Philosophy journals and the Bannon tactic of "flooding the zone with shit"

You might be aware that I have publicly shamed the leadership of the journal Philosophical Psychology for publishing a race science paper that pretends to argue for the value of free inquiry but is actually an unscientific rehearsal of long-debunked arguments for (among other things) racially-segregated education. I’ve been accused by the stealth-alt-right Heterodox Academy of being a “cancel culture” bogeyman.

I'd like to push back a bit on the framing of my objection to Cofnas's article. People are saying that I targeted it because I don't like or disagree with it. While it's true that I don't like it and disagree with it, I also don't like and disagree with dozens of articles that are published in my field every month. But I've never started a petition against any of them. This is not simply a matter of dislike or disagreement. To my mind, that framing is a bit like saying that epidemiologists dislike or disagree with the conclusions drawn by anti-vaxxers, or that climate scientists dislike or disagree with the conclusions drawn by climate skeptics. I should add that this is not a wild comparison, as Cofnas himself has flirted with climate skepticism and compared climate scientists to defenders of Jeffrey Epstein.

Instead, what I would say is that I found Cofnas's policy suggestions repugnant -- in particular, his claim that government should "devote money to programs that are tailored to the strengths of different groups." This is obviously just code for racially segregated education. Essentially, he wants to overturn Brown v. Board of Education. (He has claimed in several venues that he doesn’t support segregation, but he has yet to explain how that is consistent with a call for such programs.)

So I took a look at the reasoning backing Cofnas's suggestions and found it argumentatively very weak. In my criticisms of Philosophical Psychology and Cofnas's paper, I have focused almost entirely on that reasoning, not the repugnant conclusions that Cofnas draws from it. Moreover, to my knowledge, Cofnas has yet to offer a single response to these criticisms. On top of that, I have not once called for Cofnas to be sacked or suspended. I have said that he should suffer reputational damage for publishing extraordinarily bad research, but that is -- I think -- entirely appropriate in response to extraordinarily bad research.

Just to rehearse some of the more obvious and egregious error's in Cofnas's paper, here's a list:

(1) He simply assumes that broad folk races (white, black, Asian) are biological categories. This is a long-refuted fallacy.
(2) He conflates broad folk race categories with the fine-grained cladistic approach to genetic inheritance that practicing scientists actually use, which enables him to pretend that there is scientific support for his highly speculative claim that, "in a very short time," scientists will discover the genetic explanation for the race gap in IQ scores.
(3) He scoffs at environmental explanations for the race gap in IQ scores without taking seriously many serious contenders. In my original commentary on his paper, I pointed to housing segregation and ecological racism, with specific reference to lead poisoning. It's well-established that lead is a neurotoxin that is especially damaging to the development of intelligence. It is also well-established that impoverished people and racial minorities are especially likely to be exposed to lead poisoning. The recent case of Flint, Michigan, is a dramatic example, but the problem is much more widespread. To put this in context, the removal of lead from paint, gasoline, and other supplies has been credited with the massive drop-off in violent crime in Europe and North America during the 20th century. To simply ignore such a serious and plausible environmental explanation for at least some of the race gap in IQ is either deeply irresponsible or outright deceptive.
(4) The simple fact of the matter is that what Cofnas's paper calls for (free inquiry) was not in danger to begin with. Real scientists (psychologists and geneticists, among others) have been happily pursuing their inquiries into intelligence and related topics for decades. Cofnas is not himself a scientist and could not pursue such inquiries even if he wanted to -- at least not without completely retooling his disciplinary training. So what inquiry, exactly, does he think is stymied or blocked? The only plausible answer is: racist policy recommendations. But if that is what he wants to defend, then he should just come out and say it, rather than hiding behind a facade of caring about science.

There are many more problems with the paper that I won’t enumerate right now. I've helped catalogue some of them in a letter sent to the editors of Philosophical Psychology, though they have yet to respond to that letter despite their explicit call for rejoinders. The irony of this situation is not lost on me. I have also contacted as many of the members of the editorial board of Philosophical Psychology as I could. However, some of them do not seem to have publicly-available email addresses, and at least one is — as far as I can tell — literally dead. This is not a well-run journal.

The normal editorial responses to publishing an article that clearly and egregiously fails to meet the standards of peer-review are things like apology, correction, and retraction. In cases where the paper essentially depends on its errors to support a call for racially-segregated schooling, resignation of the leadership of the journal also seems appropriate. That is why I wrote the petition, not simply because I disagreed with or disliked the paper's conclusions.

One might still ask, however, why not just write a rebuttal and submit it for peer review in the same journal? I don't think that that is an appropriate response for several reasons. First, the decision to publish Cofnas's paper, along with the other leadership problems mentioned above, erased any confidence I had in the leadership of Philosophical Psychology. Second, I don't regard Cofnas's paper as a genuine contribution to the scholarly discourse. Instead, I see it (for the reasons spelled out above) as a Trojan horse that aims to introduce reactionary political and policy ideas into the mainstream. Rebutting it via the normal channels would only legitimize it, thereby helping it to succeed in its nefarious aims. So, because Cofnas's paper is not a genuine contribution to the scholarly discourse -- because it's a Trojan horse -- it does not merit a normal response such as a rebuttal.

People like Cofnas take their cue from Steve Bannon: their strategy is to "flood the zone with shit." What that means, in practice, is that if sincere scholars spent their time responding in the normal way to everything these people produce, we would have time for little else. The "flood the zone with shit" strategy puts real researchers in a double-bind. If we don't respond, their work seems to have gone un-refuted. If we do respond, we waste time that would otherwise be spent on serious scholarly inquiry. Moreover, if we respond, we draw additional attention to their bogus views. In academia, citations are the coin of the realm. So by bothering to refute them we -- as a side effect -- boost their signal and increase their clout. They know this, and that's one reason why they use the "flood the zone with shit" strategy.

It's really quite clever, I'll admit.