Where is the academic literature on skepticism as a social movement?
- George Hansen, "CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview," The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research vol. 86, no. 1, January 1992, pp. 19-63. I've not seen a more detailed history of contemporary skepticism elsewhere.
- Stephanie A. Hall, "Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics," New Directions in Folklore vol. 4, no. 1, March 2000.
- David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture, 1993, The University of Wisconsin Press.
There's a lot of literature on parallel social movements of various sorts, including much about advocates of some of the subject matter that skeptics criticize, and some of that touches upon skeptics. For example:
- Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, "The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening," in Roy Wallis, editor, On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, 1979, University of Keele Press, pp. 237-270.
- Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science, 1982, Taylor & Francis.
- Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, 2nd edition, 2006, Harvard University Press.
- Christopher P. Toumey, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World, 1994, Rutgers University Press.
In some ways, the skeptical movement also resembles a sort of layman's version of the activist element in the field of science and technology studies, based on positivist views of science that are the "vulgar skepticism" dismissed in this article:
- Michael Lynch, "Expertise, Skepticism and Cynicism: Lessons from Science & Technology Studies," Spontaneous Generations vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 17-24.
- Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions, 1995, Oxford University Press.
- R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge, Companion to the History of Modern Science, 1990, Routledge.
UPDATE (September 27, 2014): Some additional works I recommend for skeptics:
- Harry Collins, Are We All Scientific Experts Now?, 2014, Polity Press. A very brief and quick overview of science studies with respect to expertise.
- Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense On Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, 2010, University of Chicago Press. A good corrective to the overuse of Popper, easy read.
- Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, 2013, University of Chicago Press. Good collection of essays reopening the debate many thought closed by Larry Laudan on whether there can be philosophical criteria for distinguishing the boundary between science and pseudoscience.
5 comments:
Though not an academic work, I collected data on the skeptics groups on Meetup and reported the numbers in the appendix of my 2008 "Raising Our Game" piece.
And, of course, the pragmatists you mention (except maybe Kurtz) were hardly skeptics. Here I think Putnam is correct that American pragmatism is distinctive to a large degree because it combines fallibilism with anti-skepticism. It is not just belief that requires justification but doubt too.
Jim: The modern skeptical movement has essentially redefined skepticism--they're not philosophical skeptics, they're skeptics about knowledge claims that are empirically testable yet not supported by scientific evidence.
I Doubt It: I need to write a literature review paper of potential relevance to a research project for next year, but if this is it, then I need to find an analogous literature, say, about some other social movement, from which to identify relevant issues that I want to research--such as how do new media change concepts of authority and credibility, how are experts identified, what's the individual's capacity to know what's true, are there cultural differences between countries that affect the trajectories of social movements, etc.
The person you might be interested in contacting is Dr Martin Bridgstock (featured ep #47 of the Skeptic Zone podcast) - I helped him collect qual last Dragon*Con of 'activist skeptics' whilst he was there.
There's some articles that I've dug up here: http://podblack.com/2008/07/retrospectacle-shes-already-got-science-women-skepticism-and-the-need-for-more-research/ - more specifically the history of female involvement in skepticism.
George Hansen also wrote extensively on CSICOP and Martin Gardner in a way you may (or may not) find relevant: check out "The Trickster and the Paranormal."
His work has footnotes and an index.
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