Plagiarism

People who know me know how I despise a certain History professor. One of his big things was the evil of plagiarism. I always thought it was kind of a crock, the kind of thing that Ivory Tower elites get up in arms about but nobody else really gives a damn. This was cemented for me when Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarism. Here is a great chapter of a book by Glenn Reynolds that explains my thinking on most plagiarism claims.

 

My favorite quotes:  "It is bad enough when philosophy departments focus on linguistic rules rather than ethics, or when teaching students how to write a research paper has devolved into teaching footnoting at the expense of the quality of students’ arguments. Outside the academic realm, the effects are worse still. When politicians are talking about gimmicks, they are not talking about substantive issues. And politicianspeak doesn't just put voters to sleep: it causes them to disengage from the political process, leaving things all the more open to control by special interest groups whose selfishness provides them enough reason to stay awake."

 

And: "  As Lindey notes, in parallelism cases, "the technique for the presentation of findings is fairly standard. . . . You take excerpts from the supposedly offending work, and corresponding ones from the alleged source, and you put them one below the other, or -- more effective still -- side by side. You see to it that both the selection and the arrangement underscore the resemblances. You make no mention of any differences unless you have to." This is, of course, exactly what the Stewart/Feder plagiarism computer was programmed to do. The problem, however, is that "[t]he technique makes a weak case look strong" because "[m]ost parallels rest on the assumption that if two successive things are similar, the second one was copied from the first. This assumption disregards all the other possible causes of similarity."