So, a few weeks ago, I linked to a short piece written by Princeton Philosophy Professor Gilbert Harman in which Harman made the case that Marc Hauser's book Moral Minds plagiarized the ideas of a young researcher named John Mikhail.
Then, suddenly, the Harman piece disappeared. Harman commented that he had not meant for the piece to go public. He had posted it to his website in order to get comments from a small circle of colleagues. When it received wider attention, Harman pulled it down so that he could give his ideas some more thought before publicizing his accusations.
Well, an expanded version of the piece is now back up. You can read it here. I haven't diffed the files, but it looks like the original piece is still there, with some additional discussion at the end.
Connoisseurs of academic scandal, enjoy.
Hat tip to Laila Waggoner.
Edit: Post title had Marc Harman instead of Marc Hauser. Der . . .
Odd that you didn't also not that Hauser responded to Harman in a non-emotional and reasoned way. Harman should be ashamed of posting his piece. It lacks scholarship and should be retracted. Mikhail's work is very good, but it is not the essence of Hauser's book.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen the Hauser response. Do you have a link for it?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.princeton.edu/~harman/HauserResponse_Harman%20essay.pdf
ReplyDeleteSorry for not getting the link back. There is an interesting footnote in the Hauser response where he claims that one of Harman's own papers on the linguistic analogy could be seen asa case of plagiarism. I didn't believe it so I looked it up. Harman's paper doesn't cite anyone and is written as if he invented some of the big ideas. Poor form given his accusation!
ReplyDelete