Marc Hauser is in hot water (again)
A few weeks back, the philosopher Gilbert Harman had posted to his personal Web site a short paper arguing that Marc Hauser had borrowed excessively, and without proper attribution, from the ideas of the scholar John Mikhail in Hauser’s book Moral Minds. When it started to get some public attention Harman quickly took the document down, saying that he didn’t mean for it to be widely read, and had put it up just to solicit some comments from friends and colleagues. But the other day, Harman re-posted his argument (in a revised form), together with a substantial response from Hauser. (The Boston Globe has a story on the incident, here, and here is something on the subject from the Wall Street Journal.) I’ve not read Hauser’s book, but if his response to Harman contains the best that can be said in his defense, then the situation looks dire. This is the sort of thing that students can be expelled from school (at least, from my school) for, and whether or not it is in violation of institutional guidelines or disciplinary best practices, what Hauser has done is clearly dishonest and unethical — and none of that changes if Hauser did all this “by accident”, whether because he didn’t recognize the extent of Mikhail’s influence on him or because he didn’t see the need to give him more credit. (That would just make him culpably ignorant.) To argue, as Hauser essentially does in his reply, that he really wasn’t influenced by Mikhail as much as he oh-so-obviously was, does not do much to help his cause.
But that’s just what I think. How about you?
I think if one of my freshman borrowed similarly in a final draft, I’d fail him and drag him in front of the dean.
— Freddie · Oct 27, 01:45 AM · #
“To argue, as Hauser essentially does in his reply, that he really wasn’t influenced by Mikhail as much as he oh-so-obviously was, does not do much to help his cause.
But that’s just what I think. How about you?”
Me? I think I’d have to actually read the book before making “oh-so-obviously” judgments. But that’s just me.
— keatssycamore · Oct 27, 01:38 PM · #
I think I’d have to actually read the book before making “oh-so-obviously” judgments. But that’s just me.
And that’s fair. But as I said, my evaluation is based on the fact that Hauser had so little of substance to say in his own defense.
— John Schwenkler · Oct 27, 03:10 PM · #
John Schwenkler,
But you didn’t limit yourself to passing judgment on his defense, you explicitly went further by writing, “ … as much as he oh-so-obviously was”. I do not understand how you can claim “oh-so-obviously was” without reading the book.
Am I misreading this sentence? B/c up until that sentence, I thought that you had been fair and that you had, in fact, limited yourself to evaluating the particulars of Hauser’s weak defense of himself in his response to Harman. So fair play right up until there at the end where you extend your claim beyond the weakness of Hauser’s self-defense (which you’ve read) to the explicit claim that a book you haven’t read was “oh-so-obviously” influenced by Mikhail.
How can you possibly find that influence “oh-so-obvious” until you’ve read Mikhail AND Hauser?
— keatssycamore · Oct 30, 02:41 PM · #
The decline in the taboo against plagarism is one of the great markers for how even our elite have been “dumbed down”.
Mike
— MBunge · Oct 31, 05:50 PM · #