Published on July 12, 2019.
As a continuation of the previous chapter, this passage criticizes the authoritarianism, politicization, and distortions in research ethics found in parts of the humanities from the standpoint of a scientist, while introducing an attempt to analyze political discourse objectively through artificial intelligence and document analysis.
It fundamentally reexamines what scholarship is and what science is, bringing into view the deep confusion within Japan’s universities and research community.

2019-07-12
Countering academic preconceptions with artificial intelligence. Many parts of the results obtained in this survey accord with my own empirical observations.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Countering academic preconceptions with artificial intelligence.
Many parts of the results obtained in this survey accord with my own empirical observations.
During his university years, the author studied biochemistry in the Faculty of Science, and in graduate school engaged in research on artificial intelligence in a graduate school of engineering, but from that time he had a strong interest in the theory of scholarship and the theory of science.
Accordingly, he read many books on the philosophy of science and also participated in study sessions held by related laboratories, and he still vividly remembers being astonished by a certain remark he encountered there.
“This is correct because Professor ○○ says so.”
It was the moment when I felt disillusioned with authoritarianism.
This kind of remark is unthinkable in a science laboratory.
However, that incident was no more than a prologue.
After taking up a teaching position at a university, I came to know that there existed “scholarship” operating on values completely different from those of the education we had received.
In the natural sciences, one is rigorously trained to interpret experimental results while excluding subjectivity as much as possible.
Needless to say, it is utterly unacceptable to tamper with experimental results or distort their interpretation for political considerations.
That is precisely why scholarship must be independent from politics.
And yet, among the humanities there are rampant forms of “scholarship” which, from the standpoint of a scientist like myself, make it impossible to tell whether they are engaging in scholarship or in politics.
Though they bear the same name of scholarship, activities based on entirely different norms are being carried out.
To bring this confusion under control, we must begin with the definition of scholarship itself.
That is why, in 2005, I wrote What Is Scholarship? (Daigaku Kyoiku Shuppan).
In that book, I argued that fields bearing the name “science,” such as the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, must satisfy the requirement of being “systematic knowledge possessing the power to predict.”
Scholarship that manipulates experimental results for convenience naturally cannot possess predictive power.
In recent years, research ethics have come to be questioned strictly in the wake of the research misconduct issue involving Ms. Obokata, but the other day I once again encountered a shocking scene at a symposium on promoting education in research ethics.
A person from a medical background who had served for many years as president of a national university stated the following from the podium as a background factor behind research misconduct.
“When people fall into groupthink, misconduct occurs. It is the same as with the Liberal Democratic Party.”
When I think that a person who does not even notice the inappropriateness of making a political statement in such a setting stands at the center of research ethics education, I cannot help but feel utterly disheartened.
Of course, it would be a different matter if he were saying this on the basis of objective evidence that the Liberal Democratic Party is more prone to groupthink than other parties.
However, at least in my own research, I have found results indicating the opposite.
For about the past ten years, the author’s research group has conducted studies in document analysis using information engineering, in order to bring scientific methods into the humanities.
In general, this is a field known as big data, data mining, and text mining.
Much of this research assumes application to business, but I have been engaged primarily in analyzing political documents such as the proceedings of the National Diet.
As one part of that work, we created an artificial intelligence system that identifies which party’s Diet member made a given statement in the Diet proceedings “2”.
This article will continue.