Tag: Papers

Rejection

One of my papers (the Kaikoura piece) has been sent back with a rejection slip. Now this isn’t as bad as it might seem, for two reasons. The first is that the paper did get far enough to be revised, which is better than for most other submissions, so hurray me. The second is, well, that it seems that the reviewers really were never going to accept the paper anyway. I quote:

The question that the author raises is pointless and rests on a total misunderstanding of the conspiracy theory as presented by Karl Popper and by Richard Hofstadter. The theory was the subject of criticism for almost two centuries, and the latest literature that continues this activity is quite redundant.

and:

The author seems not to take the main point, namely that Pigden and Keeley havent the faintest idea what the problem is, nor do they even competently reproduce what Popper says.

Which is to say that all the recent work on Conspiracy Theories in Philosophy (according to the two reviewers) is unnecessary because none of the work improves upon Sir Karl Raimond Popper’s work in `The Open Society and Its Enemies.’

Now, I could rant on for quite some time as to how ridiculous that view is but I am not going to. One of the first lessons you learn in the publication game is that papers get rejected for silly reasons and the only real response is to seek publication elsewhere. So, off the paper goes (again).

12/02/2008

Revise and Resubmit

On Friday I received a response to my article submission (the piece I gave back at the beginning of last year to the Postgraduate Conference in Kaikoura). This was a little surprising; I had been told it would take three to four months to get a reply and I sent it in (well, used a strange and arcane web-interface to submit it) a little over three weeks. In academic terms this was a little like breaking the light barrier.

My first thought was that this must be a rejection letter but it turned out to be a `Revise and Resubmit.’ Admittedly, they want a major revision, but it’s still a tiny bit of academic progress. This will be my first truly academic article should it get accepted (the Skeptic piece does not count, seeing as it is not a peer-reviewed publication) ((Although this is not a paper I’m all that wed to, truth be told. My other paper awaiting a response, the AAP piece, is much more interesting and much more relevant to my thesis)).

I have, since Friday morning, spent an awful lot of time rewriting. One thing the two reviews of the paper showed me was that the first third was too much like a discussion paper rather than something trying to advance a thesis. I’m hoping to fix that with this new revision. I’ve cut out about five hundred words and replaced them with almost brand new ones, some of which make snappier points than their forebears.

It’s also been a bit of trial, in re software. I write my thesis in TeX. Most journals used to accept TeX documents but a lot of them are moving towards Word .doc submissions, mostly, I believe, because of the Track Changes feature (which TeX can provide some functionality of, but not `out of the box’). I hardly ever use Word and don’t like having too; it takes too long to load and it paginates weirdly. For a little while I had a footnote that was located smack in the middle of a page and nothing fixed it until I loaded the file up on another machine.

More news as it comes to hand.

10/20/2008

Skeptics Conference Presentation

Saving the Paranormal from the Laws of Science

Skeptics Conference 2008, Waikato Diocesan College, 660 River Rd, Hamilton, Saturday the 27th of September

It is generally recognised that theoretical reasoning allows us to generate a lot of beliefs about the world, but some people take what can be called the ‘strong’ version of the argument from theoretical reasoning that argues that our theories of the world, as espoused by the Natural Sciences, allow us to come up with a complete, veridical account of the way the world works. Such accounts tend to deny the existence of entities and processes called ‘Paranormal.’ In this session, based upon a recent paper of mine published in ‘The Skeptic’ (‘The Curious Case of Freeman Dyson and the Paranormal, Vol. 14, No. 2) I will argue that it is not clear that we should be reductionists in respect to the paranormal because neither methodological nor epistemic reductionism rules out of court theories that contain paranormal entities or processes.

07/19/2008

Other people’s thoughts (and my own)

Recently Münzenberg, at Soob, wrote a little piece on Conspiracy versus Conspiracy Theory. A lot of it dovetails nicely into my recent paper on what it is that Conspiracy Theorists believe; Münzenberg’s argument is that just because people believe wacky Conspiracy Theories isn’t a reason to have a wholesale dismissal of belief in potential Conspiracies now. Münzenberg uses the example of pre-9/11 conspiracy theorising:

The example was FBI field agent Ken Williams who wrote the Phoenix Memo about the possibility of Al Qaeda members training in flight schools. His memo was discounted by his leadership. Whether or not they thought his views were conspiratorial we don’t know, but Williams uncovered a smaller part of a greater conspiracy and he was discounted. We all know what happened after Williams theory was discounted right? Thousands of people died. But that is ok, because LE guys like Williams with his crazy theories are “prone to believe in nonsense” according to Shrinkwrapped.

Münzenberg raises the important object to wholesale scepticism of Conspiracy Theories; some of them will turn out to be warranted. We should not forget that.

I (of course) wrote a paper on this very subject just over a year ago (at that Kaikoura conference), which I kept promising to upload the final version thereof and never did. Well, now I have. LaTeX-ed and slightly reformatted (for the modern age), I present:

Conspiracies Then, Now and Tomorrow: How Do Past Instances Affect the Likelihood of Similar Events Now?

05/05/2008

Finally, it will see the light…

Several thousand years ago (or so it seems) I wrote a paper defending an epistemological position regarding the possible existence of things called ‘paranormal,’ which was submitted to The Skeptic which was accepted for publication and then… Well, nothing happened. About a year ago I started to chase up Dr. Michael Shermer and his promise to publish and now, with some slight revision, the paper has been formally approved for publication in the forthcoming issue (which goes on newstands… Well, I don’t know. Sometime in the next three months; more news as it comes to hand). This is, of course, a very good thing. Publication is king in my world and this is a publication with an interesting readership that I think philosophers should be communicating with, the skeptical community which is often science-literate but not necessarily epistemologically savvy.

An abstract follows. This one is deliberately a little obtuse; it was written as an example of overly technical writing for one of the courses I teach, but it’ll suffice for the time being. I’ll draw attention to the article closer to publication with a better abstract.

‘Saving the Paranormal from the Laws of Science.’

Abstract:

One reason to believe the conclusion that paranormal phenomena should not be taken as be counter-rational is one based upon the reduction of fundamental predicates from observed instances. It is all well and good to be epistemic reductionists and take a Humean worldview but we should not think that this necessitates the controversial thesis that the predicates of epistemic reductionism are indicative of ontological reductionism. Such a move would require some bridging principle which would show that epistemic statements, based upon limited instances of supposed regularities, can generate genuine ontological knowledge.

04/03/2008

So, I lied.

I said it would be up within a day or so and I’m only now getting around to it. It’s because I thought I might be able to clean up the audio a little but discovered that I couldn’t really be bothered. I might write a little about the reaction to the paper later this week, but given my inability to keep promises at the moment I won’t say anything more, other than:

Here it is. (Right Click to Download)

(Recorded in situ, with leg tapping a-plenty)

12/10/2007