A scholar’s bad faith need not invalidate the accuracy of their findings.
Evidence
His book tends to overemphasize the importance of French Orientalists at the expense of those of other nations. Although Rodinson welcomed the challenge to what he judged to be the smug self-satisfaction of so many Orientalists, he thought that Said’s earlier critique was overstated, based on limited reading, and unreasonably limited to French and British Orientalists. He considered the linkage made by Said between colonialism and Orientalism was too naive. Said’s book was too exclusively focused on Arabs, whereas Rodinson pointed out that four out of five Muslims are not Arabs. Moreover, unlike Said, he did not believe that the bad faith or polemical intent of a scholar necessarily and intrinsically vitiated everything that that scholar wrote. He made a speech at the Leiden Conference of Orientalists where, among other things, he pointed out that the fact that Champollion had racist ideas about the degeneracy of modern Egyptians did not affect the correctness of his decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 460
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely hard position: separating the correctness of a discovery from the moral/political character of its discoverer — bears directly on how we judge whole disciplines built by tainted figures.
- XREF: Echoes the well-meaning-vs-correct-results tension in the noise/silence canon and in scientific objectivity debates. — connects to: A scientist’s bias does not invalidate the evidence produced — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 122