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All about class.
*important caveat that said TT job was secured via an internal hire where two other grads of the same school…
Excellent questions! Re question 6, I have actually already invented a new punctuation mark. I can’t type it here, as…
29. Should competitive examination questions obey Betteridge’s Law?
It’s likely that Notre Dame will return to a policy of requiring GREs next year (this year they’re officially optional…
Would love to see what a successful answer (in the view of the All Souls’ examiners) looks like.
That list of questions has a beauty to it, I swear.
It starts here, and continues here, and receives scathing commentary here. For the life of me, I can't even figure out what the purportedly offending passage even means: its English is barely intelligible. Synthese should be embarrassed to have published this on the latter ground alone. What do readers think of all this?
Yikes. This definitely and perhaps irrevocably damages the reputation of Synthese.
I don't know, Synthese has survived far worse:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/synthese-once-again.html
Of course, then there was a turnover in editors–not that that seems warranted here. This seems to be just pure carelessness in oversight and probably an indication that Synthese publishes too many pages each year.
I've seen a few people saying that they can't make sense of the passage, and hence treating the dubiously "homophobic" bits as some kind of mad outburst. I do think it's meant to be an argument, so here below is my translation of the overall intent, with all the incoherence and objectionable bits removed:
“So, now you’ve heard my excellent arguments for why universal logic makes sense and pluralist logic doesn’t. Since those arguments are so excellent, you might wonder, like I do, why people remain so anxious to cling onto the discredited idea of plural logic. Well, I think it’s partly para-philosophical. We’re in a cultural moment where people align ‘pluralist” with progressive politics, and everyone likes a progressive. But this pluralist=good reflex leads to just as many absurdities as the idea that there can be a plural array of logics, or that philosophy will naturally progress towards accepting more logics rather than refining the universal one. The pluralist=good idea is historically contingent, and will fade at some point. When it does, people will realize that I, JYB! JYB! JYB!, was right all along.”
If he’d just written that, it would all have been fine and no one would have had to resign.
Anyhow, since I’m sure my department would like me both to be a logician and to publish in Synthese, please cite the above rather than the original passage in any future work on pluralist logic:
Fool, Some Internet and Beziau, Jean-Yves. “The relativity and universality of logic (de-weirdified 2nd ed.).” Synthese (2014) and Leiter Reports (2016): 1-16.
Fool is obviously right.
Synthese should hire Fool as its copyeditor. This version is much clearer and seems more sensible. In fact, a copyeditor with such skills could improve many academic journals.
I have a speculation (and of course this is nothing but a speculation) as to how this paper got through. I suspect that some of the referees were in fact dyed-in-the-wool pluralists or non-classical logicians who were bending over backwards not to be unfair to a universalist opponent by shutting him down, either in the name of ‘scholarly standards’ or in the name of (what shall we say?) ‘moral taste’ ‘decorum’, ‘political correctness’ or simply ‘not being needlessly offensive’. Plus they may have had the slightly malicious intention of giving Beziau enough rope to hang himself, which he has comprehensively done.
As for the editor of the special issue, there is, it seems to me, a problem if you invite some person prominent within a field to write a paper representing a position and he serves up something which in your opinion is crap (or even a bit sub-par). You could go for a revise-and-resubmit but what if the person involved is prickly and arrogant and resistant to revision? What if he fancies himself as a daring and provocative writer and resists any attempt to tone down his offensive examples and/or comments? What if he threatens to withdraw rather than revise? You may find that your Collection/Special Issue starts to fall apart because a position that you think ought to be represented may not now have a representative. Under such circumstances you may decide that a bad representative of that position is better than none at all. Just guessing, of course, but I suspect that something like this explains how Beziau’s paper made it into print.
As for the blame-fest : The editors in chief may have fumbled (but really, you know, they must be absolutely overloaded with work) but the person who really dropped the ball here was the guest editor. He’s the one who should carry the can.
To Fool (the Foole who hath said in in his heart that there is no God or the Foole who hath said in his heart that heart that there is no justice?): I am sorry to say that your reconstruction is unduly charitable. For if you read the article in full, it turns out that there are no *arguments* against the logical pluralism whatsoever apart form the one you reconstruct. So perhaps the right way to paraphrase the passage would go something like this.
“You might wonder, like I do, why people remain so anxious to cling onto the OBVIOUSLY ABSURD idea of plural logic. *After all it takes no notice of distinctions that I think important and puts an ‘s’ on the ends of words that ought to be in the singular.* Well, I think it’s partly para-philosophical. We’re in a cultural moment where people align ‘pluralist” with progressive politics, and everyone likes a progressive. But this pluralist=good reflex leads to just as many absurdities as the idea that there can be a plural array of logics, or that philosophy will naturally progress towards accepting more logics rather than refining the universal one. *Plus some of its proponents, such as Greg Restall, are frivolous fellows who like to propound ridiculous ideas just because they are ‘sexy’ whilst some of its adherents accept such ideas for essentially the same reason.* The pluralist=good idea is historically contingent, and will fade at some point. When it does, people will realize that I, JYB! JYB! JYB!, was right all along.”
(Needless to say, the slur against Greg, which is definitely there in the text, is ludicrously unfair as Greg is the very model of intellectual integrity.)
Also I recommend Caterina Duthil Novaes’s posts over at New Apps which are notably sane and humane. Her latest comment:
I don't think JYB is a particularly homophobic or sexist person (not more than your average male academic in any case); I just think these remarks were made in a lighthearted tone but turned out to be infelicitous.
Quite.
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