Bourgeois academic distopia

In my last entry, about wise birds and the workplace, I discussed the bourgeois strategy.  Since then I read an interesting blog entry about citation practices in academic disciplines, over on Evolutionary Psychology.  In this piece Rob Kurzban discussed poor citation and the need to have it checked before proceeding to publication.  He is now rolling out a test of his ideas for Evolution and Human Behavior.

I am not wholly convinced of this need to fastidiously check citations, but I do think citations are often ill used.  There is a tendency to ad hominem argument in theoretical pieces, and citations are simply used to demonstrate the hominem in question. Moreover, some sort of association between the current author and the cited is forced and the validity of the argument is to be judged only by the good company the author keeps - at least in his or her mind.  This is the device of a sophist, or rhetorician, and good editing will simply have the entire structure removed.  Indeed, my instinct tells me we should simply be reducing citation and pushing for clear lines of argument - a PREDICATE LOGIC 101 course should be mandatory for all scholars. None the less, Kurzban's efforts may well bring us to improved line of sight, not least as he is looking for pinpoint accurate citation that will direct a reader to the precise place a claim is made, thereby exposing its original structure. I wish him well.

Embedded within this issue is another, that of academic ownership, and this brings me back to the bourgeois strategy.  Lots of folk worry about plagiarism and duly referencing the progenitor of an idea.  However, ideas are often discovered during constrained random walks through conceptual space.  Those constraints coming from individual dispositions as well as the architectural history of that space.  Inevitably several people will have the same idea, or rather, they will encounter it.  Given that there is so much literature available there is a strong likelihood that a given scholar will happen upon an idea but not the first paper ever to articulate it.  The poor citation practiced in this case will in no way be indicative of the author's lack of intellectual propriety or skill.

In my view this means that ideas are allocated to scholars in a fairly arbitrary fashion.  One might, by rough comparison, expect allocation to lead to hawkish ownership - a proprietorial response to discovery.  Likewise, in recognition that one has merely seen something previously found, rather than created it, we might anticipate a dovish bow, and capitulation.  The social norms around citation may well be a response to this - a system to coordinate this social problem.

In a utopia, where academic careers were judged differently, or not at all, we might all take more shared joy in the content of ideas, and worry less about these problems.  This fantasy brings into sharp relief the essential role of competition in academic creativity and also causes me to wonder about the actual process of thinking and discovery in science.  We really are components in a larger machine.