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The joke that is Sociology (The Conceptual Penis)

Fishking

Fishking

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Most rational people understand that Sociology, or how it presents itself in academia, isn't something that should be taken seriously. It is not a science but a study that is merely a representation of whatever cultural, political, and ideological biases that exist in any group. To highlight how much of a joke sociology is, and how it should never be considered a science, someone has submitted a paper purely as a mocking joke to a peer review journal and it was publish.

It really doesn't get much better than this. The paper was title "The Conceptual Penis" and put forward that the penis is merely a social construct and pointed out in their abstract that pre-operative transgender women having anatomical penises proves that the penis is a construct because, well, they are women.

'The Conceptual Penis': Academic Hoax Exposes Absurdity Of Gender Studies | Daily Wire

"The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial."

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)
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"The Conceptual Penis" would make a good name for a band.
 
Seems more an indictment of open-access and/or pay-to-publish journals. Also Cogent is a journal for social sciences, not sociology.
Cogent Social Sciences is a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences: from law to sociology, politics to geography, and sport to communication studies. Connect your research with a global audience for maximum readership and impact.
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Sociology is a questionable field, but this doesn't raise any questions about it.
 
spud_meister said:
Seems more an indictment of open-access and/or pay-to-publish journals. Also Cogent is a journal for social sciences, not sociology.

Sociology is a questionable field, but this doesn't raise any questions about it.
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1. It's a peer reviewed journal.

2. Sociology is part of the the parent umbrella of social sciences.
 
Fishking said:
1. It's a peer reviewed journal.
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Yes, and clearly a ****ty one. Do we know if they even had a sociologist doing the peer review?

2. Sociology is part of the the parent umbrella of social sciences.
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Sociology is one of many social science.

If you can somehow prove the article was reviewed and approved by a sociologist, you might have a point, otherwise this is just further proof that peer-review outside of the major reputable journals is broken.
 
spud_meister said:
If you can somehow prove the article was reviewed and approved by a sociologist, you might have a point, otherwise this is just further proof that peer-review outside of the major reputable journals is broken.
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One of the points made by the authors was that a major reputable journal did reject the paper only to recommended its publication in this journal. So yeah, peer-review within the major reputable journals is broken in this field since they are recommending the publication of this garbage. Still, this is a slightly weaker case than the Sokal Affair which did involve a major reputable journal publishing a hoax paper itself.
 
Threegoofs when this hoax was posted as some kind of baffling 'refutation' of climate science said:
Your gullibility is strong on this one.


https://academeblog.org/2017/05/20/the-hoax-that-failed-or-skeptics-who-arent-very-skeptical/

"The article, it turns out, was initially rejected by a journal, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, which as it turns out doesn’t even make a list of the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. Boghossian and Lindsay were then referred to a smaller outlet, Cogent Social Sciences, that offers publication where authors “pay what you like” (apparently, these authors didn’t pay anything) in return for publication. While this open-access journal claims to employ peer review, in fact articles are only reviewed by a single individual and just about all are accepted. And while it is published by Taylor and Francis, a respected publisher, the journal’s website makes clear that it operates entirely independently of Taylor & Francis, and that its publishing model is utterly different from theirs.

So, on the basis of publishing a hoax paper in an obscure vanity journal with zero credibility in the field they wished to “expose,” the authors — and those who praise them — somehow jump to the conclusion that the entire discipline of gender studies is corrupt. As one observer wrote, “How they made this deductive leap is actually far more puzzling than how the paper got accepted.” (Boghossian, by the way, is a philosopher who actually teaches critical thinking.)"
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Also of note from that link:
Moreover, as science blogger Ketan Joshi pointed out, “academic hoaxes happen in the hard sciences, too:

Andrew Wakefield, a British anti-vaccination campaigner, managed to publish a fraudulent paper in the Lancet in 1998.
A US nuclear physics conference accepted a paper written entirely in autocomplete.
A trio of MIT grad students created an algorithm that creates fake scientific papers – in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing found 120 published papers had been generated by the program.
A paper entitled “Get me off your ****ing mailing list” was accepted for publication by computer science journal.
A 2013 hoax saw a scientific paper about fictional lichen published in several hundred journals.”

Yet no one — and certainly not people like Pinker and Dawson — would ever suggest that these embarrassments invalidate the entire fields of physics, computer science, or biology. Added Joshi,

The article in Skeptic Magazine highlights how regularly people will vastly lower their standards of skepticism and rationality if a piece of information is seen as confirmation of a pre-existing belief – in this instance, the belief that gender studies is fatally compromised by seething man-hate. The standard machinery of rationality would have triggered a moment of doubt – ‘perhaps we’ve not put in enough work to separate the signal from the noise’, or ‘perhaps we need to tease apart the factors more carefully.’​
 
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