1. Harter's Precept: Review of The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   Published: 1997
   Hamilton gives three major examples of erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absence of evidentiary support: (1) Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant Ethic spurred the advance of capitalism; (2) the widely accepted thesis that Hitler's main electoral support came from the lower middle classes (the despised petit bourgeoisie of Marxism); and (3) Michel Foucault's thesis that the modern prison evolved not as a more humane alternative to the cruel physical punishments of earlier centuries, but as part of a wide-ranging scheme by sinister forces to enforce a pervasive social conformity.
2. The Social Misconstruction of Reality
   Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1996
   Analyzes erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absense of evidentiary support, and examines why this happened.
3. Who owns knowledge?
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   Published: 2007
   The resurgence of a Romantic view of culture poses a real menace to the free flow of knowledge and threatens to corral it into intellectual Bantustans. The ideas of free speech and open debate become meaningless if we fail to defend a universalist concept of knowledge or if we accept the notion of science as but a local view whose factual claims must defer to cultural and political needs. If scientific debate is constrained to express only sentiments with which people feel comfortable, culturally and politically, then science dies as the line between knowledge and myth becomes eroded.
   

Experts on Knowledge in the Sources Directory

1. Improbable Research
2. International Labour Organization
3. Organization of American States