rcrocket wrote:
Lots of hubris here. I wonder when you're going to answer my questions.
To summarize my "cats in a bag" views.
FARMS Review is like lots of other academic organs for expressing thought. It expresses a particular view. It uses peer review to make sure the pieces are accurate. It has a target audience.
Sure, it could be more respectable to enemies of its mission by permitting those enemies to publish within its pages. But, somehow, I just don't see that happening. It is respectable to those who enjoy reading its pages. It fulfills its mission and does a wonderful job at it.
1. Hubris? I think your use of that expression is purely rhetorical. Still, I did perhaps provoke you with my 'cats in a bag' simile.
2. Answer your questions? See my responses earlier, including responses to your 'answer my questions' rhetoric, which is becoming a bit tired now, surely?
3. "FARMS Review is like lots of other academic organs for expressing thought." I have responded to that assertion with quite detailed evidence of the way that journals that academics take seriously differ from "FARMS Review" in their aims and practice. I am content for our readers to judge between us.
4. "It uses peer review to make sure the pieces are accurate." I have already illustrated the way that recognised academic journals peer-review submissions. FARMS Review. in my contention, differs very significantly, and indeed crucially, from their practice. Again, let our readers judge which of us is more persuasive.
5. "Sure, it could be more respectable to enemies of its mission by permitting those enemies to publish within its pages." I am trying hard to imagine a conversation with members of the editorial board of (say) Physics Letters A (see details above), in which they referred to "enemies of their mission". For real academic journals, the question is whether a paper is relevant to the subjects covered by the journal or not, interesting or uninteresting, well-argued or not, technically competent or not. "Friend or foe" considerations just do not come into it. FARMS Review, I suggest, is about advocacy of certain views which are ultimately based on faith, not on scholarship, and such scholarship as it may contain is purely incidental to that advocacy.
6. "It is respectable to those who enjoy reading its pages." ... that is hardly surprising!
7. "It fulfills its mission and does a wonderful job at it." It probably does the best job that can be done in giving believing LDS with apologetic interests, such as yourself, a forum in which to have discussions undisturbed by outside critics, and in providing reassurance to those LDS who do not actually read it, but who find its presence a reassuring evidence that there are some 'scholars' who manage to remain LDS. It does not, in my submission, succeed in functioning as a normal academic publication committed to unfettered scholarship - but then, as you have repeatedly made clear, that is not its mission. Again. let our readers judge who is more persuasive on this point.