The American Copy Editors Society is organizing a National Summit on Plagiarism and Fabrication, which will take place on April 5, and this has led a number of people to start thinking about plagiarism issues in advance of the event. One of the more interesting contributions to the discussion has been Roy Peter Clark’s “Why we should stop criminalizing practices that are confused with plagiarism,” at Poynter.org. Clark argues that discussions of plagiarism in the field of journalism are often too loose to be helpful. Clark’s argument has led to some interesting discussion at You Don’t Say and Language Log.

One of the longstanding questions about plagiarism is one with which many First Things readers might be quite familiar, at least indirectly: plagiarism in homiletics. The advent of the printing press made sermon publication very easy and, at the same time, delivering a sermon written by someone else very easy. So if someone does this and does not attribute it to the original source, and if we take “plagiarism” to mean “morally problematic copying without attribution,” does this count as plagiarism? I’m inclined to think there is nothing problematic about it, because homilies are not an area of life in which originality is especially important, but you can easily find people on both sides of the issues today.

You could also find people on both sides of the issue in the eighteenth century, when large-scale publication of sermon series began to take off. One person who had to deal with the question directly was Laurence Sterne. Sterne often gave other people’s sermons, and his own published series of sermons includes a great many that are clearly other people’s sermons reworked to various degrees. He was criticized for it, and this is probably what led to what is arguably the most famous literary passage on plagiarism ever: Volume 5, Chapter 1 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman attacks plagiarism in words that are themselves plagiarized from Richard Burton.

I’ve often thought myself that we would do better to stop thinking in terms of whether something counts as plagiarism and instead consider the underlying reasons why it’s problematic. There is no reason to think that what is problematic in one field will be problematic in another, and, indeed, reason to think that this will often not be the case. Copying becomes problematic when things like money and reputation are on the line; that is, it becomes troubling when it can endanger the incentive structure of the field in question. There are, however, many fields where copying does not do this. Nobody cares whether laws have original language or not; we so take for granted that politicians don’t write their own speeches that we are surprised when they do; and entire fields of folk art are based on swapping ideas in ways entirely inconsistent with any concern for plagiarism.

In any case, my view is a stronger view than most people usually accept; more people are likely to take the approach that Clark, following Richard Posner, takes. Whatever one’s view, it does seem that we need to think more critically about what we are actually criticizing when we talk about plagiarism, and why.

It’s certainly possible that I’m wildly optimistic (it would not be the first time), but I am inclined to disagree with the recent suggestions of Joseph Knippenberg and Matthew Franck, based on recent (possible) changes in policy on sexual orientation, that the Boy Scouts of America would change its position on theism and atheism, at least at any point in the foreseeable future. There are several reasons to think this.

(more…)

The U.S. Constitution gives the president the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment,” and at least several of the Founding Fathers thought that such a power was important to the usual and normal order of government. Laws tend naturally to severity because they cannot take into account circumstances. A government deriving its authority from the people, however, needs to have a built-in recognition that circumstances do sometimes matter, even if the law does not account for them. In the words of James Wilson, “Citizens, even condemned citizens, may be unfortunate in a higher degree, than that, in which they are criminal.” Taking this into account is one of the ways in which a government can make clear that law exists for the good of the people rather than the reverse.

President Obama has to date issued twenty-two pardons and one commutation of sentence. This is extraordinarily stingy. There was not a single pardon or commutation for the 2012 year, unless you count the Thanksgiving turkeys. The president has only issued pardons on three occasions. His clemency grant rates are extraordinarily low.
(more…)

In my philosophical folklore post last week I asked about other tidbits of philosophical folklore, and commenter Ray Ingles gave one example:

The “is-ought fallacy” is another recurring ‘folk philosophy’ phrase – meaning “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’”, after Hume.

This is a very interesting one, and it is undeniably common — even the exact phrase “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” returns something like 48000 hits on Google, and when you start adding variations, the number explodes. The principle is sometimes called ‘Hume’s Guillotine’, a label that seems to go back to philosopher Max Black in the 1960s. Others call it ‘Hume’s Law’, the source of which I have not been able to trace, although it does seem to be both more recent and less useful, given that there are plenty of other things that have also been called ‘Hume’s Law’. As is often the case with things that reduce to a slogan, it seems to be used in very different ways. Here are some various formulations that often get thrown around when talking about the ‘Is-ought fallacy’ or ‘Hume’s Guillotine’:

You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
You can’t derive an imperative from an indicative.
You can’t derive value judgments from factual judgments.
You can’t derive normative claims from factual claims.
You can’t derive evaluative claims from non-evaluative claims.

But oughts, imperatives, and value judgments are all very different things. ‘Ought’ statements, for instance, are generally indicative statements.  What adds to the confusion is that all of these, even if they are often true, seem to have obvious counterexamples, yet they are all treated as absolute statements. There are many intriguing puzzles here, and the question is sometimes even raised as to whether the use of the principle is self-defeating. As a friend of mine, James Chastek, once joked, “We can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; therefore we ought not to try.”

Perhaps we should go back and look at the source of this slogan, David Hume (1711-1776).

(more…)

Among the many things worth studying, one of the most interesting is what I call ‘philosophical folklore’. Folklore, of course, consists of micro-traditions passed down within communities as part of the ordinary ways of life of the people in those communities. We usually think of these micro-traditions as artistic, but much folklore is philosophical in character. Studying this kind of folklore, often fascinating in its own right, can be quite illuminating.

Of all subjects in philosophy, I think informal logic tends to provide the richest veins of philosophical folklore. Reasoning and evaluating reasoning are things everyone has to do. Formal logic tends to get too technical to be widespread. Informal logic, on the other hand, is almost purely folkloric in nature. Unsystematic and messy, it consists chiefly of rules of thumb, folk classifications, proverbs, slogans, and the like. While there are academic philosophers who attempt to give order to this melange, these attempts at organization are always partial, so many strands of it always escape. Further, appeals to some element or other of informal logic are widespread, not confined to academia, and can have important effects on the kinds of reasoning that are accepted in the broader community. Taking a common slogan like, “You can’t prove a negative,” we are faced immediately with a number of questions. In most of the obvious senses such a claim is false, so how did it come to be part of common wisdom? Does it owe anything to some long-forgotten context? Has it changed its meaning over time, and why? How does its use impact the kinds of argument people accept (or refuse to accept)? We can trace down the history of it and find, for instance, that “You can’t prove a negative” originally had a specific legal context, which is true of a large amount of our folklore about reasoning, and that in breaking free of its original context it has come to be used in very different ways.

Within the already fruitful field of informal logic, one of the most fruitful for the philosophical folklorist is the theory of informal fallacies. Labels for alleged fallacies spring up and spread like weeds, are widely used, and interact in fascinating and sometimes puzzling ways. One interesting element of philosophical folklore that I’ve seen bouncing around recently has been something called a ‘reification fallacy’. The ins and outs of this bit of folklore are quite complex, but if you bear with me a bit through the long story, I think it shows how interesting it can be to try to study classifications of fallacies as bits of folklore. If you’re not that patient, you can probably skip down to the last few paragraphs.

(more…)