Re: a question about scholarly ethics
- From: "neverbetter" <neverbetter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 18 Mar 2006 12:09:26 -0800
TomS wrote:
A question occurred to me about scholarly ethics.
As I am neither a scholar nor an ethicist, this question may
have no validity, but I'm just curious.
It seems to me that a scholar has certain obligations when
communicating to the public. One of them would be to inform the
audience when s/he is expressing an opinion outside of the area
of scholarly expertise.
To take a manufactured example, if a specialist in the history
of the American Revolution wrote an article on the Civil War, there
ought to be a disclaimer something like this: "I'm an expert on the
American Revolution, not on the Civil War, so my opinions may not
reflect the best of current opinion on this topic."
What do you folks think?
I dunno, it could make people think "Ok so why do you bother to write
at all if you don't know anything about it" and they could miss out on
a lot of good books and articles. You don't have to be a specialist to
write good informative text on a topic as long as you've done your
research properly, so requiring such a disclaimer could undermine the
credibility of a lot of good stuff. When venturing outside of one's own
field a scholar can familiarize himself with the literature and he
could perhaps show the text to a few experts for feedback before
publication if it's not a peer reviewed journal and it could be
up-to-date and factual even if it's somewhat out of his box. But the
ones that *really* need the disclaimer the most wouldn't have it
because their writers think of themselves as the experts on everything
under the sun.
But definitely an ethical scientist should know the limits of his
knowledge and temper his pronouncements accordingly. Tentative language
can express their uncertainty even in the absence of a disclaimer and
opinions should be distinguished from statements which are backed by
evidence. It's good to resist the temptation to declare absolute
truths if one hasn't got them in one's possession. And one needs to
think of the intended audience. For scientists, the arguments should
mostly speak for themselves, but when the text is intended for the lay
audience they are not as well qualified to determine the worth of the
arguments and the author may better succeed to ride on borrowed
authority. If there's an introduction of the author it should disclose
his area of expertise, if any, and avoid bragging and advertizing
himself as an expert of more than he's worth.
I think there may sometimes be an illusion that expertise in one field
gives authority on all fields, because the magazines sometimes have
articles in which celebrity scientists are asked to comment on
something that is quite outside their area. Of course they may express
personal opinions as everybody else does, but some people seem to
function as sage opinion automats who are supposedly qualified to
comment on anything and everything. There's nothing wrong in saying "I
don't know, please ask someone who is an expert on it" if a journalist
calls and asks for expert comments on something that is way out of
one's field,
.
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- From: TomS
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