Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms 'fake news' and 'post-truth'. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms 'fake news' and 'post-truth'. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that 'fake news' and 'post-truth' do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. Secondly, that these terms are unnecessary, because we already have a rich vocabulary for thinking about epistemic dysfunction. Thirdly, I observe that 'fake news' and 'post-truth' have propagandistic uses, meaning that using them legitimates anti-democratic propaganda, and runs the risk of smuggling bad ideology into conversations.
The debate about the nature of knowledge-how is standardly thought to be divided between intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of propositional knowledge, and anti-intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of ability. In this paper, I explore a compromise position-the interrogative capacity view-which claims that knowing how to do something is a certain kind of ability to generate answers to the question of how to do it. This view combines the intellectualist thesis that knowledge-how is a relation to a set of propositions with the anti-intellectualist thesis that knowledge-how is a kind of ability. I argue that this view combines the positive features of both intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.
Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group's knowledge that p reduces to group members' knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue for what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a group can know an answer to a question in virtue of members of the group knowing parts of that answer, when the whole answer is available to group-level action. I argue that this account explains a swathe of central cases of group knowledge, as well as explaining some central features of group knowledge.
Who should be the author(s) of an academic paper? This question is becoming increasingly pressing, due to the increasing prevalence and scale of scientific collaboration, and the corresponding diversity of authorship practices in different disciplines and subdisciplines. This paper addresses the conceptual issues underlying authorship, with an eye to ameliorating authorship practices. The first part of the paper distinguishes five roles played by authorship attributions: allocating credit, constructing a speaker, enabling credibility judgements, supporting accountability, and creating an intellectual marketplace. The second part of the paper argues that distinguishing these functions helps us see that at least some of the confusions around authorship are due to tensions between these functions. The final part of the paper suggests a way to resolve these conceptual confusions, which we will call the CSWG proposal. This proposal suggests replacing authorship with a bundle of roles tailored to the functions of authorship-contributor, spokesperson, writer, and guarantor-which can be distributed in a number of different ways. as a collective author. 2 In many disciplines (especially in interdisciplinary collaborations) it will be unclear or indeterminate what the norms for ascribing authorship are.Researchers have identified a number of problems caused by the combination of scale of collaborations and diversity of authorship practice: i) confusion around disciplinary norms (Street et al. [2010], Mitcheson [2011], Macfarlane [2017]); ii) deliberate flouting of disciplinary norms (in a 2005 survey of NIH grant-holders 10% of respondents admitted assigning authorship inappropriately (Martinson et al. [2005], see also Pignatelli et al. [2005], Rohwer et al. [2017])), iii) the emergence of ghost authors (writers who are not listed as authors, often to hide commercial interests) who haunt as much as a fifth of papers in medical journals (Wislar et al. [2011] see also Flanagin et al. [1998], Mowatt et al. [2002]); iv) a lack of consensus about how to resolve disagreements (Macfarlane [2017]); v) disagreements about authorship (Mitcheson et al. [2011]); and vi) problems in reading a byline (Shaw [2016]). Given these problems, it is no surprise that authors often make subversive and unruly authorship attributions (Penders and Shaw [2020]).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.