rap session

my rap session, with ken johnson, took about 8 minutes. this is not a bad thing; ken came with exactly what i was looking for, which was a list of the major relevant journal/article databases in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. i think he was surprised that i had such specific requests for research help, and it gave me a boost of confidence to be able to show him that i had already begun searching on several of the databases he suggested and that i knew what i was doing. his lists of social science and humanities databases were especially helpful, since i have yet to do much searching outside of the sciences specifically. now i know where to look.

we also verified that my iLLiad account was still active and that i could remember my login and password. ken's other suggestion was to directly contact the professional/academic associations for each discipline i wanted to investigate and simply ask if there was anything like an "official" stance or theoretical perspective on the UFO/ET question, or at least those aspects of it with which each discipline would deal. i had thought of contacting individual researchers, but not these organizations. how cool will it be to write an association of physicists and ask how they treat journal/conference submissions concerning UFOs?!

ken was unable to answer one question i've come across: is there an established citation style for quoting a researcher's personal blog? is it of the same status as a website? (is the content of the same status?) i find that many physicists will openly speculate on the matter of UFOs on blogs...perhaps as an alternative to "publishing" on the matter?

does anyone know what MLA doctrine has to say about blogs?

proposal

(working) thesis title:

"The UFO/ET Debate: Science, Pseudoscience, and Argument"

(working) thesis:

The case against the idea that extraterrestrials have ever, or are currently, visiting our planet can be understood as falling generally in line with institutionalized scientific knowledge. By looking at the ways in which various academic disciplines treat the topic of UFOs/ETs, we can see how established disciplinary perspectives shape the arguments of "disbelievers" as well as how they contribute to the perception of "believers" as making irrational and unscientific claims. The case for the idea that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrials rests on arguments that are largely considered invalid by disciplinary/scientific standards; however, these arguments (and the evidence underlying them) may actually represent significant challenges to the very framework that rejects them. I will argue that it is the threat posed by the case for the reality of UFOs to our contemporary scientific understanding of the universe which accounts for its regular dismissal from the realm of "serious" scientific inquiry (as well as the realm of what most people are willing to believe), rather than the intrinsic scientific value of the arguments and evidence which comprise the case itself.

Or: how is it that evidence of UFO & ET-related phenomena comes to be dismissed before it is even considered? How is it that so many people refuse in principle to entertain the arguments advanced by the "believers?"

types of research, gathering data:

gather information from books and internet sources in order to accurately represent the arguments of both sides; extensively search journal databases to determine how the UFO/ET question is approached from disciplinary perspectives (i.e., Psychology/Sociology attempting to explain "abduction" as a mass delusion, Physics attempting to prove/disprove the possibility of interstellar travel, "paradigm shifts" in the Philosophy of Science, etc.); gather philosophical sources on scientific method, empiricism, and the treatment of anomalous evidence; gather philosophical/sociological sources on the relationship between scientific discourse and public opinion, the relationship between expert and common knowledge, etc.
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hmmm...i still need to clarify this a bit. i need an outline and a finalized thesis statement. that's first on my timeline--let's say, by the end of this week.

Ph.D.'s reflect on grad school, higher ed

i know grad school is on many of our minds these days, so i thought i'd share some interesting threads i've recently come across in the blogging world.

this is a post from a feminist philosopher about what it's like to have a Ph.D. in terms of how academics (and the institutions that employ them) measure professional success and personal satisfaction. her advice to students will warm your hearts, i promise.


here is a post from over at crookedtimber.org, which is often host to these sorts of "internal conversations" between Ph.D.'s, journalists, and other representatives of the intelligentsia. it begins with a few links meant for people considering grad school, but the comment thread is loaded with useful information from readers who speak to the issue of pursuing post-graduate degrees from the perspectives of their fields/professions.

i always find it interesting to get a glimpse into the minds of people who are doing the kind of work i think i may one day want to be doing. perhaps one of you will find something relevant here.

(i'd also just like to say that coming across stuff like this makes me appreciate/think about the Praxis component of the IDS core. i think much of what i learned in my Praxis class--about the way higher ed. works, how disciplines work, etc.--is validated by seeing what these professionals have to say about their own experiences)

see?

something i suspected, but which was confirmed during my time in the library today:

try to find scholarly articles containing the keywords "ufo" and "extraterrestrial," and the overwhelming majority of your results will be from the fields of psychology and social psychology (sometimes sociology as well). almost without exception, the goal of these articles will be to explain how & why people come to believe that they've been abducted by aliens. certainly, these disciplines are not to be criticized for addressing issues which they see as reasonably falling within their rightful provinces...but can it be that the only academically interesting question regarding UFOs and extraterrestrials is a psychological one??

this is a good example of what i mean when i refer to the role that academic disciplines play in shaping the UFO/ET debate. academics are supposed to be experts, right? and we often defer to experts when attempting to settle disputes about which we suppose experts should have authoritative knowledge, right? well, with regard to the possibility that extraterrestrials might 1) exist, and 2) have visited our planet, the "experts" are predominantly--bordering on exclusively--concerned with how so many people can possibly have such similar delusions. discouraging.

lesson: sometimes academia is simply unable to play a meaningful (let alone helpful) role in your quest for knowledge, because academia is pretty sure you're just fucking nuts to begin with.

science

i was typing this in the comment thread, but i decided to make a separate post out of it.

billy asks how i will address the so-called "typical critiques" of the ET hypothesis, which i accused him of raising as we drank and argued one night this summer. he notes that i pointed out the frequency with which these critiques (or "anti-alien-assumptions," as i'll call them) are invoked as being reason enough to dismiss their content. let me attempt to clarify what i mean:

it's the very fact that these arguments can be seen to constitute a body which can be identified as 'typical' in the first place that i want to flesh them out and see upon what they most strongly rely. remember how i kept saying that you were being an "ideological skeptic," as opposed to whatever else there is? (scientific skeptic? methodological-rational skeptic?) i want to try to present that set of assumptions and arguments which make up the 'standard' perspective (of the doubter) as clearly and comprehensively as i can...my idea is that this side considers itself to be the rational/scientific approach, and that it does so based mainly on an understanding of contemporary science, especially the fields of astronomy and physics, as an authority or a witness to the effect that the ET hypothesis must be false. basically, the argument is that our current state of scientific knowledge rests on principles that imply the impossibility of interstellar travel such as would have to have occurred for the UFO phenomenon to have even a grain of truth to it. you might say that this side operates based on the principle: if a = the statement 'UFO's are real,' and b = everything else we know, then for a to be true, b has to be false. the doubters generally begin their argument by asserting that b is not false.

the side of the believer has also become "canonized" at least to the extent that its arguments can be laid out in a way that, i think, most members of the believer-community would agree with. this side also sees itself as embodying the properly-scientific approach, mainly because it believes that taking account of the so-called evidence is the appropriate course of action in settling the question. in other words, the believer-community accuses the scientific disciplines of being unscientific because they cite themselves to support their claim that the evidence must already be unworthy of their serious attention (either it's fabricated, or it must be explainable according to what we know). the ET hypothesis simply cannot be entertained in the rational evaluative processes of those whose minds are made up that what would have to be up for revision, if a were true, cannot be up for revision.

this is to place the debate squarely within the realm of philosophy of science, and i think i'll spend a good amount of time there in my paper. however, entire epistemological frameworks are at work in this debate; this is where 'conspiracy theory,' popular culture, and disinformation come in. i'll focus on those elements in my next post, but the point is that, taken together with one's attitude towards the science questions above, the entire fabric of belief at work in either side of the ET/UFO debate most often takes an ideological form. as such, the "typical" perspectives of doubter as well as believer can withstand the theoretical contradictions contained within them...just the kinds of contradictions that reason and rationality are supposed to be able to weed out of our worldviews.

so we have theories about the world, and we may also have evidence that those theories are incomplete or wrong. to put the theory first is to do a scientific injustice to the evidence that may factually refute it; however, to put the evidence first and build a worldview around it is dangerous because of the number and variety of theories to which it can give rise. the idea of the "skeptic" is valuable here, as "one who, barring conclusive evidence, suspends judgment." most doubters are not true skeptics...neither are most believers.

mulligan!

leah's right. eff that philosophy bullhonk, i'm doing my thesis on aliens.

background information: i spent all of last semester researching the arguments and evidence at play in the debate over whether or not extraterrestrial races have ever, or are currently, visiting this planet. it's a personal interest of mine and has been my entire life (call me crazy, i dare you), but i got really into it this past spring. what fascinated me the most was the way in which each side of the debate supports its position. there are appeals to theoretical physics, archaeology, political philosophy, and a whole range of other "established disciplinary perspectives" in the process, with each side claiming a given field and its experts for itself. then there's the "evidence," everything from photographs, video, artifacts, and what's especially interesting to me, testimony from military/government/intelligence officials as to the truth of what the believers say is really happening.

the "evidence," then, appears less-than-incontrovertible to most, at the same time that it completely convinces others. why?! how?! i think it's because the whole situation seems to put certain things we think we know (for instance: the speed of light as an upper limit on space travel makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that ETs could reach us) up against other things we think we know (documented and corroborated evidence that spacecraft which defy our current knowledge of physics actually exist), and both seem to be true. i think this causes people to reason differently about the matter, which challenges the notion we typically have of reason, which is that it is universally available in common form to the human mind.

this is the basic problem i want to investigate. i want this paper to be an exercise in fleshing out rationality and argumentation, as well as a survey of the role of different academic disciplines in contributing to the popular conception of UFO "enthusiasts" as entirely without basis for the arguments they advance. pop culture, media, disinformation, little green men...it's goin' down, y'all.

narrow

you know how "i heart huckabees" begins and ends with the question of whether coincidences are meaningful or meaningless? i love this question. for my part, i'm disinclined to take coincidences as "signs" because i find it difficult to believe that they originate from anywhere, or that they're intended for me somehow...i don't see them as a form of communication because i don't think they're from some(where/thing/one). i do, however, take coincidences to be generally meaningful, insofar as i am able to conceive of myself as still "receiving" something through them, even if it wasn't "sent" by anyone in particular.

i digress. the world gave me a motivational kick today by throwing one of my thesis ideas directly into my internet-browsing path, and i decided to decide to go ahead and settle on it. i shall concern myself with language as a point of divergence between the (so-called) schools of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.

i'll head to the library tonight and post again with some specific ideas, but i can tell you right away that i'm going to need all the help i can get to narrow this topic down. more to come...