I’d originally planned to do a follow-up post to last week’s on the nexus between Patrick Gunkel’s lists and his charts, but something got in the way and I was absolutely compelled to write about it.
I keep hearing about how corrupt peer review and academic journals have become, but I’m not an academic so I don’t really understand the scope or impact of all that.
My understanding was that AI had accelerated many of the existing bad trends, such as fake sources being cited and bad research managing to pass peer review.
And then, while doing my never-ending research into Gunkel’s science of ideas, I came across the following statement in Volume 11 of a 2024 peer-reviewed paper in Cogent Business & Management:
Could it be?
Did Patrick Gunkel, who was undoubtably a fan of Buckminster Fuller, come across the concept of ideonomy in one of Fuller’s books and either steal the concept outright or subconsciously steal it, then claim to have invented it later on?
I checked the cited source—the reprinting of a 1963 book by Fuller called Ideas and Integrities—and could find no such claims. It was a total fiction.
The paper has since been revised and updated at my request to remove the bogus reference.
The authors denied this misinformation about ideonomy came from an AI hallucination, but it sure looks like the sort of hallucination that AI generates, especially an early model of ChatGPT.
The Awful Implications
I’ll spare you the bloody details of the back and forth I had with the authors of the paper during the Christmas holiday last year.
And yet it nevertheless brought home the crisis that until now I’d only just heard about in academia and strongly supports my decision to create a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to advance Gunkel’s vision and legacy.
Left to its own devices, bad information approved to enter academic discourse by a peer-reviewed journal becomes available to mainstream academics who might want to describe ideonomy in future work.
And not just other researchers, either—but generative AI models, which are constantly going through these papers as they are published and using the information to update their model weights.
Given that the authors told me they were working on at least three other papers that cited ideonomy, a fake reality may have become the real reality for AI, with Buckminster Fuller being credited for the invention of ideonomy in no time at all.
Fortunately the authors indicated they would remove all references to Gunkel in the future to prevent their error from proliferating.
The utter irony of the situation is that the authors refused to attribute the creation of ideonomy to Gunkel because, they claimed, they did not want to introduce any unsupported claims into the academic record even though I provided them with a plethora of additional sources to prove that Gunkel was the creator of ideonomy—including a source to David Stipp’s 1987 Wall Street Journal article that the authors had already cited in their study.
It was a hellish email exchange to be sure.
But it was worth it, given that I may have kept Gunkel’s legacy from being abolished by a major academic error.
Just One More Thing
But as much as I want to be able to put this episode behind me and turn toward the future, there was a small little question that came up about the origin of the term ideonomy that I wasn’t able to resolve.
The authors I corresponded with repeatedly focused on a single statement from the MIT ideonomy website,1 presumably written by Gunkel himself, which seemed to suggest the term ideonomy had already been around for a few hundred years by the time Gunkel decided to invent a science of ideas in the early 1980s.
As Gunkel wrote:
Supposedly the word ideonomy was first coined by the French Encyclopedists, and they, too, are said to have used it to designate a science of ideas. What is unclear is whether these men made any actual contribution to the building of ideonomy, especially in the present sense. Perhaps they simply employed the word as a synonym for logic, pantology, philosophy in general, or philosophy applied to creative or social purposes.
Gunkel didn’t provide any references for this statement, and the word “supposedly” makes his assertion of this information all the more curious.
Who told him this?
Why was he simply speculating about what the term itself referred to?
The French Encyclopedists were a group of philosophers who predated the French idéologues, the most direct influence on Gunkel’s science of ideas.
I’ve never had the time to go back and find out how to substantiate Gunkel’s claim about the true history of the word ideonomy, and at this point I’m not sure I ever will.
It’s just another dimension of Gunkel research that will likely be resolved only with the existence, in the future, of others who are interested in Gunkel’s vision and delving into the intellectual history of the idea sciences.
So, does anyone want to help me out?
What do you think, should I create a prize for the person who can find the definitive answer?