research center...
Um, if it's the same researcher at a different stage of his career,... why?
Posted by: Yan | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 04:51 PM
Perhaps this was Jessica's point, but this question isn't relevant if your definition of discrimination excludes the presumption of equality.
It's relevant to the notion of 'the blank slate' - which is, after all, the title of the book.
A high degree of relevance would only prove it would be legitimate to ask.
A high degree of relevance can show that it ought to be in any respectable book of that size on the subject.
Posted by: Lynet | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 06:46 PM
Might check out: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/021125crbo_books?021125crbo_books
Posted by: dipankar | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 07:31 PM
Because thinktanks have very lax intellectual standards. Their primary purpose is to support their funders' political biases, rather than to discover truths. Academics publish in peer-reviewed journals; political hacks don't. Of course, a peer-reviewed paper is still an academic piece of research, even if it was written by a thinktank researcher, and a popular book that distorts facts is still shoddy, even if it was written by an academic. However, Pinker quotes statistics published in thinktanks without any fact-checking or peer review, which makes him fair game for accusations of lax intellectual standards.
Posted by: Alon Levy | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 09:00 PM
I'm much more Dawkins than Gould, myself, but, thanks, Alon, for this review. Don't you think it's more accurate to say that the Dawkins school, rather than frown upon any suggestion of environmental influence on behavior, believes environment acts upon genetic predispositions--sometimes altering them completely, sometimes affecting them subtly but significantly, sometimes being increased or lessened by them, etc.? And what do you think of Matt Ridley's work--he writes on genetics and how it relates to who we are, but also how environment is equally influential in this outcome. And finally, doesn't Pinker say somewhere in the book that the strict "nature vs. nurture" debate is not taken seriously by any scientist worth his/her salt, as it's pretty much nothing but a conveniently alliterative shorthand for a complex interaction between the two supposed "poles" that determine human behavior? I'm honestly asking you this, b/c I read the book a few years ago and don't remember, and it may be Ridley who said this very bluntly in one of his books (or someone else).
Posted by: Akbi | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 09:40 PM
Thanks Alon. Pinker usually gets a free pass on this site, despite his sloppy and tendentious science. The man writes far too much and is a simplifier and a populizer. Dawkins is even worse. Both are steeped in Ev Psych silliness. (All that selfish gene nonesense.)
Posted by: Jonathan | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 08:28 AM
A high degree of relevance can show that it ought to be in any respectable book of that size on the subject.
No, you're moving from an is to an ought. That's a fallacy. And it proves my point about bias.
Because thinktanks have very lax intellectual standards. Their primary purpose is to support their funders' political biases, rather than to discover truths. Academics publish in peer-reviewed journals; political hacks don't.
Universities have funders, too. So do peer-reviewed journals. And peer-review does not prove the work is good, it just tends to ensure a certain overall level of quality. You can have non-peer-reviewed work that is of high quality and empirically sound, such as the best law reviews. And you can have academics who aren't political hacks publishing in think tanks. I think you're nitpicking. I wouldn't reject RAND or Brookings Institution papers out of hand. That would be silly.
Pinker quotes statistics published in thinktanks without any fact-checking or peer review
Yes, but you haven't attacked the statistical work itself; you've attacked Pinker for citing to it. You're criticizing him for citing to stats that, for all you know, are perfectly correct. You're a biased nitpicker.
It's relevant to the notion of 'the blank slate' - which is, after all, the title of the book.
That's why it's legitimate to ask. That doesn't make it illegitimate not to ask. Your problem is that Pinker isn't spouting your agenda. Not everyone must agree with you in order to have a valid opinion. It's called pluralism.
Posted by: Jessica | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 05:56 PM
Pinker usually gets a free pass on this site, despite his sloppy and tendentious science. The man writes far too much and is a simplifier and a populizer. Dawkins is even worse. Both are steeped in Ev Psych silliness
How would you know? You're a professor of 18th-century British Literature.
Posted by: Jessica | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 06:06 PM
Yes, but you haven't attacked the statistical work itself; you've attacked Pinker for citing to it. You're criticizing him for citing to stats that, for all you know, are perfectly correct. You're a biased nitpicker.
It's reasonable to criticize a scientist for citing non peer-reviewed data in a book; the fact that it might turn out to be "perfectly correct" is hardly a counterargument, since it might equally well turn out to be flawed, the point of asking for peer-review sources is so that we don't have to go around tracking down each study cited in the book to check its methodology ourselves before judging how likely the book's thesis is to be valid.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 06:48 PM
it might equally well turn out to be flawed, the point of asking for peer-review sources is so that we don't have to go around tracking down each study cited in the book to check its methodology ourselves before judging how likely the book's thesis is to be valid.
Well, that's just an admission that you didn't do any tracking down or checking of the methodology yourself. In which case, you aren't criticizing the author for anything but your own laziness and ignorance.
As I already noted, the reason your criticism of Pinker makes no sense is that there are non-peer-reviewed sources of empirical or scholarly information that are credible, such as law reviews, papers put out by reputable think tanks, and work by reputable academics (who may be out of academia).
It is also the case that Pinker is a reputable scientist. You shouldn't be questioning whether his thesis is valid; you should be questioning whether it is sound. Your confusion over soundness and validity is the kernel of what's wrong with your biased criticism.
Posted by: Jessica | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 07:04 PM
It's relevant to the notion of 'the blank slate' - which is, after all, the title of the book.
That's why it's legitimate to ask. That doesn't make it illegitimate not to ask.
I suspect we are simply not going to agree on this point, but, to my mind, writing a large book on a particular topic can constitute an undertaking to cover that topic with reasonable breadth, or at least to mention those areas you could cover but aren't, if you're going to leave things out.
More to the point, though, if your overall topic is the question of whether some traits are inborn or a result of a person's environment, then only arguing as far as lack of discrimination can be somewhat misleading. Pinker may not directly state that the indications that there is no discrimination mean that differences between men and women with regard to interest in mathematics are inborn, but given that the question of whether such traits are inborn is his main topic, it is natural to assume that this is what he is implying. Levy is then pointing out that there is a flaw in this implied reasoning.
Posted by: Lynet | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 07:35 PM
Lynet,
The problem is clearly that you do not understand the scope of Pinker's topic.
Levy, as I have pointed out above, is trying to artifically enlarge Pinker's topic by arguing Pinker should include reference to a discourse corresponding to Levy's biases and ideology.
Pinker is a scientist. His topic is not radical feminist polemics. Stephen Pinker is not Catherine MacKinnon.
If you want to read radical feminist polemics, read Catherine MacKinnon.
Posted by: Jessica | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 07:43 PM
Jessica, you're using a very adversarial and ad hominem-based style of debate (with the accusations of bias, ignorance, etc.), reminiscent more of the type of shouting matches that characterize typical political "debates" on the internet rather than discussions of scientific claims--could you please tone it down a little? To reply to your specific arguments, it is hardly "laziness" or "ignorance" to ask that an author cite peer-reviewed material, it's standard practice in the scientific community, because scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own. Given your argument, would you say that peer-review is entirely unecessary, since any scientist who relies on peers to investigate the methodology of a scientific study is just being too lazy/ignorant to investigate it themselves? What do you think is the value of peer-review, if it has nothing to do with cutting down the amount of gruntwork each individual scientist has to do in evaluating someone else's research?
Your argument about soundness vs. validity doesn't make much sense either--I never claimed Pinker's thesis was invalid, in fact I never commented on his claims at all, and I only used the word "valid" when I said "the point of asking for peer-review sources is so that we don't have to go around tracking down each study cited in the book to check its methodology ourselves before judging how likely the book's thesis is to be valid." This is an argument about soundness because it's about whether the book provides a good basis for "judging" the validity of its thesis--if a book doesn't give the sort of evidence that would allow us to judge the validity of the thesis, then its arguments are unsound, even though the thesis might in fact be correct. And of course, Pinker does cite peer-reviewed papers for a great many of the facts he uses to support his arguments, so I'm not making a blanket claim that everything in the book is unsound, just particular arguments which depend on papers from thinktanks which have not been peer-reviewed.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 07:47 PM
Given your argument, would you say that peer-review is entirely unecessary
How is this relevant to whether Pinker's claims are sound?
This is an argument about soundness because it's about whether the book provides a good basis for "judging" the validity of its thesis--if a book doesn't give the sort of evidence that would allow us to judge the validity of the thesis, then its arguments are unsound, even though the thesis might in fact be correct
Actually, you're wrong. You're conflating whether you actually know (because you didn't check the think tank's methods) with whether one can know (in particular, whether Pinker checked the think tanks' methods before citing to them). If we're talking about a reputable scientist citing to a study conducted by a reputable think tank with a large number of reputable researchers and connections to reputable universities, then it is lazy induction to conclude that citation renders the argument unsound.
"Laziness" and "ignorance" are not personal attacks; they are accurate descriptions of the epistemological foundations of your argument. As for Levy, he clearly is advocating in favor of bias. It says so on the website he cites to in the post above. Yes, I check people's citations. I'm not lazy, like you.
Posted by: Jessica | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 07:59 PM
Given your argument, would you say that peer-review is entirely unecessary
How is this relevant to whether Pinker's claims are sound?
It's relevant to the general question of whether it's reasonable, in the context of a scientific debate, to equate "non-peer-reviewed" with "unsound". I believe this assumption is made by the peer-review system itself--if a scientific paper cited a bunch of think-tank papers, it wouldn't pass peer-review, the reviewers wouldn't be expected to do a separate peer-review of each of the cited papers in order to judge the scientific soundness of the paper which cited them.
Now that I've explained what I think is the relevance, could you please answer the question? If your arguments are consistent, then if you accuse me of "laziness" and "ignorance" for not performing a detailed study of the methodology behind each paper, it seems to me you should make the same accusation against any scientist who relies on the judgment of expert peers for deciding whether a piece of research is sound as opposed to performing her own detailed investigation. On the other hand, if you're not really trying to advance a self-consistent intellectual position, but just trying to make some insulting jibes at your opponents in an internet debate, then you will probably continue to avoid this question.
This is an argument about soundness because it's about whether the book provides a good basis for "judging" the validity of its thesis--if a book doesn't give the sort of evidence that would allow us to judge the validity of the thesis, then its arguments are unsound, even though the thesis might in fact be correct
Actually, you're wrong. You're conflating whether you actually know (because you didn't check the think tank's methods) with whether one can know (in particular, whether Pinker checked the think tanks' methods before citing to them).
"Soundness" is not simply a question of whether one "can know" the claims made are correct if one puts an arbitrary amount of effort into it. It is partly a matter of agreed-upon conventions about how much of a burden the person making the argument is expected to shoulder themselves, and how much they can reasonably expect of their audience. Obviously if a scientist made a bunch of controversial factual claims without citing any any sources, the argument would be judged unsound even if later detailed studies showed the claims had been correct; it still wouldn't have been reasonable for the scientist to tell his audience they needed to go out and perform these studies themselves before making judgments about his argument. I'm just saying that it's an agreed-upon convention in scientific discussions that it is also asking too much of an audience that they perform their own detailed check of the methodology of the cited sources, and that this is one of the main reasons for having a peer-review system in the first place.
If we're talking about a reputable scientist citing to a study conducted by a reputable think tank with a large number of reputable researchers and connections to reputable universities, then it is lazy induction to conclude that citation renders the argument unsound.
Not according to the peer-review system, no; the fact that an eminent scientist cited a non-peer-reviewed paper in a popular book would be unlikely to convince a peer review committee that the paper counted as a good citation in another paper that they were reviewing.
In any case, are you really confident that Pinker investigated each of these think-tank studies himself with the same level of time and rigor that would go into peer-review? He never claimed to have checked the methodology of the papers at all, as far as I can remember. So it's not like I'm accusing him of dishonesty, just of an error in judgment in citing those papers in his argument, or possibly of having more lax standards of evidence in a book aimed at the public than he would in a professional paper (an accusation that could be leveled against many scientists writing popular books).
"Laziness" and "ignorance" are not personal attacks; they are accurate descriptions of the epistemological foundations of your argument. As for Levy, he clearly is advocating in favor of bias. It says so on the website he cites to in the post above. Yes, I check people's citations. I'm not lazy, like you.
I'm skeptical that someone would write an emotionally-charged taunting line like "I'm not lazy, like you" if they were just trying to make a dry intellectual critique of the "intellectual foundations of my argument", as opposed to being intentionally provocative and insulting. Surely it wouldn't be hard to find a more neutral phrasing for this sort of critique? And as I said earlier, if you are really making a well-thought-out and consistent intellectual argument, I don't see how you can avoid the implication that the scientific community as a whole is equally "lazy" for relying on the peer-review system instead of each scientist personally investigating every single study that comes up in the course of a debate.
As for the accusation of bias, it's still an ad hominem argument even if you believe there is some factual basis for it, like an author citing a "biased" web site (isn't this a fairly subjective judgment?) And you made other psychological attacks on Levy, like "Your problem is that Pinker isn't spouting your agenda", which of course you couldn't really know unless you were a mind-reader. Also, you did not only accuse Levy of bias, you also accused me of it when you said "Your confusion over soundness and validity is the kernel of what's wrong with your biased criticism." At that point my only comment had been on the importance for using peer-reviewed sources, I had said nothing else about Pinker's book (have I mentioned that I actually liked The Blank Slate for the most part, even if I didn't agree with every detail?)
As for your claim that you "check people's citations", have you in fact checked the thinktank papers Pinker cites, and looked at their methodology with the same degree of scrutiny as a peer-review committee? Or are you just trusting Pinker's judgment here? if so, would you be equally trusting of the judgment of Lewontin if he cited some non-peer-reviewed articles in a popular book?
Posted by: Jesse M. | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 09:22 PM
I submit that anyone who reads what I say about rape anywhere, including in this essay, and concludes I'm a MacKinnonite is too illiterate to parse the sentence, "There is hardly a single thing Pinker gets right about rape in his book, except that Susan Brownmiller is wrong."
Posted by: Alon Levy | Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 11:10 PM
It's relevant to the general question of whether it's reasonable
This is a way of saying it's not particularly revelant. Everything is relevant to everything else at a very high level of generality.
I submit that anyone who reads what I say about rape anywhere, including in this essay, and concludes I'm a MacKinnonite
I did not conclude you were a MacKinnonite. My point was that if one wants to read MacKinnon, one should read MacKinnon.
I'm skeptical that someone would write an emotionally-charged taunting line like "I'm not lazy, like you" if they were just trying to make a dry intellectual critique of the "intellectual foundations of my argument", as opposed to being intentionally provocative and insulting.
Well, that's your subjective bias. I wrote "epistemological foundations" not "intellectual foundations". One can be intellectual and yet know nothing. You are a case in point. Neutral enough for you?
Obviously if a scientist made a bunch of controversial factual claims without citing any any sources, the argument would be judged unsound even if later detailed studies showed the claims had been correct
There is a difference between actual controvery and sham constrovery, no? Are you claiming that creationism must be taught in public schools beside evolution because we must "teach the controversy"?
have you in fact checked the thinktank papers Pinker cites, and looked at their methodology with the same degree of scrutiny as a peer-review committee?
My criticism is of your failure to check those cites. Trying to redirect the focus to me is a tu quoque fallacy.
He never claimed to have checked the methodology of the papers at all, as far as I can remember.
You admit that you don't even recollect the facts that allegedly undergird your own argument and yet you take me to task for questioning the epistemological foundations of your argument? Talk about inconsistency.
If your arguments are consistent, then if you accuse me of "laziness" and "ignorance" for not performing a detailed study of the methodology behind each paper, it seems to me you should make the same accusation against any scientist
This is a fallacy, too. Unlike me calling you lazy and ignorant, it is formally and actually an ad hominem.
So it's not like I'm accusing him of dishonesty, just ... possibly of having more lax standards of evidence in a book aimed at the public than he would in a professional paper (an accusation that could be leveled against many scientists writing popular books).
Oh? You mean your criticism is insubstantial and pointless fluff?
Posted by: Jessica | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 01:51 AM
Not according to the peer-review system, no
Not all induction need be within the peer-review system to be sound; not all reasoning within the peer-review system is sound.
Posted by: Jessica | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 02:09 AM
It's relevant to the general question of whether it's reasonable, in the context of a scientific debate, to equate "non-peer-reviewed" with "unsound"
This is a way of saying it's not particularly revelant. Everything is relevant to everything else at a very high level of generality.
So you don't think the general question "do all non-peer reviewed citations qualify as unsound arguments in the context of scientific debates" is relevant to the specific question "does Pinker's use of non-peer reviewed citations make some of his arguments unsound?"
Obviously if a scientist made a bunch of controversial factual claims without citing any any sources, the argument would be judged unsound even if later detailed studies showed the claims had been correct
There is a difference between actual controvery and sham constrovery, no? Are you claiming that creationism must be taught in public schools beside evolution because we must "teach the controversy"?
Creationism is a sham controversy because evolution is not controversial in the scientific community. But Levy pointed out that the ideas Pinker uses think-tank studies to support are certainly controversial among scientists trained in the relevant fields: "What establishes Pinker's shoddiness is the treatment of social problems like sexism, racism, and crime, which is based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker's say."
My criticism is of your failure to check those cites. Trying to redirect the focus to me is a tu quoque fallacy.
It might be the tu quoque fallacy if you were making an actual argument, but really you're just being insulting. So, I don't feel too bad about pointing out that if by your standards I'm lazy and ignorant, then so are you.
He never claimed to have checked the methodology of the papers at all, as far as I can remember.
You admit that you don't even recollect the facts that allegedly undergird your own argument
Whether or not Pinker claims to have done a detailed check of the methodology of the papers he cites does not "undergird my argument", since my argument is just about how scientists shouldn't rely on non-peer-reviewed studies. The question about whether Pinker had claimed anything about checking the methodology of these studies was just a side-issue, sparked by your claim that since Pinker includes them in his book we should take his word that they're sound (I was just pointing out that I don't think Pinker made any specific claims to have verified their soundness). And again, would you urge the same sort of trust if instead of Pinker it was Lewontin citing some non-peer-reviewed sources in making an argument that didn't happen to fit your own views?
and yet you take me to task for questioning the epistemological foundations of your argument?
No, I take you to task for the specific assertion that a person making a scientific case to the public should be free to use non-peer-reviewed sources, and to put the burden on his audience to check the soundness of these sources on their own.
If your arguments are consistent, then if you accuse me of "laziness" and "ignorance" for not performing a detailed study of the methodology behind each paper, it seems to me you should make the same accusation against any scientist
This is a fallacy, too. Unlike me calling you lazy and ignorant, it is formally and actually an ad hominem.
Er, what? Pointing out that your argument leads naturally to certain strange conclusions is an ad hom, even though this statement has nothing to do with you personally? Maybe you should review the definition of "ad hominem".
Not all induction need be within the peer-review system to be sound; not all reasoning within the peer-review system is sound.
No, but it provides a reasonable standard of quality that allows a scientist to cite a large number of studies/papers without putting the burden on the audience to do a detailed investigation of each one in order to come to a judgment about the plausibility of the scientist's case. I'll just refer back to an argument and question from a previous comment:
it's standard practice in the scientific community, because scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own ... What do you think is the value of peer-review, if it has nothing to do with cutting down the amount of gruntwork each individual scientist has to do in evaluating someone else's research?
Unsurprisingly, you never answered this question.
Well, that's your subjective bias. I wrote "epistemological foundations" not "intellectual foundations". One can be intellectual and yet know nothing. You are a case in point. Neutral enough for you?
OK, it's pretty obvious by now that you are not really arguing in good faith, but just trolling.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 03:00 AM
Pointing out that your argument leads naturally to certain strange conclusions is an ad hom, even though this statement has nothing to do with you personally?
But you didn't point out a feature of my argument; you suggested that my perspective would naturally lead me to take a certain position with regard to any scientist. If your suggestion equally applies to anyone who shares my perspective, it could be fairly taken as a circumstantial ad hominem. There's more than one kind of ad hominem. Look it up; there's a famous example involving Peter Abelard.
Unsurprisingly, you never answered this question: What do you think is the value of peer-review, if it has nothing to do with cutting down the amount of gruntwork each individual scientist has to do in evaluating someone else's research?
Because the abstract question as to "What is the value of peer-review?" is irrelevant to whether Stephen Pinker's arguments in The Blank Slate are incredible due to a few of his citations to statistical work performed by think tanks.
it's standard practice in the scientific community, because scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own
That would be a fine argument if Pinker had not provided any citations. He provided the citations. You can follow up and evaluate the data yourself if you like. You know the name of the think tanks and can access the studies, probably from the think tank web sites, but you have not done that and are attempting to discredit the quality of Pinker's inferences premised on those statistics because you don't like the name of the think tank that provided them. Correction: you have no idea if you like the names of the think tanks, because you don't even know the names of the think tanks, so you have no idea if their work is generally taken seriously in academia or whether their staff is comprised of respectable academics taking a break from teaching.
Levy pointed out that the ideas Pinker uses think-tank studies to support are certainly controversial among scientists trained in the relevant fields ... based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker's say."
The problem with this attempt is that you did not read my posts above. There is no evidence that the researchers in the relevant think tanks are not mainstream scientists aware of what actual controveries are; for all you know, they are researchers who take actual controversies into account in their work and discount the sham controvery that Levy is trying to stir up in his polemic above.
my argument is just about how scientists shouldn't rely on non-peer-reviewed studies.
This is incoherent. Where do scientists get their hypotheses if they may only generate scientific knowledge based on what is in peer-reviewed studies that have already been published?
The question about whether Pinker had claimed anything about checking the methodology of these studies was just a side-issue, sparked by your claim that since Pinker includes them in his book we should take his word that they're sound (I was just pointing out that I don't think Pinker made any specific claims to have verified their soundness).
No, it isn't a side-issue: that is the main point, which you are half-cleverly trying to run away from. The question is whether Pinker's argument is in fact sound, not whether his citation form is up-to-snuff; but you insist that Pinker has a burden to communicate that his argument is sound to you; assuming you're right, the question is whether Pinker communicates to you that his argument is sound, yet you don't even remember what he communicated to you! So what is the basis of your criticism? You don't know whether Pinker sufficiently communicated to you the soundness of his argument because you can't recall.
Creationism is a sham controversy because evolution is not controversial in the scientific community.
Are you arguing that Stephen Pinker cannot distinguish actual controversies from sham ones? Perhaps Pinker does not see a controversy where Alon Levy does because Alon Levy is biased and Stephen Pinker is not. Why are you discounting that possibility?
So you don't think the general question "do all non-peer reviewed citations qualify as unsound arguments in the context of scientific debates" is relevant to the specific question "does Pinker's use of non-peer reviewed citations make some of his arguments unsound?"
No, I don't. The question 'Do all non-peer reviewed citations qualify as unsound arguments in the context of scientific debates?' is nonsense. Citations are not arguments.
So, I don't feel too bad about pointing out that if by your standards I'm lazy and ignorant, then so are you.
You just contradicted yourself. Up in the thread you chided me for my argument's fundamental inconsistency, yet now you claim I have a standard so categorical and pure that it can be applied to prove I am a hypocrite. Which is it? Am I incapable of of making a consistent argument, or does my argument have categorical application? Or are you too stupid to realize when you've pissed in your own soup?
Posted by: Jessica | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 04:55 AM
Pointing out that your argument leads naturally to certain strange conclusions is an ad hom, even though this statement has nothing to do with you personally?
But you didn't point out a feature of my argument; you suggested that my perspective would naturally lead me to take a certain position with regard to any scientist. If your suggestion equally applies to anyone who shares my perspective, it could be fairly taken as a circumstantial ad hominem.
No, a circumstantial ad hominem deals with motive, which would only apply if I were trying to point out an inconsistency in your statements in order to show that you don't really believe some of them. But I'm not saying anything about your motives here, nor am I even saying your views are inconsistent (since you haven't answered my questions about the value of peer review in general, I don't know your views on that subject); I'm just making a statement of the kind "if we use argument X to show Y in the case of Pinker, then applying the same argument X to the case of peer-review in general would imply Z, but Z is a fairly absurd conclusion, therefore this discredits argument X". There is no sense in which this is an ad hom.
Because the abstract question as to "What is the value of peer-review?" is irrelevant to whether Stephen Pinker's arguments in The Blank Slate are incredible due to a few of his citations to statistical work performed by think tanks.
First of all, I didn't say that "Pinker's arguments in The Blank Slate" are unsound in general, just any specific ones which rely on non-peer-reviewed sources. And the question "what is the value of peer-review" is quite relevant here, because if the answer to the question is "the value of peer review is that scientific debates would be impossible if we each had to check the methodology of each study on our own", then it is unreasonable for a scientist to point to non-peer-reviewed studies and expect his audience to check the methodology on their own. Of course Pinker didn't say anything about expecting this, but you argued that the burden is indeed on the audience to perform an evaluation of the think-tank studies.
it's standard practice in the scientific community, because scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own
That would be a fine argument if Pinker had not provided any citations. He provided the citations. You can follow up and evaluate the data yourself if you like.
Um, my argument was that "scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own", and your response is that I should investigate the methodology of the papers on my own? You're kind of missing the point of my "fine argument".
Levy pointed out that the ideas Pinker uses think-tank studies to support are certainly controversial among scientists trained in the relevant fields ... based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker's say."
The problem with this attempt is that you did not read my posts above. There is no evidence that the researchers in the relevant think tanks are not mainstream scientists aware of what actual controveries are
And what does this have to do with the price of tea in china? I wasn't commenting on whether they are "mainstream scientists" or whether they are "aware of what actual controversies are", only whether their claims are, in fact, controversial among other scientists. It was in response to your little quip about "teaching the controversy", remember? I hope you're not claiming that mainstream scientists never produce controversial work, or that we can be confident that work by a mainstream scientist published by a thinktank has the same quality as work by the same scientist that passed peer review (after all, if we could be confident in the work of any mainstream scientist before it had been checked by others, we wouldn't need to put their work through peer review in the first place).
my argument is just about how scientists shouldn't rely on non-peer-reviewed studies.
This is incoherent. Where do scientists get their hypotheses if they may only generate scientific knowledge based on what is in peer-reviewed studies that have already been published?
I think it was pretty obvious that I was only talking about "relying on previous studies" when the scientist is relying on the work of other scientists to support factual claims made in a paper, not when proposing novel hypotheses or providing the data from one's own experiment.
The question about whether Pinker had claimed anything about checking the methodology of these studies was just a side-issue, sparked by your claim that since Pinker includes them in his book we should take his word that they're sound (I was just pointing out that I don't think Pinker made any specific claims to have verified their soundness).
No, it isn't a side-issue: that is the main point, which you are half-cleverly trying to run away from. The question is whether Pinker's argument is in fact sound, not whether his citation form is up-to-snuff
Er, and my whole argument is that if an argument depends on citations from non-peer-reviewed studies, then in a scientific context it is automatically unsound.
but you insist that Pinker has a burden to communicate that his argument is sound to you
No, I just say that your claim that the burden is on me to investigate the methodology of the studies he cites is at odds with the accepted standards of burden of proof in scientific arguments.
assuming you're right, the question is whether Pinker communicates to you that his argument is sound, yet you don't even remember what he communicated to you!
You have a strange free-associative style of criticism where you take the specific things I've said, paraphrase them in some absurdly general way (like your earlier paraphrase that I was 'taking you to task for questioning the epistemological foundations of my argument'), and then say that something else I've said is at odds with this vague general formulation. My criticisms are specifically about the importance of using peer-reviewed citations, not some nebulous claim that "Pinker has a burden to communicate that his argument is sound". I don't know what it even means to "communicate an argument is sound", anyway--are you arguing that if Pinker had said something like "I know these studies aren't peer-reviewed but I've investigated their methodology and they're good, trust me", that would imply he was making a sound argument? Normally a sound argument does not require that we just take the speaker's word for it on important issues.
Are you arguing that Stephen Pinker cannot distinguish actual controversies from sham ones?
No, but then Pinker didn't claim that all the facts he cited would be uncontroversial among scientists.
So you don't think the general question "do all non-peer reviewed citations qualify as unsound arguments in the context of scientific debates" is relevant to the specific question "does Pinker's use of non-peer reviewed citations make some of his arguments unsound?"
No, I don't. The question 'Do all non-peer reviewed citations qualify as unsound arguments in the context of scientific debates?' is nonsense. Citations are not arguments.
Sigh. I think a charitable reader would understand what I meant here, which to phrase it more precisely would be something like "If a scientific argument depends on factual claims which come from studies by other scientists which have not been peer-reviewed, does that automatically qualify it as an unsound argument according to accepted standards in science?" Now, can you see the relevance of this to the question "if one of Pinker's arguments depends on factual claims which come from non-peer-reviewed studies by think-tanks, does that automatically qualify it as an unsound argument according to accepted standards in science?"
It might be the tu quoque fallacy if you were making an actual argument, but really you're just being insulting. So, I don't feel too bad about pointing out that if by your standards I'm lazy and ignorant, then so are you.
You just contradicted yourself. Up in the thread you chided me for my argument's fundamental inconsistency, yet now you claim I have a standard so categorical and pure that it can be applied to prove I am a hypocrite. Which is it?
More argument-by-free-association. I didn't chide you for "inconsistency", I pointed out that one of your arguments, if applied more generally, would lead to ridiculous conclusions (namely a denunciation of the entire peer review system). Anyway, in turning your own insults back on you, I was actually using a pretty much identical strategy: showing that if you were to apply your claims about me being "lazy" and "ignorant" more generally, it would lead to a conclusion you might not like (namely that you are equally lazy and ignorant). In neither case am I commenting on whether your own claims and beliefs are actually consistent or inconsistent, I'm just saying that if your logic were applied to situation Y, it should lead to conclusion Z.
But, as I said before, there's an important difference between the two cases; in the first you were making an actual argument of some kind so I was making a counterargument, in the second case you were just insulting me so I was only turning that around and saying, in effect, "I know you are but what am I?"
Posted by: Jesse M. | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 10:36 AM
Jessica, get up on the wrong side of the bed this week?
I'm rather amazed that Pinker is taken seriously at all. The major theme of his work is that culture doesn't influence human identity. What does he imagine we've been up to for the last 10,000 years? If there is any doubt that science is becoming too fragmented to make meaningful social claims, Steven Pinker will clear that right up.
Posted by: Deets | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 11:26 AM
Jesse M: I didn't chide you for "inconsistency"
Jesse M: "On the other hand, if you're not really trying to advance a self-consistent intellectual position, but just trying to make some insulting jibes at your opponents in an internet debate, then you will probably continue to avoid this question."
Jesse M: "I'm not saying anything about your motives here, nor am I even saying your views are inconsistent..."
You are a liar.
Jesse M: if the answer to the question is "the value of peer review is that scientific debates would be impossible if we each had to check the methodology of each study on our own"
Except we aren't talking about scientific debate. We're talking about Levy's and your ignorant and intellectually lazy attacks on Stephen Pinker based on citations to think tanks you cannot name in his book, which you evidently did not read or do not remember well enough to credibly comment on.
Jesse M: Of course Pinker didn't say anything about expecting this, but you argued that the burden is indeed on the audience to perform an evaluation of the think-tank studies.
No, I argued that if you're going to argue that Author made an error in citing to Think Tank X, you should have read the citation and know what the name of Think Tank X is.
Jesse M: I hope you're not claiming that mainstream scientists never produce controversial work
No, I'm claiming there is a difference between (1) non-controversial work by a mainstream scientist that a hack calls controversial to discredit it and (2) actually controversial work put out by non-mainstream scientists. I think you're the equivalent of a creationist arguing that an "Evolution is just a theory" sticker be placed on a high school textbook.
Jesse M: or that we can be confident that work by a mainstream scientist published by a thinktank has the same quality as work by the same scientist that passed peer review (after all, if we could be confident in the work of any mainstream scientist before it had been checked by others, we wouldn't need to put their work through peer review in the first place).
If we don't know who the scientist is, what the think tank is, or why or to what purpose the citation is being used, we shouldn't make an assumption either way. We should be neutral. You are advocating in favor of bias.
Jesse M: I think a charitable reader would understand what I meant here
I think a charitable reader would not assume that Pinker has not checked the methodology of the think tank whose statistics he is relying on.
Jesse M: Pinker didn't claim that all the facts he cited would be uncontroversial among scientists.
1. He doesn't need to claim it if he cites facts accurately; the facts speak for themselves.
2. He doesn't need to claim whether the argument is controversial; either it is controversial or it is not.
3. Look, your memory has conveniently reappeared just in time to fix your broken argument.
Jesse M: Normally a sound argument does not require that we just take the speaker's word for it
Citing to facts is not pleading for someone to take you on your word alone. We're talking about citations to studies, remember?
Posted by: Jessica | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 01:48 PM
Wow. I check back on this a day or so later and we have an all out flame war between one "Jessica" and one "Jesse." Since "Jessica" chose to question my credentials (without of course providing any of hers) I can only say that
1) Yes I am an English Professor and not a scientist. But, my period includes Locke and Hume, and I've written on both. So I have very good sense of the original blank slate argument.
2) I have work-related interests in the cognitive sciences, about which I do know at least a very little. I've never found Pinker that convincing. He's always seemed to me, for what's worth, to be a populizer who puts a smiley face on some of the most intractible problems in the philosophy of mind (including most recently consciousness). I'd refer "Jessica" to my colleague Jerry Fodor's review of How the Mind Works in the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html), later expanded into the short book, The Mind Doesn't Work that Way (MIT, 2000).
3. I have no problem with nativism as such. Who could deny that much of the mind is with us prior to experience? None of that entails a Selfish Gene or a reduction of the entire domain of culture to a holdover from the Pleistocene.
4. It is amusing, finally, that Jessica queries my own credentials without giving us the slightest sense of who she is. Perhaps she is Pinker himself. She could in fact be anyone. Bottom line: it is one thing to say what you think with your real name attached to your ideas. It is another to argue from the safety of anonymity. "She" is at the very least a coward.
Posted by: Jonathan | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 03:12 PM
Of course Pinker didn't say anything about expecting this, but you argued that the burden is indeed on the audience to perform an evaluation of the think-tank studies.
No, I argued that if you're going to argue that Author made an error in citing to Think Tank X, you should have read the citation and know what the name of Think Tank X is
But that wouldn't be enough to judge whether the study's methodology was good or not. So I would still make a blanket assertion that Pinker made an error in judgment in citing any non peer-reviewed studies when making a case about scientific issues, regardless of where these studies came from, because even if the methodology of these studies happened to be good, the audience has no assurance that this is the case unless they perform their own detailed investigation; that's the value of peer-reviewed sources, they don't place such a burden on the audience, the peer-review process gives the audience a reasonable level of confidence that there were no obvious problems with a study.
if the answer to the question is "the value of peer review is that scientific debates would be impossible if we each had to check the methodology of each study on our own"
Except we aren't talking about scientific debate. We're talking about Levy's and your ignorant and intellectually lazy attacks on Stephen Pinker
We're not having a scientific debate, but please read the the context of what you quote, I didn't say we were having one. I said that if a scientist cites non-peer-reviewed studies when the scientist is engaged in a scientific debate, then this places an unreasonable burden on the audience and thus is "bad form" (this is not itself an argument about science, but a meta-argument what is appropriate for a scientist to say or do when trying to present a case). Do you disagree that Pinker's book was meant as part of a scientific debate?
(BTW, the man's name is Steven Pinker)
No, I argued that if you're going to argue that Author made an error in citing to Think Tank X, you should have read the citation and know what the name of Think Tank X is.
But that's irrelevant, since like I said, I'm making a blanket statement about the appropriateness of citing any non-peer-reviewed sources when making a scientific case to the public. I don't have the book in my house so I can't check the name of the specific think-tank (I lent the book to my sister after finishing it, since she was the one who suggested that it looked interesting), but even if it was a think-tank composed exclusively of the most respected scientists in the world, it wouldn't change anything for me as long as the studies they produced had not been peer-reviewed by critical colleagues.
I hope you're not claiming that mainstream scientists never produce controversial work
No, I'm claiming there is a difference between (1) non-controversial work by a mainstream scientist that a hack calls controversial to discredit it and (2) actually controversial work put out by non-mainstream scientists.
You seem to be avoiding the question, since neither of your categories covers actually controversial work by mainstream scientists, which is what I was asking about. If you think mainstream scientists never disagree about significant issues, you've got a lot to learn about science; if you just think that none of Pinker's arguments in The Blank Slate, or the claims of evolutionary psychology in general, would be disputed by other mainstream scientists, I could point you to a number of books and articles demonstrating otherwise, such as this critical review of Pinker's book by the evolutionary geneticist H. Allen Orr, or the general critique of evolutionary psychology in the book Adapting Minds, which is by a philosopher of science but summarizes many arguments made in the literature by mainstream scientists (see here and here for examples of specific critiques from the book).
or that we can be confident that work by a mainstream scientist published by a thinktank has the same quality as work by the same scientist that passed peer review (after all, if we could be confident in the work of any mainstream scientist before it had been checked by others, we wouldn't need to put their work through peer review in the first place).
If we don't know who the scientist is, what the think tank is, or why or to what purpose the citation is being used, we shouldn't make an assumption either way. We should be neutral. You are advocating in favor of bias.
No, I'm saying that we don't have a good enough basis for "making an assumption either way" even if we do know the scientist; unless the work has been peer-reviewed, we can't have much basis for confidence that the work is sound, therefore other scientists should not cite such works when making their case.
I think a charitable reader would understand what I meant here
I think a charitable reader would not assume that Pinker has not checked the methodology of the think tank whose statistics he is relying on.
This response has nothing to do with the specific issue I was talking about when I said you were reading me uncharitably. Once again, it seems like instead of trying to respond to my actual arguments and paying attention to the context of the statements you quote, you're just scanning my response for keywords and sentence fragments you can quote and then post some snappy comeback to. But as far as your comment goes, I don't think it's particularly uncharitable to suspect (not 'assume') that Pinker did not do an in-depth study of the methodology of each non-peer-reviewed study he cited; perhaps he just trusted in the reputations of specific scientists or think-tanks, as you have been advocating all along.
Pinker didn't claim that all the facts he cited would be uncontroversial among scientists.
1. He doesn't need to claim it if he cites facts accurately; the facts speak for themselves.
But if they are controversial, that means other scientists dispute their status as "facts".
2. He doesn't need to claim whether the argument is controversial; either it is controversial or it is not.
Again you respond to an isolated quote of mine without paying any attention to the context. If you recall, I was responding to your question "Are you arguing that Stephen Pinker cannot distinguish actual controversies from sham ones?" which was in response to my comment "Creationism is a sham controversy because evolution is not controversial in the scientific community"--of course there'd be no reason to think I was accusing him of failing to distinguish real vs. sham controversies if he had never said whether the argument was controversial or not in the first place!
3. Look, your memory has conveniently reappeared just in time to fix your broken argument.
I don't have a photographic memory, so without the book on hand I can't claim to be certain that Pinker never claimed his arguments would be totally uncontroversial. But let's say I'm pretty confident he didn't, because I remember him discussing the views of fellow scientists, such as Gould or some of what he called the "connectoplasm" advocates in neuroscience, who he disagreed with.
Normally a sound argument does not require that we just take the speaker's word for it
Citing to facts is not pleading for someone to take you on your word alone. We're talking about citations to studies, remember?
More ignoring of context. When I talked about not taking the speaker's word for things, I was referring to the specific hypothetical question I had asked immediately prior: 'I don't know what it even means to "communicate an argument is sound", anyway--are you arguing that if Pinker had said something like "I know these studies aren't peer-reviewed but I've investigated their methodology and they're good, trust me", that would imply he was making a sound argument?'
I didn't chide you for "inconsistency"
On the other hand, if you're not really trying to advance a self-consistent intellectual position, but just trying to make some insulting jibes at your opponents in an internet debate, then you will probably continue to avoid this question.
You are a liar.
Am I? The quote you posted didn't "chide you for inconsistency", it asked if you were putting forward a well-thought out, self-consistent intellectual argument, or just being insulting, and pointed out that if you were being consistent I don't see how you could avoid criticizing the entire peer review system; but since you refused to tell me your thoughts on peer review, I don't know if you do in fact (consistently) criticize the whole system. To the extent that the quote was chiding you, it was just chiding you for your childish taunts; even if someone was being inconsistent I wouldn't "chide" them for it, I'd just point out the apparent inconsistency, and if they were arguing in good faith they'd either explain how I had misunderstood their argument, or acknowledge the inconsistency and modify their position.
As for the other comment you quoted, "I'm not saying anything about your motives here", when I said "here" I was referring specifically to the previous comment that "Pointing out that your argument leads naturally to certain strange conclusions" does not qualify as an ad hom. At other points in the discussion, when it is obvious that you are not making any sort of "argument" but just being insulting, then I feel free to comment on your motives, as with my earlier comment that you seem to be trolling rather than debating in good faith.
Anyway, since virtually all aspects of your debating style suggest you aren't trying to understand my overall argument and respond substantively, but just to pick isolated quotes of mine and respond with "gotchas" or snappy comebacks or strawmen based on ignoring context or insulting taunts, I don't see any point in continuing this. If you ever want to change your tactics and have a real good-faith argument (which includes not being insulting, trying honestly to understand the other person's position, and answering questions about your own position), let me know, if not I won't be replying to any further comments you make here.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 04:15 PM
But that wouldn't be enough to judge whether the study's methodology was good or not.
That isn't the question. The question is whether you are in a position to criticize Pinker for his specific offenses -- if you cannot even recall what those offenses are, you are not.
So I would still make a blanket assertion that Pinker made an error in judgment in citing any non peer-reviewed studies when making a case about scientific issues, regardless of where these studies came from, because even if the methodology of these studies happened to be good, the audience has no assurance that this is the case unless they perform their own detailed investigation; that's the value of peer-reviewed sources, they don't place such a burden on the audience, the peer-review process gives the audience a reasonable level of confidence that there were no obvious problems with a study.
Here I will quote Frank Cross: "Any decision rule, be it a law or regulation or standard for evaluating research is going to be inaccurate. It can't take into account the diversity of circumstances to which the rule would be applied. And the reason for having such a rule is that it will still be more accurate than the free-for-all of unrestricted case-by-case evaluation." The purpose of peer-review is not to benefit the audience in an particular case; it's to ensure general quality control over the run of cases. As I pointed out, peer-review can result in errors, sound reasoning takes place outside of peer-review, and hypotheses and other creative acts in science are not submitted to peer review, as that would stunt the accumulation of knowledge. What you fail to understand, it seems, is that peer-review has no intrinsic value. Its value is derived solely from the fact that it is a rule. You could have another workable rule in place to enforce the same values and instill the same confidence. In any event, like any rule, there are conditions under which exceptions can be reasonably made. So your constant retreat to the deification of peer-review makes no sense because it doesn't prove anything in this particular case.
I don't think it's particularly uncharitable to suspect (not 'assume') that Pinker did not do an in-depth study of the methodology of each non-peer-reviewed study he cited
Recasting an assumption as a suspicion does you no good. In either case, there is no basis for the skepticism. My point is that if you're so confident in your own skepticism, then you should rightly be skeptical of your skepticism. Bias toward skepticism is still bias.
even if it was a think-tank composed exclusively of the most respected scientists in the world, it wouldn't change anything for me as long as the studies they produced had not been peer-reviewed by critical colleagues.
As should have been clear from my remarks earlier, I find this position of yours rather ridiculous. Let's take RAND as an example. Sure, it receives funding from the military. But it is also staffed with dozens upon dozens of respected scientists from a multiplicity of disciplines. The think tank has access to high-quality data that most university researchers lack access to; it has ties with respected unitiversities; and its work has a history of influencing policy and world affairs. In other words, you cannot simply ignore a RAND study simply because it originates from a think tank. Moreover, the internal process of a multiplicity of RAND scientists looking over one paper may not constitute peer-review (because it is a process internal to RAND), but such an internal check may serve as an institutional safeguard of the think tank's reputation and influence. In other words, they're interested in getting it right, not skewing facts for the moolah. Is that a sufficient substitute for peer-review? In a particular case, it may be. So you can't simply, without knowing which think tank it is, just conclude we have no reason to be confident of a study's findings because the findings were extrapolated in a think tank. Worse still, you ignore the implicit bias in the peer-review process of the academic community by touting the value of "critical colleagues". I recognize that you have cited to a scientist's review of Pinker's book, but most of the reviewers of Pinker's books tend to be English professors or liberal arts folks, as opposed to cognitive scientists or philosophers of the mind. This, of course, reflects the desire of newspapers and magazines to sell copy, not a discourse of truth-seeking. English professors and cultural critics love to bash Pinker because Pinker's popular books attack constructivism. Of course, you're going to get fireworks if you ask a constructivist to review the work of an anti-constructivist. That's like asking Senator McCarthy to review a Marxist film! I take your point that actual controversy means a dispute over what are the facts; but my point is that a constructivist and an anti-constructivist will disagree even if the facts are agreed upon, and will even unreasonably disagree as to certain facts simply because they bitterly disagree on a higher-level about more complex ideas. The latter is sham controversy.
Do you disagree that Pinker's book was meant as part of a scientific debate?
I think that if Pinker wanted to submit a scientific paper to the peer-review process, he would have done so. To blame him for not writing a scientific paper when he set out to (and had a contract to) write a book for the general public is to blame a tiger for its stripes.
As to your "argument," your entire argument has been a circumstantial ad hominem. You have repeatedly attacked inconsistencies that are phantasmal (or perhaps only you can see them) and suggested that the inconsistencies exist because I am dodging your question; you have speculated that I am dodging your question because I am only interested in taking your statements out of context and making you appear foolish.
You did in fact lie. You set forth a hypothetical statement alleging that if my motivation for being inconsistent was to insult you, then I would likely not answer your question. You thereafter indicated that you thought I was continuing to avoid your question. While affirming the consequent is an illogical move, you were trying to be underhanded, so it still constitutes a claim that my argument is inconsistent because it is insincerely held, in direct contradiction, I might add, to your claim that you did not commit a circumstantial ad hominem against me. Worse, you failed even to consult the example of a circumstantial ad hominem which I provided you (Peter Abelard, remember?). If you had, you'd know the definition is broader than you permit: "A circumstantial ad hominem accuses the person of having an alternative motive for defending the proposition or points out its inconsistency with the person's other views". Or. Or. Before, I rightly noted you were guilty of the latter. Now we both know you're guilty of the former, too.
Worse still, you seem to ignore the context and obvious import of statements I have written, so you are a hypocrite, to boot. Here is an example:
Jessica: No, I'm claiming there is a difference between (1) non-controversial work by a mainstream scientist that a hack calls controversial to discredit it and (2) actually controversial work put out by non-mainstream scientists.
Jesse: You seem to be avoiding the question, since neither of your categories covers actually controversial work by mainstream scientists, which is what I was asking about.
The obvious implication of my statement is that you are a hack trying to discredit Professor Pinker. You are a hack in part because you cannot even recall what you are complaining about; you are hack because your "question" is irrelevant to Alon Levy's shoddy hit-job on Steven Pinker, which was intended to bolster Levy's profile at Pinker's expense; you are a hack because there are reputable scientists and philsophers of science who do indeed criticize the whole peer-review system -- that is not an absurd position to hold. Richard Rorty, among others, criticizes science and seeks to properly confine it; David Baltimore, in his Tanner Lecture on Human Values, too, can be said to criticize the project of science (http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Baltimore93.pdf).
Worst of all, you are a hack because you hide behind claims such as "Words like 'communication' are vague" (and, yes, this is a fair paraphrase). If you do not know what the word "communication" means, how exactly can you have an sensible argument?
To the English professor,
It is amusing, finally, that Jessica queries my own credentials without giving us the slightest sense of who she is.
The tu quoque fallacy sure is popular these days.
So I have very good sense of the original blank slate argument.
It seems Pinker is not dealing with the original blank slate argument, but how it functions as received wisdom today, so your expertise (or ability to clarify what the original blank slate argument was from how it is conventionally used today) is not particularly relevant.
Bottom line: it is one thing to say what you think with your real name attached to your ideas. It is another to argue from the safety of anonymity.
Yes: the authors of the Federalist papers were cowards because they did not use their real names. You would think a professor of English could do better than schoolyard nanner-nanner. Apparently not! And to think you teach impressionable students!
To return to the point: Alon Levy's essay above is not a part of the scientific debate, it is a shameless attempt akin to a creationist trying to discredit scientific inquiry so as to advance his sectarian faith.
Posted by: Jessica | Friday, February 02, 2007 at 12:47 AM
Jessica,
I think you are confusing Tu Quoque with good manners. Even in matters of scientific dispute, there are certain standards of civility that tend to help move things along.
Perhaps you recall the umbrage taken by Richard Dawkins at Mary Midgley's review of The Selfish Gene in 1979:
All this for her having called him, in her review, an "egoist."
Goose and Gander, wouldn't you say?
For such a stauch defender of the purity of science, you make an awful lot of unsupported, if not unsupportable, claims:
I wouldn't bother saying any of this if you didn't make some good points. It's true that a work doesn't have to be peer reviewed to be valid. It's true that think tanks may produce scientically defensible work despite thier conflicts of interest. And your point about the complexity of determining equality (e.g. Jews in Montana prisons) is well taken.
But to protest that Alon's essay is tainted by "bias" is just diversional. Is your defense of Pinker unmotivated by such a thing?
Reputation is hardly an objective foundation for truth claims. There's nothing wrong with having a bias (in fact it's probably unavoidable), as long as you take pains to subject your ideas to scrutiny. What you seem to be arguing is that Pinker should get the benefit of the doubt because he's behaved as a proper scientist in the past.
Whether or not the studies Pinker cites are sound, it is legitimate to point out the conflict of interest, as Levy does. In conjunction with Levy's contention that Pinker does not consult the findings of conventional social science, this presents a credible challenge to Pinker's thesis. What is your response, apart from the defense that we should trust Pinker because he has a nice reputation? There's a word for that: faith.
Posted by: Deets | Friday, February 02, 2007 at 12:35 PM
"Jessica" writes:
"most of the reviewers of Pinker's books tend to be English professors or liberal arts folks, as opposed to cognitive scientists or philosophers of the mind ... English professors and cultural critics love to bash Pinker because Pinker's popular books attack constructivism."
Interestingly, the one English Professor in this discussion--me--responded that he has no problem with nativism.
Interestingly, "Jessica" ignored my reference to Jerry Fodor's review of Pinker in the London Review of Books, later expanded into a short book on the topic. Fodor is a world-class philosoper of mind and cognitive scientist, and a die-hard nativist. Moreover, Pinker derived a great deal of his paradigm (especially the whole idea of mental modules) from Fodor's work. Yet, Fodor is critical of Pinker's entire program, especially the evolutionary argument. And "Jessica" ignores this. It takes an English Professor to point it out to her.
Posted by: Jonathan | Friday, February 02, 2007 at 02:15 PM
Hmph, I know I said I was done replying, but while I still think it is futile to try to engage in "debate" with you, your last comment does provide some good opportunities for me to clarify some broad aspects of what I have been arguing all along here. So I'll make one last comment on that--hopefully it'll be helpful, if not to you (I doubt that you are interested in 'help' understanding my position anyway, you seem to read my comments exclusively for the purpose of finding openings to attack, like a trial lawyer rather than someone engaged in intellectual debate), then to any other readers who have been masochistic enough to follow along this far.
Here I will quote Frank Cross: "Any decision rule, be it a law or regulation or standard for evaluating research is going to be inaccurate. It can't take into account the diversity of circumstances to which the rule would be applied. And the reason for having such a rule is that it will still be more accurate than the free-for-all of unrestricted case-by-case evaluation." The purpose of peer-review is not to benefit the audience in an particular case; it's to ensure general quality control over the run of cases. As I pointed out, peer-review can result in errors, sound reasoning takes place outside of peer-review, and hypotheses and other creative acts in science are not submitted to peer review, as that would stunt the accumulation of knowledge.
Actually, I agree with everything said here! Notice that in my previous comments I repeatedly said that Pinker had violated widely accepted conventions of scientific argument by citing non-peer-reviewed studies. I kept using that word for a reason--the peer-review rule is just that, a convention which the scientific community has chosen to adopt by mutual agreement. Pinker has not violated any universal rules of logic or reasoning, in a parallel universe where the convention adopted by the scientific community was different these citations might be perfectly acceptable. But as you and Frank Cross say, we need some rule, and Cross' argument for the need for one is quite similar to my earlier comment that "it's standard practice in the scientific community, because scientific discussions would grind to a halt if each scientist had to perform a detailed investigation of the methodology of every study cited in a paper or book on their own." You earlier described my argument as an "epistemological" one, but I usually think of epistemology as dealing with what we can ultimately know of truth if we try our very hardest to find it; the peer-review convention is meant to deal with the more practical issue of how we can quickly judge whether the citations in a given scientific paper or study are likely to be sound without asking each reader to do a detailed investigate of each citation in each paper on a case-by-case basis.
So, it does no good to point to the fact that the peer-review system is not perfect, that sometimes bad work passes or good work fails, and to therefore argue that we should accept certain non-peer-reviewed papers which you think you can vouch for--the whole point of the rule is that it is better to avoid this sort of case-by-case analysis, if everyone tried to argue that their favorite non-peer-reviewed studies should be treated as exceptions to the rule, the system would break down. Hence the convention that each author is expected to use only peer-reviewed sources to back up claims about other scientists' research, and that the burden is never on the reader to check the soundness of some non-peer-reviewed studies on their own. The peer-review system isn't perfect, but it's "good enough"--bad work that passes peer review will probably be exposed in later peer-reviewed studies, and good work published in non-peer-reviewed studies will probably be replicated by later peer-reviewed ones.
I also wanted to clarify my argument about the logical implications of your own original criticism of Alon Levy and me, and explain more clearly why it was not an ad hominem:
the definition is broader than you permit: "A circumstantial ad hominem accuses the person of having an alternative motive for defending the proposition or points out its inconsistency with the person's other views".
Thinking about this definition, I actually agree that "pointing out an inconsistency with the person's other views" can be a kind of ad hominem. The point is that you should evaluate all arguments on their own terms, independently of the person who made them: if a person makes argument X, and I say "but that's inconsistent with belief Y, which you hold", then although that may show the person is not reasoning consistently, it isn't relevant to the question of whether argument X is sound or not. The same argument could have been made by another person who didn't hold any beliefs inconsistent with it, and the soundness of an abstract argument cannot depend on the person making it.
However, it's important to understand that I was never trying to discredit any arguments you made based on their possible inconsistency with other beliefs of yours. As I said in an earlier comment, I'm just making a statement of the kind "if we use argument X to show Y in the case of Pinker, then applying the same argument X to the case of peer-review in general would imply Z, but Z is a fairly absurd conclusion, therefore this discredits argument X". This is a type of reductio ad absurdum, and it only depends on the fact that I think conclusion Z would be "fairly absurd", and would expect most others to agree. It doesn't matter to my argument whether you do in fact endorse conclusion Z or not.
(to fill in the blanks, argument X would be something like 'it is shirking one's intellectual responsibilities to declare all non-peer-reviewed studies to be unacceptable in a scientific argument out of hand, without actually investigating the source to see if its methodology and reasoning are sound', Y would be something like 'Alon Levy and Jesse M. are shirking their intellectual responsibilities by declaring Pinker's think-tank citations unacceptable without investigating them, in truth it is their responsibility to look into the citations themselves and see if they are flawed', and the absurd conclusion Z that comes from applying X to peer-review in general would be something like 'all scientists who adopt the conventions of the peer-review system, in which it is never acceptable to cite non-peer-reviewed studies, are shirking their own intellectual responsibilities, in truth it should be their responsibility to investigate all these citations themselves instead of dismissing them from scientific papers')
You might object that if I was just making a reductio ad absurdum argument, and it doesn't matter to the argument whether you endorse conclusion Z, then why did I keep asking you about it? Essentially it was a rhetorical strategy, I was trying to "catch you on the horns of a dilemma" as they say. If you agreed with me that conclusion Z was fairly absurd or at least unreasonable, then I would point out that this discredits argument X using the type of reductio ad absurdum I described above. On the other hand, if you actually endorsed conclusion Z, this would make the absurdity of your position more apparent to anyone else reading the discussion. You avoided this dilemma by simply refusing to answer my question, but at the cost of making it clear that you are not really debating in good faith here.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Friday, February 02, 2007 at 02:22 PM
Hence the convention that each author is expected to use only peer-reviewed sources to back up claims about other scientists' research, and that the burden is never on the reader to check the soundness of some non-peer-reviewed studies on their own.
Except we're not talking about Pinker writing a peer-reviewed study; we're talking about a book Pinker authored for a popular audience, so your incessant asking of this question is both irrelevant and pointless. Moreover, we were not talking about the peer-review rule in the abstract, we were talking about Pinker's citations to think tanks in a particular instance within his book written for lay readers. The problem with your "argument" about the peer-review rule (aside from the fact that it is irrelevant) is that it is a cover for the fact you have no idea which think tanks Pinker cited to. In other words, it need not take a parallel universe; all it need take is actual evaluation by you. If you had read the book and looked at the citation, perhaps you would have a basis to complain that the citation was lacking; but without evaluating the quality of the citation itself, you are in no position to discredit the citation in the particular instances Levy is referring to simply because they may not have been peer-reviewed studies that were cited to. That is epistemological; you have no idea what you're complaining about, you're just making a general objection that may not apply in the particular case -- worse, you have no idea whether it applies, either, so there is no justification motivating the making of your objection.
You avoided this dilemma by simply refusing to answer my question
I didn't avoid any dilemma; there is no dilemma. Your distinctions are false and beside the point of what we're talking about.
the whole point of the rule is that it is better to avoid this sort of case-by-case analysis, if everyone tried to argue that their favorite non-peer-reviewed studies should be treated as exceptions to the rule, the system would break down.
No, that isn't it at all. The point is that no matter what we do, there will be a rule in place. Free-for-all is a bad rule, as it is less reliable than a rule we craft. Whatever rule we craft, whether peer-review or not, will produce errors that justify the making of exceptions. There is no rational way you can agree with that Frank Cross quote and come to the conclusion that exceptions should never be made. Nowhere does Cross suggest that "the system would break down" -- his point is that a well-crafted rule is better than a poorly crafted one because fewer exceptions will need to be made. That is not an argument that there are no conditions under which there can be exceptions to rules, which is your "argument".
your last comment does provide some good opportunities for me to clarify some broad aspects of what I have been arguing all along here.
In other words, more opportunity for you to slip around and pretend you didn't mean what you said when you said something foolish, splenetic, and patently wrong.
What is your response, apart from the defense that we should trust Pinker because he has a nice reputation? There's a word for that: faith.
This is sad. I am not arguing we should trust Pinker. I am arguing we should be perfectly neutral with regard to his citations in the instances Levy refers to; moreover, I am saying we should actually look at the citations and know what they are before we object to them.
Yet, Fodor is critical of Pinker's entire program, especially the evolutionary argument. And "Jessica" ignores this.
I didn't ignore it. It is irrelevant to my point that most critics of Pinker's work are English professors who are biased against the project of his work. I never argued that any criticism of Pinker is invalid. I pointed out that biased nitpicking over citations to think tanks is a cheap way to take on a reputable scientist making a substantive argument. I didn't respond to that specific point of yours because I didn't find fault with it.
As to the point of this dialogue: Alon Levy is making cheap attacks on Pinker. You all here are defending Levy, probably because you are his friends. and he asked you to divert attention from my criticism of his perfidy. I am not friends with Steven Pinker and I had never heard of Alon Levy before I read this website, which I happened upon while looking for something totally unrelated. As a result of reading Levy's polemic above, I have a low opinion of him.
Posted by: Jessica | Friday, February 02, 2007 at 05:08 PM
"Finally, Pinker quotes a 2001 study by Eric Turkheimer as showing that the Darwin wars ended and the gene-centric side, led by Richard Dawkins, prevailed over the more environment-based side, led by Stephen Jay Gould. Thence Pinker concludes that attempts to raise children in ways more conducive to growth are futile, since much of their future behavior is genetic, and almost all of what is not genetic is due to developmental noise rather than environmental influence."
You must have been reading the Cliff's note's version, because in the same chapter, maybe even on the same page, Pinker acknowledges that Turkheimer's study has a narrow focus (the middle class) and that environmental factors may emerge if these results are compared across socioeconomic lines. He pretty much foretold of Turkheimer's findings in the 2003 paper. How could you miss that?
Posted by: Jahed | Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 12:58 AM
I have got some informations about THE BLANK SLATE but i have never read it, after reading your ideas above about this book. I think it is worth to reading, so i will read it later.
Posted by: Daniel Pennant | Friday, April 13, 2007 at 02:29 AM