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« on: April 21, 2013, 02:29:45 pm »
I think the opinions of your scientists seems reasonable. I'm not going to say I have spent any reasonable amount of time looking into Bakker's philosophies, but from what I have looked at, I can say that I felt similar to your quoted opinions. I, however, and just some guy off the street. One would hope that someone that is, more or less, in the field of study that the paper was written about, would be able to more fully grasp what the hell was going on.
Though the credentials of your readers may be important. I don't know what the paper(s) were about, and I don't know how much a 'neruolinguistic researcher' would know about it. However, what I can say is that Bakker does not write scientifically, and the people in the scientific community expect a certain kind of writing. I don't know how much Bakker claims to be a scientist, but he certainly isn't doing 'science' on a day to day basis. Philosophy and science can be more or less similar depending on how theoretical ones research is. I would imagine that your readers, since they are doing research (which I take to me actually doing experiments and developing working models of theories) that philosophy is not close to heart. Practical science, outside the realm of purely theoretical stuff, is not much like philosophy, and the practitioners would not appreciate something like the texts written by Bakker.
This is because, like they said, he isn't a scientist. I'm sure he could write something that could be more comprehensible for a scientific audiance, but from what I've seen, most of his work is not for them. Its for the philosophers. His papers are not scientific papers.
Go to google scholar or something similar and look up a journal article regarding something scientific. You'll find a very similar design in all of them. They will start with an abstract, then go into their hypothesis, then a theory section, then their apparatus and method for testing, data and discussion, and finally the conclusions they came to. There will also be an appendix section.
There is not a lot of fluff. Not a lot of confusing dialect and complex sentence structure. The only thing that may be confusing are the terms that are very specific to the research itself, and these things are usually explained in the appendix, accompanied by all the references they used for their work.
Peer-reviewed scientific journal articles go through a rigorous process to get published, and their findings are typically more accurate and more reliable than textbooks or papers, since those can be written by just a few people and hold no obligation to be accurate.
I'm just trying to say I can understand the stance of the your scientists. Bakker is a philosopher not a scientist, and grabbing any random scientist from the street and asking them to interpret his writing will probably yield you the same result over and over again.