What does it mean to be Intellectually Dishonest?

[Smilephantomhive]

I've heard many people use this term both online and offline lately and I'm not 100% what they mean. I have an idea, like you ignore part of the data or truth or whatever in order to fit what you really want. Idk, I jsut want to have a clearer understanding of what it means to be intellectually dishonest. Feel free to post examples.

 

[Tellenbach]

I'll take a stab at it. To me, it means taking a position that you know to be false (usually, in order to advance an agenda).

For example:

The feminist Gloria Steinem came up with the "one grope policy" in order to defend her good friend President Bill Clinton from allegations of rape and sexual assault. Instead of condemning his actions, she made up this excuse where it's not really a terrible thing to grope a woman until she says "no". So when Clinton groped (allegedly) Kathleen Willey, there was nothing wrong with it because she hadn't said "no". I doubt many people would agree with this notion, including Steinem, but because she didn't want to take sides against a friend, she came up with this stupid nonsense. I doubt she even believes in it herself.

 

[great_bay]

You don't have to be intelligent to be intellectually dishonest although most people would assume so. For instance, if a person were taking remedial writing class and plagiarized their paper, that would be considered intellectually dishonest.


In my opinion, somebody intellectually dishonest is somebody who abuses their writing skills and starts lies by writing news paper articles.

 

[Qlip]

agenda > truth

 

[Lark]

agenda > truth

Basically that.

I used that term in a review on amazon of a book by an objectivist who is writing about freedom, they cite erich fromm and talk a bit about his theories about freedom, the thing is that fromm's a socialist, Ayn Rand would have hated his material and I thought it was dishonest to cherry pick his work in that manner and ignore that taken as a whole his work was contrary to the objectivist position the author was smuggling in as a trojan horse in a self-help book.