Some brief thoughts on the Synthese issue

Leiter has a writeup here and here about the special Synthese issue about intelligent design. You can read all the details there, I'm not going to rehash them. Some brief thoughts, however:

• It seems to me that the Editors in Chief took the wrong approach on the insertion of the disclaimer into the issue. If they truly believe what they say there, the offending paper(s) should not have been published in the first place.
• Assuming that the Editors in Chief acted professionally when the issue originally appeared (i.e. they checked that the articles met the usual scholarly standards), it looks highly likely that some pressure was applied after the issue appeared. That also explains why changes were required to a paper that was already published online.
• We don't know what sort of pressure was brought to bear, or even the nature of it (political, financial, reputational, some sort of blackmail, really who knows).
• The disclaimer as published seems a lousy compromise at best. If heavy handed political or financial pressure was brought to bear, the reasonable response of the Editors in Chief would have been to resist or resign (dependent on the source of the pressure) - for the simple reason that if this succeeds once, it will just happen over and over again.

This sort of thing does however point to the sort of slippery slope (about which I hope to write some more later) that professional academia is slowly being pushed onto. For me, the disclaimer from John Wilkins in his blog post here sums it all up:

I am, of course, an Associate of the Philosophy department of the University of Sydney and do not act in any official capacity there, just for clarity’s sake. Complain to them all you like. It can’t lose me any salary.

To me, this is one of the main attractions of the 'life of the mind' outside academia. If you're dependent on the system, it will mess with you. Just because it can.

Update: there is an exception to the last bullet point which I've overlooked. What if not only the Journal but also the Editors in Chief received 'libel' threats (the last ones addressed personally)? I rate this as an exception because in that scenario, not publishing the disclaimer and immediate resignation would not have removed the threat. Even so, publishing the disclaimer was still a lousy compromise.

Presenting a paper at AAP

I've thought about attending for a while, but finally decided to present a paper at the AAP conference.

Rather than rehash my thesis, I've decided to talk about something related, but also new: the absolute theory of chemical reaction rates. The reason for this is that it is surprising to some degree that this theory has not attracted more attention in the philosophy of chemistry community. It is a very nice example of physical chemistry at its best.

I actually tried introducing this theory in my thesis, but found that it did not really integrate well in the structure of that particular argument, so finally, before Christmas, decided to leave it out.

Anyway, my abstract reads:

Henry Eyring's absolute rate theory provides a good insight into what it might take to reduce a realistic theory of chemistry to a collection of physical theories. The theory of absolute reaction rates is an example of how the unity of science works in practice. The theory explains the size of chemical reaction rate constants in terms of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum chemistry, but also uses a number of notions unique to chemistry, such as the 'transition state'. Moreover, the explanation relies in important measure on the comparison of reaction rate constant expressions derived from these individual theories. This example can be used to evaluate the philosophical notions of reduction deriving from Nagel, Spector, and Kemeny and Oppenheim, as well as Darden and Maull's notion of 'interfield theories'. These various theories of reduction are the key building blocks in the idea of unity of science. I argue that philosophical ideas about the unity of science need to consider theories of sufficient complexity to avoid the trap of oversimplification. On the other hand, we must also avoid a lazy conclusion of disunity, to which the theory of absolute reaction rates provides a robust counterexample.

This will be my first full conference in about 12 years, and I don't really know what to expect. But I'm going to have fun. I'm coming on my own wing, so see it as a holiday...