Please take a moment to review the record of what has transpired, especially here, here, and here.
Given the evidence now available, please take this poll [POLL CLOSED] to record your opinion of the conduct of the Editors-in-Chief of Synthese. Obviously an on-line poll is fraught with difficulty in this context, but if there are enough votes, we may at least get some rough sense of professional opinion at this stage.
FIRST UPDATE: So with about 120 votes cast in the first 45 minutes, opinion is overwhelmingly (87%) that the Synthese editors acted unprofessionally, but there is division of opinion on the proper response: 46% favor a boycott, while 41% think a boycott too severe a sanction, though they concur the editors deserve criticism for their unprofessional handling of the matter. 7% feel there is still not enough evidence available on the basis of which to form an opinion. I will update the results at various intervals, since the risk of gaming this kind of poll are real, for all the obvious reasons.
SO AFTER 1 HOUR AND 45 MINUTES and more than 200 votes, opinion is still overwhemingly (84%) that the Synthese editors acted unprofessionally, with 41% favoring a boycott. 8% feel there's not enough evidence for offering an opinion, and 8% incredibly believe (or purport to believe) that the editors handled the situation properly. (I suppose if one allows for votes by the editors themselves, friends of the editors, and friends of Beckwith or Intelligent Design, this seems a bit less surprising. While I can understand how someone could reasonably adopt any of the other three options, I can't understand how any reasonable and impartial observer could conclude that the matter was handled properly!)
AND NOW AFTER ABOUT 3 1/2 HOURS and more than 320 votes, opinion is still overwhelmingly (80%) that the Synthese editors acted unprofessionally, with 43% favoring a boycott. 12% now feel they do not yet have enough evidence to form an opinion. I'll probably let this run a bit longer, as long as I don't detect evidence of coordinated voting prompted from other sites, but will shut it down around 500 votes.
FINAL: I've had to close the poll, as it did get linked from a source with a definite point of view, which resulted in a suspicious surge in one category in particular. So what can we conclude from this unscientific enterprise? I suppose only that a solid majority of philosophers (how large is hard to say) feel that this situation was handled badly, but that they divide about evenly over the right remedy, as it were.
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