The Importance of Peer Review

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The importance of filtering out truly bad stuff on the internet. Being put in a journal kind of is in some sense a stamp of approval it's a validation of that opinion. In a world without journals what does it matter that one more person puts up a wacky not very well validated opinion on the internet? We don't lose anything by not having peer review, he says. There is something valuable about having a means by which like non-scientists who might be interested in science can know where to look for decent ideas.

Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the rescue! I had a very ambitious conversation with Liam Kofi Bright, starting with what we mean by “truth” (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, and deflationary approaches), and then getting into the nitty-gritty of how we actually discover it. There’s a lot to think about once we take a hard look at how science gets done, how discoveries are communicated, and what different kinds of participants can bring to the table.

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Liam Kofi Bright received his Ph.D. in Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently on the faculty of the London School of Economics in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and the Scientific Method. He has worked on questions concerning peer review and fraud in scientific communities, intersectionality, logical empiricism, and Africana philosophy. He is well-known on Twitter as the Last Positivist.

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