...so it's time for a petition, which, after 24 hours and despite being linked from the Daily Snooze this morning, has only some two dozen signatories. (UPDATE: after 48 hours, 48 signatories!) It was launched by famed Twitter tough guy Mark Alfano (Macquarie), seen here threatening the paper's author, graduate student Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) (says Mafia Mark to Mr. Cofnas: "You're about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me"). Good to get confirmation that not only is there no norm against criticizing graduate students for their public acts and statements (which no one, other than graduate students on Twitter, believed of course), but there apparently isn't even a norm against launching a petition against the "vulnerable" and threatening them Mafia-style!
The petition is being ignored because it is so obviously foolish. I'll give the last word on that to philosopher David Wallace (Pittsburgh), quite possibly the only adult who comments reguarly at the Daily Snooze:
Here we go again.
In the first place, the petition’s description of the paper doesn’t look factually accurate. It claims that the paper (i) “argues that the best explanation of differences in IQ scores between racial and ethnic groups is genetics”, and (ii) “completely neglects the role played by environmental injustice, housing segregation, and related forms of discrimination in producing these differences.”
As for (i), the paper’s discussion of the science argues only that it is a scientifically serious possibility that racial IQ differences have a genetic component, not that it’s cut-and-dried that it does (far less that the difference is 100% due to genetics). The section of the paper summarizing the science ends “As of now, there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component.” Furthermore, that conclusion (which occurs 6 pages into a 24-page paper, at the end of a 3-page discussion of the science) is all that the author needs, because the main question the paper asks is whether we should actively prevent research on the question, and to make that an interesting question we only need to know that a genetic component isn’t scientifically unserious, not that it’s scientifically proven. (And, I should add, the author’s all-things-considered defense of allowing research on the topic is fairly nuanced, and gives a pretty sympathetic hearing to the arguments against.)
As for (ii), the author explicitly discusses the possibility of shared-environment, non-genetic explanations for the IQ gap (pp.128-129 in the paper), treats it as an ongoing live possibility, and mentions difficulties for it (invariance of the gap under quite large-scale shifts in the environment; need for an environmental factor to shift the distributional mean without shifting the distributional variance; adoption data). He only very briefly considers specific examples, and those examples (differences in socioeconomic status; overt discrimination) don’t include all those given in the petition. I’m inclined to think lead, in particular, would have been worth mentioning, but it’s scarcely a hanging offense to have left it out, especially given the author’s overall dialectic (which, recall, requires no more than that a genetic component is a serious scientific possibility).
But over and above this (of course) it’s just unserious to suppose that, because another philosopher spots something in a paper that they regard as a “glaring error” that the paper was incompetently refereed – far less that it should be retracted, or that the journal has anything to apologize for. “There is a major flaw in this argument” or “Something really important is being left out” is one of the most common forms of a reply article, and one of the most common reactions that I, at least, have on reading papers! It’s in the nature of philosophy. Sure, there’s some threshold of straightforwardly factual (or mathematical) error that might count as just a failure of refereeing, but that threshold is ridiculously higher than anything the petition discusses (either normatively or be the descriptive standards of contemporary philosophy of science).
As became clear in the discussions of the Tuvel incident, there’s something particularly troubling about a call for retraction here. In the sciences, where a paper is a report of (usually empirical, sometimes statistical) work done, acceptance of the paper indicates that the journal accepts the paper’s reports of the work as fact, and retraction indicates that the journal has changed its mind. But philosophy papers (normally) don’t describe work done elsewhere: the paper itself is the research. And retraction doesn’t normally prevent the paper being read. Its only concrete consequence is to cause harm to the author. That’s a worrying way for the scholarly community to resolve its disagreements at the best of time, doubly so if the author is a junior academic (Tuvel), triply so if, as in this case, the author is a graduate student.
However, in my eternal optimism I’m hoping that we’ve learned some lessons from the Tuvel incident. The statement from the editors of the journal – noting that the paper is controversial, but defending its publication anyway – is reassuring. (For all that in an ideal world we wouldn’t need these statements because they would go without saying.) One of the bright spots in the mostly-dismal Tuvel affair was the statement by Hypatia’s (then) editor, Sally Scholz:
“I firmly believe, and this belief will not waver, that it is utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data). In this respect, editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers. That is where I stand.”
It looks as if it’s where the editors of Philosophical Psychology stand, too. Good for them.
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