Thanks for this thoughtful summary. I wonder how much interest there was among the scholars assembled there in open science and the methodological improvements that will be needed for a credibility revolution to end the replication crisis? A heterodox social science movement that simply continues with the standard procedures that coincided with falling trust in the "soft" fields will not advance far, in my opinion.
Thanks, Gabriel--excellent question. I didn't get a sense from this conference that there was a major methodological focus. To be fair, I am inferring and deducing what I can from the conference program and from the work I'm familiar with already from some of the presenters. I think the Centre there in the UK that organized the conference is more about the unasked questions or neglected topics in social sciences because of the prevailing ideologies and monocultures in social science disciplines. But maybe new topics necessitate greater methodological diversity as well. I'd certainly think so.
It's quite possible that some of the presentations contained discussions of methodological improvements as subthemes or "sidebar" issues. I saw a post on (x) from Eric Kaufmann that recordings of the sessions will be available, so it may be possible to get a finer-grained understanding at that point.
I do know that Cory Clark has addressed open science methods in some of her previous presentations, with some caveats even with the more rigorous peer pre-reviews (pre-registrations) for open science projects--and she's made the case that Adversarial Collaborations, of course, will address those gaps because scholars with competing perspectives will have to work together in advance to define methods, data collection procedures, reporting and the nuances within on findings. I think I have that right . . .
Since this is the inaugural conference sponsored by this Centre, I'd assume some feedback will be sent from attendees about gaps or questions that are missing. From what I can see, Kaufmann and organizers are very open to suggestions.
"herotodox" obv, is relative to the orthodoxy. If what is orthodox becomes heterodox, then that which was heterodox becomes orthodox. There's nothing inherent about heterodoxy. It's mostly about who is winning when. That some people are naturally independent, and hence more likely to end up on the heterodox side of things is a different issue.
It is an amusing accident of English etymology that every academic discipline that calls itself a science, isn't one. I usually quote Neil Postman or Richard Feynman on the misunderstanding about the deceptively named "social sciences", i.e, that they are sciences at all. But, since I've been reading her "Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs", I'll quote Barbara Mertz instead. "This has been a very superficial, limited probing of some of the types of problems we encounter when we talk about causes in history. We have not even settled the important question of whether there are causes. Yet we will probably go right on looking for them, and talking about them. The intellectual climate of our own era asks for explanations. We would like, if we could, to reduce all phenomena to systems of logical sequence. In part this is the effect of the prestige of the physical sciences, and this effect is not always for the good. ... the disciplines that deal with man and his peculiar affairs cannot expect to use the methods, or anticipate the results, of the physical sciences. The human experiment will not reproduce itself under laboratory conditions; we can never control our specimens to such a degree that we can isolate a pertinent stimulus or determine a specific conclusion. My personal antipathy toward the use of the term "scientific" in the humanistic disciplines is that the very application of the word sometimes suggests to the user that such isolation and such determination are possible. Sometimes I wish they were."
Thanks for this overview of the conference. I share your skepticism about some critics of higher ed who are, like their counterparts on the progressive academic left, more activists than scholars. And I agree that "post-progressive" probably isn't the best term for critics and their case against identity progressivism. Your essay suggests ways to more affirmatively frame this movement, and these alternatives might also enable academia's critics to stand against right-wing illiberalism.
Thanks--I've attempted in some other articles in this space to grapple with the full range of "heterodoxy" as it's being lived out by various actors, in academia and elsewhere. And the term is applied variously by journalists and those in the media. This conference in the U.K. illustrates some of the challenges--very worthy goals for the conference, I'm sure there were compelling presentations and many wide-ranging discussions among those gathered. As noted in my article, though, I have some reservations about a few individuals--I'm not attempting to maintain some "purity test" at all, given that's against what "heterodoxy" is supposed to be about, but sometimes choices must be made about who will support foundational principles of liberal democracy, and intellectual pluralism, which underpin academic freedom and the avowed general goals of the best kind of "heterodoxy" in the academy. I'm not persuaded that Rufo is an especially great example of believing in the widest possible range of expression, and his political activism almost certainly mirrors, psychologically, the "scholar-activism" that he decries (rightly) in the academy. He's entirely too caught up in his certitude and dogma to be an especially compelling champion for intellectual pluralism, and he is mostly interested in power rather than learning from people who think differently.
We need critics of higher ed who want to improve it and suggest better models for doing so, not those who want to impose their very politicized "solutions".
Thanks for this thoughtful summary. I wonder how much interest there was among the scholars assembled there in open science and the methodological improvements that will be needed for a credibility revolution to end the replication crisis? A heterodox social science movement that simply continues with the standard procedures that coincided with falling trust in the "soft" fields will not advance far, in my opinion.
Thanks, Gabriel--excellent question. I didn't get a sense from this conference that there was a major methodological focus. To be fair, I am inferring and deducing what I can from the conference program and from the work I'm familiar with already from some of the presenters. I think the Centre there in the UK that organized the conference is more about the unasked questions or neglected topics in social sciences because of the prevailing ideologies and monocultures in social science disciplines. But maybe new topics necessitate greater methodological diversity as well. I'd certainly think so.
It's quite possible that some of the presentations contained discussions of methodological improvements as subthemes or "sidebar" issues. I saw a post on (x) from Eric Kaufmann that recordings of the sessions will be available, so it may be possible to get a finer-grained understanding at that point.
I do know that Cory Clark has addressed open science methods in some of her previous presentations, with some caveats even with the more rigorous peer pre-reviews (pre-registrations) for open science projects--and she's made the case that Adversarial Collaborations, of course, will address those gaps because scholars with competing perspectives will have to work together in advance to define methods, data collection procedures, reporting and the nuances within on findings. I think I have that right . . .
Since this is the inaugural conference sponsored by this Centre, I'd assume some feedback will be sent from attendees about gaps or questions that are missing. From what I can see, Kaufmann and organizers are very open to suggestions.
"herotodox" obv, is relative to the orthodoxy. If what is orthodox becomes heterodox, then that which was heterodox becomes orthodox. There's nothing inherent about heterodoxy. It's mostly about who is winning when. That some people are naturally independent, and hence more likely to end up on the heterodox side of things is a different issue.
It is an amusing accident of English etymology that every academic discipline that calls itself a science, isn't one. I usually quote Neil Postman or Richard Feynman on the misunderstanding about the deceptively named "social sciences", i.e, that they are sciences at all. But, since I've been reading her "Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs", I'll quote Barbara Mertz instead. "This has been a very superficial, limited probing of some of the types of problems we encounter when we talk about causes in history. We have not even settled the important question of whether there are causes. Yet we will probably go right on looking for them, and talking about them. The intellectual climate of our own era asks for explanations. We would like, if we could, to reduce all phenomena to systems of logical sequence. In part this is the effect of the prestige of the physical sciences, and this effect is not always for the good. ... the disciplines that deal with man and his peculiar affairs cannot expect to use the methods, or anticipate the results, of the physical sciences. The human experiment will not reproduce itself under laboratory conditions; we can never control our specimens to such a degree that we can isolate a pertinent stimulus or determine a specific conclusion. My personal antipathy toward the use of the term "scientific" in the humanistic disciplines is that the very application of the word sometimes suggests to the user that such isolation and such determination are possible. Sometimes I wish they were."
Thanks for this overview of the conference. I share your skepticism about some critics of higher ed who are, like their counterparts on the progressive academic left, more activists than scholars. And I agree that "post-progressive" probably isn't the best term for critics and their case against identity progressivism. Your essay suggests ways to more affirmatively frame this movement, and these alternatives might also enable academia's critics to stand against right-wing illiberalism.
Thanks--I've attempted in some other articles in this space to grapple with the full range of "heterodoxy" as it's being lived out by various actors, in academia and elsewhere. And the term is applied variously by journalists and those in the media. This conference in the U.K. illustrates some of the challenges--very worthy goals for the conference, I'm sure there were compelling presentations and many wide-ranging discussions among those gathered. As noted in my article, though, I have some reservations about a few individuals--I'm not attempting to maintain some "purity test" at all, given that's against what "heterodoxy" is supposed to be about, but sometimes choices must be made about who will support foundational principles of liberal democracy, and intellectual pluralism, which underpin academic freedom and the avowed general goals of the best kind of "heterodoxy" in the academy. I'm not persuaded that Rufo is an especially great example of believing in the widest possible range of expression, and his political activism almost certainly mirrors, psychologically, the "scholar-activism" that he decries (rightly) in the academy. He's entirely too caught up in his certitude and dogma to be an especially compelling champion for intellectual pluralism, and he is mostly interested in power rather than learning from people who think differently.
We need critics of higher ed who want to improve it and suggest better models for doing so, not those who want to impose their very politicized "solutions".