Follow him here. He posts July 7, 2023:
…the 4th circuit just struck a blow against academic freedom, citing a famous case which involved a person in the LA prosecutors office telling the truth about a case the prosecutor was lying about. The ruling: you have no right to contradict the employer. Now it has been established in an academic context, which is important, because rights in these cases depend not on law but on clear precedent. Now the clear precedent is “shut up,” you have only very special circumscribed rights– as a citizen and in your classroom and research, but not to speak up against the administration. Beware. Every Provost in the country has the champagne out tonight.
If it was public topics, i.e. politics as such, he would have been OK. What Garcetti established was that if you object to company or organization policy, even if they ask you to lie, you can be fired for it. Mostly this just means that if you are critical of affirmative action in your university you can be fired.
Porter is a tenured statistics professor in the college of education. He was unhappy with the direction of the higher ed program, with which he was affiliated. In particular, he thought the college and the program had gone woke and was promoting social justice over good scholarship. He expressed those views internally in departmental email and departmental meetings. As a consequence, he was removed from the higher ed program on the grounds that he was insufficiently collegial.
The majority held that professorial speech in department meetings and the like is speech pursuant to their job duties under Garcetti v. Ceballos and does not fall under a narrow exception for research and teaching. As a consequence, such speech is entirely unprotected by the First Amendment and does not even reach the balancing test under Pickering v. Board of Education.
‘Since FDA Commissioner Robert Califf began his second tenure as the agency’s head in February 2022, he has made combating “misinformation” one of his top priorities, arguing it is “a leading cause of preventable death in America now” — though “this cannot be proved,” he said.’ So which is this rationale for censorship? Misinformation, disinformation, gaslighting, BS, or the familiar problem of believing something that can’t be justified?
The distinction between mis and dis seems to hinge on the intentions of the transmitter, not the content.
Turner writes May 30:
‘Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.’ Obviously they have never seen the crows in my neighborhood, who kill babies in the nest, harass ospreys, and generally raise hell, and do this in co-ordinated attacks, calling on one another to help.
Turner writes May 13:
So the deal with AI replacing everything is that we are now going to be free to be our creative selves rather than drudges working every day on routine paperwork. But there is a catch– we will never be as good as AI in anything we do. So what we do with our creative selves is essentially worthless.
Turner writes April 2, 2023:
The actual source of the key elements of Kuhn’s theory of paradigms was Nathan Isaacs, “The Law” and the Law of Change (pts. 1 & 2), 65 U. PA. L. REV. 665, 666, 757 (1917), transmitted through LJ Henderson and James Bryant Conant. It was an account of changes in Jewish law. …[T]he basic model of establishing the paradigm, codifying it, having it break down and replaced by a new one is there is Isaacs in 1917, and his buddy Henderson applied it to the history of science. Henderson was the in-law of Conant, where you will also find the basic ideas and the personal connection to Kuhn.
Leonard Waks comments:
If Kuhn was merely Fleck, why wasn’t and isn’t Fleck famous now? For the past 30 years, everyone has known about the Fleck connection.
Ideas may be in the head, but as public objects they have to be boxed and gift wrapped before they are given away. As presentation, Kuhn’s book is a masterpiece. It provided an interpretive framework not only in science studies, but throughout the social sciences and humanities. In academia, that is a monster success story.
You cannot “steal” an idea because ideas cannot be copyrighted. When folks are ready to claim that ‘Structure’ was plagiarized, I will be interested.
Turner: “The idea that there is a cycle of doctrine which starts with something clear, turns into puzzle solving, and finally collapses and is replaced. This is a pretty radical departure from, say, Hermann Cohen, who thinks there is an essential element which persists through time and is revealed in greater purity, which is also the kind of history of science that Kuhn is rejecting.”
