Carey’s list of publications doesn’t look particularly bullshitty.
I looked at a random paper called “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species” and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an “endangered glacier” narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.
So again, it’s not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it’s still the same thing. When talking about “glaciology”, I expect something like “here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt”, but instead the guy produces something like “here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists”. The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science, but then it’s not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting “stuff people said about glaciers”, I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
It’s not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about ‘glaciers in popular culture’. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it’s something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
It reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Chairs where Ostap Bender, a con man, pretends to be a chess grand master and gives a lecture about chess, for money, despite actually being quite a bad chess player:
“Comrades!” he said in a marvelous voice. “Comrades and brothers in chess, the subject of my lecture today will be the same thing I spoke about—and, I have to admit, not without success—in Nizhny Novgorod a week ago. The subject of my lecture is an idea for a fruitful opening move. What exactly is an opening move, comrades, and what exactly, comrades, is an idea? An opening move, comrades, is ‘Quasi una fantasia.’ And what exactly does ‘idea’ mean, comrades? An idea, comrades, is human thought clothed in the logical form of chess. (...)”
The idea is: pretend to be an expert on X despite not being an expert on X. After saying a few introductory words about X, move to a meta level where you already have an experience in bullshitting. Many people will not notice the trick, because they will automatically assume that you moved to the meta level because you are such an expert on X that everything object-level is already beneath your status and now you are using your vast wisdom to generalize. While in fact you are merely talking high-status sounding platitudes.
Ostap pretends to be an expert on chess, then he switches the topic to an idea of chess, and then he presumably makes the whole lecture about ideas in general. The feminist glaciology researchers pretend to be experts on glaciology, then they switch the topic to patriarchal oppression in glaciology, and then they write an article about patriarchal oppression in general, sprinkled with some glaciology trivia.
To illustrate what I mean, I will now give you an outline of an article about feminist zymurgy that you could write in an afternoon. I actually don’t know what “zymurgy” means, I just noticed it twenty years ago as the last word in my English dictionary and it somehow stuck in my memory; all I remember is that it is some kind of science. Doesn’t matter; I can still write an article about feminist zymurgy! Here is the outline:
Zymurgy as a science is very important for our society. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some examples of practical application of zymurgy). But despite all its successes, the field suffers from a few serious problems, such as gender bias.
Scientific literature about zymurgy usually mentions (use google or wikipedia to find ten most important male researches in zymurgy) as the most important names in zymurgy. Most people won’t even notice that all these scientists are male. This is how widespread is the idea that zymurgy is mostly a male field. However, there are also many important female scientists in zymurgy, such as (use google or wikipedia to find five or ten most important female researches in zymurgy). These important female contributors are often not known enough. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some trivia about the life of these female scientists, even if the trivia is completely unrelated to zymurgy).
Women are not the only minority ignored by the white imperialistic Western science. Indigenous people are similarly erased from the official science, despite providing alternative points of view. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some native beliefs related to the field of zymurgy, however absurd). By not giving these alternative points of view the same respect as to the white patriachal science, our democracy is endangered. Further research is needed.
If there is some wannabe Sokal reading this comment, feel free to use this template, and please tell me the results.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science
“Collecting stuff people said about something” is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that’s why “prehistory” refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is “science” is kind of like asking whether medicine is “chemistry”. History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn’t mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
I looked at a random paper called “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species” and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
So again, it’s not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it’s still the same thing. When talking about “glaciology”, I expect something like “here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt”, but instead the guy produces something like “here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists”. The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science, but then it’s not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting “stuff people said about glaciers”, I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
It’s not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about ‘glaciers in popular culture’. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it’s something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
It reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Chairs where Ostap Bender, a con man, pretends to be a chess grand master and gives a lecture about chess, for money, despite actually being quite a bad chess player:
The idea is: pretend to be an expert on X despite not being an expert on X. After saying a few introductory words about X, move to a meta level where you already have an experience in bullshitting. Many people will not notice the trick, because they will automatically assume that you moved to the meta level because you are such an expert on X that everything object-level is already beneath your status and now you are using your vast wisdom to generalize. While in fact you are merely talking high-status sounding platitudes.
Ostap pretends to be an expert on chess, then he switches the topic to an idea of chess, and then he presumably makes the whole lecture about ideas in general. The feminist glaciology researchers pretend to be experts on glaciology, then they switch the topic to patriarchal oppression in glaciology, and then they write an article about patriarchal oppression in general, sprinkled with some glaciology trivia.
To illustrate what I mean, I will now give you an outline of an article about feminist zymurgy that you could write in an afternoon. I actually don’t know what “zymurgy” means, I just noticed it twenty years ago as the last word in my English dictionary and it somehow stuck in my memory; all I remember is that it is some kind of science. Doesn’t matter; I can still write an article about feminist zymurgy! Here is the outline:
If there is some wannabe Sokal reading this comment, feel free to use this template, and please tell me the results.
Now look it up and find out whether your example is less or more appropriate than you thought. ;-)
“Collecting stuff people said about something” is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that’s why “prehistory” refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is “science” is kind of like asking whether medicine is “chemistry”. History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn’t mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
He is a historian, studying history of science. That subject is exactly about studying what people (scientists) are saying.