In a message dated 12/12/2008 1:12:17 PM Pacific Standard Time, george.herbert@gmail.com writes:
Which of the literary criticism academics, publications, etc. can be so assumed to be accurate is more opaque to the outsider and harder to demonstrate / validate, I think.>>
--------------------------- "Accurate" is the wrong word for in-project discussions. As editors we can only say that a position has been presented, evidence has been marshalled, the standard approach or theory is, and so on.
"Accurate" here seems to me to be just another name for "Truth". Even within Physics there are competing theories all supposedly evidence-based. We merely have to present the competing views and move on :)
Will Johnson
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On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 2:55 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 12/12/2008 1:12:17 PM Pacific Standard Time, george.herbert@gmail.com writes:
Which of the literary criticism academics, publications, etc. can be so assumed to be accurate is more opaque to the outsider and harder to demonstrate / validate, I think.>>
"Accurate" is the wrong word for in-project discussions. As editors we can only say that a position has been presented, evidence has been marshalled, the standard approach or theory is, and so on.
"Accurate" here seems to me to be just another name for "Truth". Even within Physics there are competing theories all supposedly evidence-based. We merely have to present the competing views and move on :)
Will Johnson
Right, but there is no end to the volume of "literary criticism" (taken with a broad scope, one could include grade school book reports...).
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the article on the book.
On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the article on the book.
There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
-Phil
On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the article on the book.
There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
-Phil
Definitely, as it is that obvious stuff which ought to be included in our articles. Novel new takes on a subject, maybe not.
Fred
----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil Sandifer" snowspinner@gmail.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:44 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism
On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant criticism. Grad students' product might be, professors or professional critics moreso. But there are plenty of out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of normal academic criticism et al.
Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering that we can filter out random not-notable commentary. What line are we trying to draw - and why. We have to draw the line, otherwise we do become Cruftpedia. We're not here to collect 101 million grade school essays on "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret" in the article on the book.
There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
-Phil
That's about where my review of Mark Purdey's book (about BSE) would go. Purdey's *remotely* plausible explanation of a mechanism is far shy of Occam's Razor, which is so strange coming from a guy who explicitly likes Occam's Razor. Heavy metal poisoning is a very old subject; Roman pathology. So, why all the complications about another metal falling into the category of having limits on exposure and causing [[manganism]]. I wish Purdey's brother Nigel well in preparing another edition of the book. Hoh boy. Yah...then I guess I should look a Brown's book, especially since I agree with him on the point that burning cattle might've been a good idea. Purdey (deceased) did not.