Philip Moriarty School of Physics & F34PPP #4: Is Peer Review Peerless?

Blog posts - Very impressed by many of your blog posts. - Will get grades and feedback completed by Monday Oct 27 - Could you send me an with the following sentence: “I grant consent for my F34PPP coursework to be made publicly available online”. (If you grant consent, that is!).

Last time… The uniformity of Nature Popper and Falsification Problems with Popper Vive la Revolution?: Kuhn “Normal” science vs paradigm shifts Incommensurability

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Today When peer review fails …and what we should do about it.

So this means that peer review is really good at sifting the wheat from the chaff, right?

“In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that ``physical `reality' [note the scare quotes]... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.'' Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

“In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths - - the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.”

“At least for me it is the incredible satisfaction of taking insights from feminist theory, on the one hand, and insights from physics, on the other, and reading them through one another in building agential realism. And from there going back and seeing if agential realism can solve certain kinds of fundamental problems in quantum physics” materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

But let’s not get too full of ourselves…

The Bogdanov Affair “So no one in the String Group at Harvard” can tell if these papers are real or fraudulent. This morning…told that they were frauds, everyone was laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told that they are real professors and that this is not fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe it is real stuff…” Quoted in “Not Even Wrong”, Peter Woit

The unsettling Sch ön case

And let’s not forget…

So how do we fix peer review?