Censorship Undermines the Pursuit of Truth

Francesca Minerva, editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, addresses the conference on Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

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Jan 02, 2025

Our conference on Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is just around the corner! The program is available on the conference website. The lectures and panels will be live-streamed (the zoom link will be posted on the conference website soon).

The conference will discuss multiple facets of academic censorship, such as scientific freedom versus social responsibility and the tradeoffs between pro-social considerations and scientific progress. Speakers will discuss recent examples of scientific censorship, the implications of censorship for public policy, and the mechanisms by which academic censorship operates. One session (see below) will focus on institutional and organizational responses to censorship, featuring talks from representatives of organizations that have been recently founded in response to the ideological capture of legacy institutions:

Organizational and Institutional Responses to Censorship (01/11, 10:15-10:35)
Chair: Tania Gutsche, Center for Economic and Social Research, USC
Barry Honig: American Academy of Sciences and Letters
Lee Jussim: Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral
Science
Anna Krylov: Academic Freedom Alliance
Sean Stevens: Breaking the Shell of Ostrich Syndrome; Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Abigail Thompson: Association of Mathematical Research
Scott Turner: National Association of Scholars
Ilya Reviakine: On Samizdat
Jake Mackey and Michael Bowen: In Defense of Free (Black) Thought, Journal of Free Black Thought

Many Substacks, too, including HxSTEM, have been created in response to the censorship that pervades the ideologically captured mainstream media. Substack is the new Samizdat (Russian: самиздат).

One archetypical (and inspiring!) example of such a response is the Journal of Controversial Ideas, founded by three moral philosophers, Francesca Minerva (University of Milan, Italy), Jeff McMahan (University of Oxford, UK), and Peter Singer (Princeton University, USA).

From the journal’s website:

Journal of Controversial Ideas [is] the first open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive. The journal offers authors the option to publish their articles under a pseudonym, in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety. We hope that this will also encourage readers to attend to the arguments and evidence in an essay rather than to who wrote it. Pseudonymous authors may choose to claim the authorship of their work at a later time, or to reveal it only to selected people (such as employers or prospective employers), or to keep their identity undisclosed indefinitely. Standard submissions using the authors’ actual names are also encouraged.
We welcome submissions in all areas of academic research insofar as the topics discussed are relevant to society at large.

Unfortunately, none of the JCI editors can attend the conference in person—hence, the video address, above, by editor Francesca Minerva in which she talks about JCI, censorship, and the role of academic freedom in the pursuit of truth.

JCI will publish the proceedings of the conference—stay tuned!

More about the conference: