A lot of people rationalize the acidity of phenol by saying that resonance is responsible for much of phenol's acidity as opposed to aliphatic alcohols.
However, this image suggests that in fact the inductive effect is responsible for a great deal of phenol's additional acidity. As we can see in the picture immediately above, it seems that the sp$^2$ carbon neighboring to the oxygen is pulling most of the weight here; that the resonance contributors with charges on carbons are minor contributors. The additional resonance contributors for phenol seem to be doing almost nothing here.
So, who's right? Resonance>inductive effect in phenol or the other way around?
EDIT: The argument I have summarized above is presented here at this website entitled "I Judge People By Their Grammar and Knowledge of Phenol"
While the chemistry in the paper was good, as The Chem Blog has noted, the authors’ lack of attention to detail was borderline disrespectful. I expected more from one of the most storied labs in synthetic organic chemistry.
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It turns out that an inductive effect—not a resonance effect—is the predominant reason for the increased acidity of phenol relative to aliphatic alcohols.
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For those interested, these data come from Evans’ Chem 206 lecture notes (Lecture 20, restricted access), where the point is hammered home in glorious detail. Professor Evans’ PowerPoint slides should be framed and displayed in the Smithsonian.
Addressing jerepierre's point
$\ce{Phenol + acetone~enolate \leftrightharpoons phenoxide + acetone ~enol}$
So, from the pKa values we know that the above equilibrium lies mostly to the right (according to jerepierre). Given this, we can conclude that the reactants are less stable in the acid-base sense than the products; acetone enolate is less stable than phenoxide.
Phenol is also less stable than acetone enol.
But I don't see how this contradict's the blog article. It does contradict ron's point about being unable to use the provided pKa values to compare the relative stabilities of the acids.