The conceptual penis as a social construct

general topics
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[quote=“aeon, post:40, topic:101305”]
The point is that social science writing has a problem with deliberately obscure pseudo-erudite language.[/quote]
Perhaps, but using this assertion to give credence to what the authors did is classic petitio, as the assertion is part of what they’re trying to use their paper to prove.

If anything, the fact that the paper was first rejected by an OK journal in the field makes the opposite case, that the field does in fact have standards that distinguishes meaningful technical language from bunk. To me that rejection contains far more information than the later acceptance.

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No, it’s not begging the question. There is more than just this hoax in play. The assertion that the social sciences have a language clarity problem long precedes the hoax paper and isn’t originally mine (as I pointed out in the original post). Regardless of the motivation of the authors of the hoax, it therefore remains evidence of the problem already raised, argued and referenced in Michael Billig’s monograph.

What the hoax isn’t, is evidence that all social science is rubbish. Nor is it evidence that OA is a bad model.

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[quote=“aeon, post:43, topic:101305, full:true”]

No, it’s not begging the question. There is more than just this hoax in play. [/quote]
Nevertheless, saying that this paper proves that there is a jargon problem in the Social Sciences because there is a jargon problem in the Social Sciences is petitio.

The assertion that the social sciences have a language clarity problem long precedes the hoax paper and isn’t originally mine (as I pointed out in the original post).

Existence of the assertion doesn’t make it true. Nor does an appeal to authority.

Regardless of the motivation of the authors of the hoax, it therefore remains evidence of the problem already raised

No. It doesn’t. The fact that someone can write a paper to intentionally fit a stereotype does not in and of itself prove that the stereotype is correct. If the paper was subsequently accepted by people in gender studies as meaningful it might provide some evidence of something, but that’s not what happened. People in gender studies rejected it. If there is evidence, it is in the opposite direction.

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Of course it doesn’t prove it and nor did I suggest that. It merely joins the Sokal hoax before it as part of a body of evidence for that assertion.

If pointing out a well researched and referenced monograph on a subject, by an author within the broader field under discussion, to provide evidence for an assertion (and not assuming that that alone proves it) is ‘appeal to authority’ then academic writing in every field has a problem.

This, however …

… is an appeal to authority. :unamused:

It’s not as though Billig pulled the problem out of his hat in 2013 or this “conceptual penis” hoax came out of nowhere. The social sciences have long had a problem with “big words circulating in decreasingly narrow circles” (Billig, 2013) of sub-specialised schools of thought within the field. As far back as the late 19th century William James was criticising the then relatively new field of psychology for making up new words in order to merely sound erudite, when existing words would do the job. Moreover, C. Wright Mills dealt a devastating blow to sociological ‘grand theorists’ and the functionalist school in particular in his “The Sociological Imagination” when he merely translated virtually impenetrable prose into plain English, thus rendering its conclusions ordinary and banal. So on that background (and there are more examples, those are just three that come to mind easily), Lindsay and Boyle (2017) like Sokal (1996) before them, are evidence that it’s possible to ape that kind of bad writing and gain publication simply on the basis that a paper uses sufficient buzzwords to sound plausible.

If they’d rejected it commenting ‘This paper as presented does not achieve our standards for publication. The authors appear to be attempting to reify a “conceptual penis” by merely using gender studies’ terminology and without any evidence to back up their assertion. The referencing is shoddy and of poor quality. A substantial rethink and rewrite are required.’ and without suggesting somewhere else that it might gain publication, then I’d agree. Likewise the low impact OA generalist journal that did publish should have had the sense to use an appropriate sub-specialist to review the article, or to reject it as too specialised. But that wasn’t what happened.

And in before any ad hominem or ‘appeal to motive’: I really don’t have a fundamental beef with the social sciences or gender studies in particular. They are important (in general and to me) because they inform social policy. Social policy affects society, which in turn has an impact on the work that comes my way. Likewise, the work that comes my way is in the form of people, and medical practitioners have to rely on social science findings to help us understand our patients, who are people first and foremost. They also help us reflect on ourselves as practitioners.

I do have a beef with authors who obscure meaning behind an unnecessary passive voice suffused with confusing collections of nouns and buzzwords. This hoax paper managed to poke fun at writing like that, all wrapped up in the form of a silly dick joke :laughing: and that’s why I posted it. Although I’ll admit, like any joke, it’s a lot less funny after all the explanations … :weary:

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For anyone who already believes there is a problem with this literature, even though this attempted hoax does not in any way contribute to the evidence for that problem it will appear to, due to confirmation bias.

[quote=“aeon, post:45, topic:101305”]
If they’d rejected it commenting ‘This paper as presented does not achieve our standards for publication. The authors appear to be attempting to reify a “conceptual penis” by merely using gender studies’ terminology and without any evidence to back up their assertion. The referencing is shoddy and of poor quality. A substantial rethink and rewrite are required.’[/quote]
You only give a verdict of “rewrite” if you want to see the paper again. A flat rejection is the strongest condemnation of it, and that is exactly what the editors of the first journal did. Why would an editor waste time analyzing a paper they plan to reject as nonsense?

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Look, the problem here isn’t so hard to understand. I run a test that can only pass if condition A or B is met, and it passes. Being fairly confident in A, I might very well expect that was the reason. But if B is also the case, we know the outcome could be the same whether or not A. So treating it as evidence on A one way or the other could only be confirmation bias; if that was my goal, I used an entirely invalid test.

In this case this was a garbage paper that would only be accepted if A social science is prone to accepting nonsense based on buzzwords, or B it was submitted to an exceptionally shoddy publication. The authors and you appear confident based on prior evidence that social science is indeed prone to accepting nonsense, and so might very well expect that was what happened here.

However, it is also extremely obvious that this was an exceptionally shoddy publication – one unknown in the field, suggested by a better established but low-impact publication as a place for things they don’t want. Logically, that means we know the outcome could have been the same whether or not social science is prone to accepting nonsense. So treating it as evidence on that one way or the other could only be confirmation bias; if that was their goal, they used an invalid test.

This doesn’t change just because you have other strong evidence for A, or even suspect A was what actually caused the outcome. B means A wasn’t tested, and anyone actually interested in the evidence for it should be disappointed in that failure, instead of excusing it because they already believe A based on tests that weren’t so broken. If you care about standards, this is not the hill you want to defend.

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Yes. I have a jaded opinion of scientific writing in general and that of the social sciences in particular, and may well be subject to confirmation bias. But someone who edits an OA journal; does scientific writing for a living; or is invested in this particular literature, also has the natural tendency to ignore this signal due to the same effect.

Thank you for the link. So NORMA is off the hook and the invite was a publisher systems failure. It still doesn’t forgive ‘Cogent Social Sciences’. Also note that the hoaxers aren’t claiming they’ve proven that gender studies has a problem (any more than I did).

Yes, nicely put. Difficult to see how to design a testable question though.

But I do know what I prefer to read and that I’m not alone in thinking that way.

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But someone who edits an OA journal; does scientific writing for a living; or is invested in this particular literature, also has the natural tendency to ignore this signal due to the same effect.

The first two apply to me, and I’m very sensitive to this. Part of my job is desk-rejecting junk papers, and being an expert in the field makes it easier, not harder, for me to spot rubbish.

Of course, being in a field also makes the technical jargon of that field part of one’s daily vocabulary, so its appearance in a paper is less likely to seem excessive as it might to a lay reader. However, its misuse is that much more apparent, and in any event our target audience is not lay readers.

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All right, I don’t think that actually pertains to the hoax at hand, but let’s look at this. Is your preference tensor calculus, or protein sequence matching, or detailed osteological terminology? Those aren’t mine. There have been papers I’ve been very interested in that were nearly unreadable to me because of them, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

But I haven’t heard too many complaints about how palaeontologists are throwing around all these arcane names for skull bits when we’re just trying to learn is this or is this not a baby T. rex. We know that when they are talking to each other it’s helpful to have precise language. As someone interested, I learn to puzzle out what I can and gloss over what I can’t, and if that doesn’t work I wait for the popular summary. And while other people in the field can critique the way things are described, nobody would ever expect them to write based on what I prefer to read.

It’s true social sciences often deal with concepts that aren’t quite so unusual as a mapping between parallel vectors at different points, not that the lower bone right behind the eye is so abstract either. But you’d think people would understand the same need for precise language is there.

I mean, you’ve seen what happens when people try to use regular English for these things, right? At some point someone was looking at the role of systematic biases in society, and rather than invent new words they decided the common words racism and privilege were close enough. And I’ve heard those attacked hundreds of times, because that’s not quite what we mean by them and how dare they. Well, do we want them to introduce new “impenetrable” terms, or not?

And yet I find a lot of commenters seem to think social sciences are somehow exempt from the need for terminology. Just a little while ago there was a linked essay about Kirk and what the popular view of him was actually based on. It did have a lot of terms of art, but as with any other academic discipline I’ve learned to figure out or skip those; and I’d read it, and found it lucid, interesting, and well-argued. When I saw it posted here, I was interested to see what others thought.

And Jesus, I took off from that thread like I would from YouTube comments. Because I didn’t notice anything about the topic in question, but instead piles about how the writing I understood easily was actually something any sane person should regard as obfuscatory nonsense, the sort only Ahriman himself would ever want to see. Have people here never seen a physics or biology paper? No, but those people get to write for each other; people in social sciences don’t. (And hey, look, one of our most insightful commenters felt attacked for some reason! Imagine that.)

This isn’t to say impenetrable and obfuscatory language doesn’t go too far. It can and does, and I’m sure you can point to a bunch of real examples like the Sokal hoax demonstrating the problem. But I think it is much less a problem than people are motivated to paint it as, seeing as how willing they are to denounce an entirely legible essay as nonsense, argue for an invalid test as evidence for it, etc. And considering how often these fields are casually devalued in the first place, I find that far more troubling.

Edit to add: I think I also might point out these kinds of considerations should affect how we view something like this. Above, you told said that the political motivation of the authors doesn’t change the validity of their point. That’s true and that’s why I discussed the validity above. But you also said:

And at that point what the authors are trying to do does matter, right? If it’s not just an exercise in logic but a silly joke, then it matters whether it’s a snipe at social sciences, or contains transphobic elements like the_borderer thought, or so on. Evidence is one thing, but with jokes I care who we’re laughing at.

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Why assume tribalism when being too lazy to do more than lightly skim the paper; and/or not caring about the ‘review’ would work just as well?

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fair point. again, my mistake was assuming that the publisher was more legitimate than it really is.

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Fair enough. I would also be rather alarmed if somebody got that into a real journal on the basis of ‘machismo + climate change = catnip for liberal academics’; but my understanding is that (while the paper is more amusing than is strictly required for the job) this was more of a ‘beware the “journal” that will publish almost anything’ exercise.

Those, unfortunately, crop up in a wide variety of disciplines and suspected ideological affiliations. Perhaps the most alarming ones are the medical version, since those are just as shoddy but more likely to waste medical research resources or get somebody killed.

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Is it? I do think that’s how the episode should be read, but not how it’s being played. It’s instead being used to revile entire academic fields.

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I agree that it is being used for a hatchet job (or jobs); I just find that to be deeply dishonest given how the paper was actually published.

If you pull one over elements of a discipline that actually have enough clout to count as meaningful representatives, or even leaders, with some suitably constructed flattering nonsense; you have arguably discovered something that needs fixing in the discipline.

If you get a worthless paper published in some predatory bottom feeder journal, all you’ve ‘discovered’ is the scourge of worthless journals. That’s definitely a problem; but one that is pretty discipline agnostic and quite willing to ooze into whatever niches seem profitable.

None of this keeps you from writing up the latter like you’ve done the former and then oozing repulsive self-satisfaction; but lying about the moral doesn’t change it.

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I agree. Have you read the thread? I think others have already said all that, repeatedly.

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