Intellectual Corruption in Modern Science: A Case Study

Abstract

A reviewer of a book I wrote claimed an idea presented therein could be found elsewhere. Nine years later, no one could say where, but no one would correct the erroneous claim, so what began as an effort to obtain a redress of a legitimate grievance slowly degenerated into a tour d’farce of a surreal ethics warp in our intellectual community. The citations submitted to document the claim failed to do so, and the file on the dispute maintained by the American Psychological Association (APA) really is not about my case at all. The University of Connecticut (UConn) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) failed to hold anyone accountable. There was a basic conflict between the conduct of officials of all these organizations and their ethical codes. In a culture of intellectual corruption, behavior consisted of a pervasive and extended cover-up characterized by sophistry, secrecy, fantasy, irrelevance, rationalization, misattribution, misrepresentation, fabrication, falsification, failure to communicate and an adamant refusal to deal logically and fairly with the facts of the case. This demonstrated a complete lack of cognitive integrity and constituted a total betrayal of the academic/scientific commitment to truth.