Last week I wrote a blog post criticizing Andrew Exum’s views on the philosophy of science. In fact, I was surprised to see that a doctoral candidate at King’s College held these views at all.
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Andrew Exum[/caption]
Today Exum posts a perplexing non‐response, forswearing any interest in getting involved in the debate…that he brought up in his first post. Instead, he accuses his critics of getting their “proverbial panties in a twist” and posts a response from a reader that doesn’t defend the views Exum expressed in his first post.
I’m not quite sure what to say, other than that this isn’t much of a response. Note, though, that he obliquely makes the same argument he made last week, criticizing Dan Drezner’s “willingness to hold forth on the peoples and politics of the Arabic‐speaking world and Iran without any time spent in the region or training in its languages.”
Richard Pipes made a similar argument when he argued that despite his lack of expertise in nuclear weapons or security studies he was qualified to lead the Team B project because of his “deep knowledge of the Russian soul.” And we all remember how that turned out.