Of course, honesty is an aspiration, and not an actuality. But the
point of an aspiration is it's what we aspire to. We need to learn to
be more honest. This is good for us as people and for the subjects we
work in.
My point is that it's honest to say where we got ideas and insights. I
was responding to Terry, suggesting that it was ok for him to publish
something I wrote under his name (something I'm sure he'd never do).
That was his conclusion at the end of an argument he made about
copyright. I don't think I, anyhow, wrote anything about citation.
For me, citation is more a matter of signing into the community:
acknowledging sources and inspirations, (which gives us the ability to
check breadth of coverage, as an incidental) and accepting that we've
joined a club and there are rules. But an honest person would anyhow
realise that it's decent to say where ideas and so on come from,
rather than claiming to invent them; and that to so acknowledge beings
with it re-inforcement both of community and of evaluation.
Ranulph
On 28 Jun 2009, at 09:05, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
> I think we have to be careful to differentiate the actual bases of
> academia versus the idealized norms. Given a recent report said a
> significant number of scientists, upwards of of 50% admitted to lab
> practices that may have undermined results and something like 6%
> admitted to some for of falsification of data, academic honest I
> would argue is much like general honest, we'd prefer the situation
> where it was generally promoted, and less prefer the situation where
> it was generally practiced. This I think you can roundly see to be
> true when you look at the stories of just about any technological
> revolution, you find ideas flowing quite freely, plagiarized and
> not, for short periods as people become familiar with the changes.
> I think the history of the concept of plagiarism is particularly
> informative to the question of contemporary copyright. The majority
> of the works that I teach in some of my classes(as i teach ancient
> and medieval political theory, machiavelli and other things
> sometimes).... have no citation that was not entered after the
> fact. Citations and plagiarism came into being somewhat together,
> and for a very particular reason that had nothing to do with
> honesty, though today they seem to have to do with concepts of
> 'honor codes' and 'honesty' than their original goals of enabling
> research, and specifically enabling the finding of research.
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