A crisis of non-skepticism... at CSICOP

I used to claim that I could pick up any issue of a creationist publication, chosen at random, and find an article that I could not only debunk, but demonstrate to be self-evidently silly, if only its readers had stopped to think. I'm beginning to feel the same way about Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic. It's not like I even scour them cover-to-cover looking for pseudo-skepticism. I skim Skeptic on occasion when I go to the grocery store, and inevitably find grist for this blog.

Here we have an article by Howard Gabennesch from Skeptical Inquirer. Bear in mind that this is an article written by a university professor, vetted by the editors of CSICOP, and not only that, the editors were so proud of it that they put it front-and-center on their webpage.

Gabennesch decries a widespread lack of skepticism in his field, sociology:

Amazon.com lists more than 2,000 titles on critical thinking. Haven't we largely ironed out the conceptual fundamentals by now?

Apparently not. Here are some indicators from my discipline of sociology that illustrate some of the work that needs to be done. I draw these examples from four mainstream, college-level introductory sociology textbooks, three of which are best-sellers in a crowded market. As is true in virtually all such texts, the preface and promotional material of each book explicitly assure instructors and students that the book attaches much importance to critical thinking.

But when we look at Gabennesch's examples, we find that in fully half of his examples he provides no critique whatsoever of the writers' methodology. His claims that they are unskeptical quite literally rest on nothing more than the fact that they dare to disagree with him. Is Gabennesch scraping the bottom of the barrel to prove his point, or does he just not realize that "skepticism" means something other than "agreeing with Gabennesch"?

Of course, the pathologization of dissent is par for the course for these people. Gabennesch wants to pretend that he's not just another guy with an opinion, so he wraps himself in the flag of "Skepticism." Naturally, anyone who disagrees with a Skeptic must be practicing badthink. And if you want to get published front and center by CSICOP... now you know what to do.