Just how much confidence should we place in published research findings, even if peer reviewed? What should we ignore, reject, modify, incorporate, pursue? To answer these questions, the sciences and the humanities must be continually in the business of keeping the record of knowledge straight at the edge, an enterprise the Internet can fruitfully enhance. Accordingly, this chapter looks at some Internet-based possibilities concerning this postpublication process: watchdog blogs in the sciences, blogs and discussion forums in the sciences and humanities, and book and article reviews in the humanities. For these activities, as for peer review, Habermas’s ideal speech situation provides a useful theoretical framework. The goal is the same: the achievement of rational consensus concerning the originality, significance, argumentative competence, and clarity of expression of the work in question. After reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—after the sweeping “Prologue,” the dramatic “Pardoner’s Tale,” the raucous “Miller’s Tale,” the sermon that is the “Parson’s Tale”—readers come upon what may well be the world’s first “Retraction Notice”: . . . Now I pray to all who hear or read this little treatise, that if there is anything in it that they like, they thank our Lord Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all wisdom and goodness. And if there is anything that displeases them, I pray also that they attribute it to inadvertence rather than intent. I would have done better if I could. For the Bible says, “All that is written is written to support the teaching our faith” and that is what I wish to do. Therefore I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive my sins, especially my translations and works of worldly vanity, which I revoke in my retractions. . . . In acknowledging error, some editors of science journals lack the poet’s candor. One minced no words, responding to a request from the editors of the blog “Retraction Watch”—Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky—for reasons that a paper was retracted with the following terse comment: “It’s none of your damn business.”
Habermas, Rorty, and the Problem of Competent Interlocutors
