Jun 19, 2026 04:56 PM
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/rigor-or-ruin
EXCERPT: Sociology confronts an epistemological reckoning that threatens to exhaust whatever credibility the discipline retains. This article-a condensed version of which Eppard gave as a plenary address at the North Central Sociological Association’s (NCSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh-argues that the social sciences, and sociology most acutely, have normalized a systematic asymmetry in evidentiary standards: permissive toward ideologically congenial claims, stringent toward inconvenient ones.
The result is a discipline in which overclaiming, causal overreach, idea laundering, and the conflation of advocacy with empirical inquiry have become endemic. Compounding these epistemological failures are precipitous enrollment declines and the imminent disruption posed by artificial intelligence, which promises to collapse the informational asymmetries that have insulated imprecise academic claims from proper scrutiny... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: Sociology confronts an epistemological reckoning that threatens to exhaust whatever credibility the discipline retains. This article-a condensed version of which Eppard gave as a plenary address at the North Central Sociological Association’s (NCSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh-argues that the social sciences, and sociology most acutely, have normalized a systematic asymmetry in evidentiary standards: permissive toward ideologically congenial claims, stringent toward inconvenient ones.
The result is a discipline in which overclaiming, causal overreach, idea laundering, and the conflation of advocacy with empirical inquiry have become endemic. Compounding these epistemological failures are precipitous enrollment declines and the imminent disruption posed by artificial intelligence, which promises to collapse the informational asymmetries that have insulated imprecise academic claims from proper scrutiny... (MORE - details)
