CARELESS CRITICISM

Careless talk costs grants

The editors of Current Biology really should be more careful; some contributors are in danger of giving the game away. Years of careful fostering of the idea that everything can be explained in terms of molecular genetics and structural biology — thus keeping many of us gainfully employed — may have been undermined by their careless revelations. The current ascendancy of these disciplines could...

Criticism of Benacerraf’s Criticism of Modern Eleatics

I analyze here Benacerraf’s criticism of Thomson arguments on the impossibility of ω-supertasks. Although Benacerraf’s criticism is well founded, his analysis of Thomson’s lamp is incomplete. In fact, it is possible to consider a new line of argument, which Benacerraf only incidentally considered, based on the functioning laws of the lamp. This argument leads to a contradictory result that comp...

The Art of Criticism? Criticism as Art!

Identifying careless responses in survey data.

When data are collected via anonymous Internet surveys, particularly under conditions of obligatory participation (such as with student samples), data quality can be a concern. However, little guidance exists in the published literature regarding techniques for detecting careless responses. Previously several potential approaches have been suggested for identifying careless respondents via indi...

Burkeian Criticism

In conclusion, we should like to add two admonitions. First, criticism is an art, not the raw tables or summaries of scholarship. The scholarship is a necessary prerequisite, and the formal reports, the compilations of the learned monograph, are essential to criticism. We have too much of unimaginative word counting, the pedestrian assemblage of arguments, the methodical and generalized comment...