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Friday, October 27, 2017

Making Sense of Sentences I


In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the sentence as a complete thought. Princeton professor and literary critic Jeff Dolven notes one objective shared by all sentences: "The purpose of a sentence is to end."

Dolven is offering his thoughts on a "beloved or bedeviling sentence" each week in his current 8-part series "Life Sentences," appearing in the Paris Review. The first to be dissected comes from the pen of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:"The world is everything that is the case."

Why not bookmark Verbum Sapienti and catch the rest of the series?   


Wednesday, October 25, 2017

"Dirty Truth" Drives Dubious Remedy

"A dirty truth pervades academic publishing," confides Brian Martinson, in the current issue of Nature, viz., that researchers write papers to gain credit in the academic marketplace. These pubcoins, as Martinson, who has led NIH-funded projects in research integrity since 2001, dubs them can be quite tangible, as recent reports confirm.

One needn't agree with his problematic proposal to restrict research publication to concur that its motivations have shifted and the role of sharing knowledge has received short shrift in the process. Indeed, it is precisely the latter that prompts this academic editor to demur. Surely there are positive reinforcements that bear exploring  revisiting how tenure is awarded, comes to mind.