Defending the Asses

PEA Soup was founded as a place where people would try out new ideas, posting about an idea for a paper and not a completed, fully armored, paper. We don’t want to discourage discussion of completed work. Indeed, we have partnered with many great journals, whose recently published papers are commented on and discussed here at quite a sophisticated level. We love those discussions. But we miss and feel the need to especially encourage the more half-assed posts about papers that are still just a twinkle in the author’s eye....There are too few venues where we can quickly get feedback from the profession at large of our nascent ideas. Such feedback can be vital—saving us months of toil working on a hopeless idea or pointing us to key literature or shaping our paper early on so as to deal with key concerns.--David Sobel, PEA Soup.

Sobel tries out three reasons for the decline in discussion at PEA Soup: (i) "Facebook happened;" (ii) Sobel and his buddies have become more established; (iii) PEA Soup has become "somewhat reputable and now feels like a more high-stakes venue,"* that is, there is concern over professional reputation (this is also emphasized in dicussion). As I write this, in discussion two more reasons are added: (iv) "Contemporary philosophy is not exactly a treasure trove of new ideas," (Curt Doolittle); and reinforcing (iii): (v) people require trust to try out ideas and such trust is absent among strangers (this is how I read Manyul Im). All five of these reasons ring true to me, and I know plenty of conflict-averse professional philosophy folk who get nervous from the very idea of blogging.

As a historical aside, our blogging reticence is also unusual: Erasmus of Rotterdam basically used the then novel printing press to develop a new persona for philosophy.

But the key barrier is, in fact, a tacit presupposition in Sobel's post: (vi) published papers are the real deal+ and so blogging is either derivative (they generate comment/discussion) or, to use a technical term, half-assed. And, of course, this commitment fuels the fears expressed in (iii) & (v; I return to this below).  Given that published papers are still the route to professional advancement (especially tenure Stateside and grants in Europe) Sobel's presupposition has a lot of sociological staying power.  There is also no doubt that for some philosophical purposes, published papers generate lots of philosophical virtues--to get anything published in a reputable journal a certain care and solidity is required. But there are are also vices: a lack of play-fullness if not tediousness, status quo bias (due to having to satisfy gate-keepers), a lack of immediacy, the generation of useless scholarly epicycles, and, often, a kind of fake clarity (the one that is subsequent a lot of jargon-mastery [recall]). It is by no means obvious that the philosophical "months of toil" required to get any idea or argument into journal-publishable format, especially after the low-hanging fruit related to an idea or argument has been nabbed, is really, philosophically speaking, worth all the effort that goes into it. (I am excepting the skill that some assholes -- you know who they are -- have of churning out one paper after another.)

I know that as a reader of philosophy, I MUCH prefer the skilled blog post that focuses on the key idea over the skilled journal article that takes me through all the known objections and precise refinements. This is especially true of areas of philosophy that I don't expect to contribute to. I much prefer, say, reading Brian Weatherson's blog posts in formal epistemology than his journal articles in those area. Obviously, when I am doing scholarship on an area the journal article remains indispensable. But that's also, in part, due to (vi); the most thorough work still goes to the journals. There is nothing intrinsically superior about journal articles from a scholarly point of view. For, blogging actually allows for a lot more precise, generous, and creative citation and quotation practices than common in the journals (not to mention ongoing improvements/refinements when new things come to light).

 

Having said all of that, I am cautious about encouraging others to blog. Even though blogging has helped my career philosophically and professionally in immeasurable ways and -- Amor Fati -- I would do it all over again (hell, I have double-downed here at D&I), I have had my blogging used against me in referee rapports for book projects and grant proposals (not journal articles). By this I do not mean the activist-blogging or the blog-persona (this has also come up in referee rapports, but generally more favorably), but rather my philosophical blogging. This is sometimes used negatively to single out -- let's stipulate it's true-- my lack of precision and perfectionism, even my lack of genuine seriousness of the right sort.

Now, I have made a conscious decision to make blogging my main philosophical focus. I kind of regret that I cannot be fully whole-hearted about it; I would give up journal articles if I could get away with it professionally (impossible, alas, in the funding environment of my department and the grant environment that I work in). As I have argued, if you are an anti-systematic, systematic philosopher the philosophical blog is the place to be. That is, to echo Erasmus, I would bray like an ass all day long!

 

 

 

 

*It is worth noting that when PEA Soup partnered with journals, I expressed some concerns over the shape of future philosophical discussion. I turned out to be wrong, I hope, about my exact concerns, but not entirely wrong that it would have some such impact.

+In some sub-disciplines (like history of philosophy, continental, etc.) books are thought the really real deal.

Comments

[David Sobel]

I guess my main speculation was that people are reluctant to put forward anything but their most considered ideas for fear of being judged based on what they say on a blog. I think this a not completely unreasonable fear but a regrettable one in that it keeps us from sharing our ideas before we have spent a lot of time on them.

[Neil McArthur]

Great post. I remember as an undergrad what a disappointment it was when I first started reading work by my professors. I had been so impressed talking to those professors with the interesting, provocative opinions they had on a seemingly endless range of topics. But the journal articles were narrow, dry and long, and so barren of the personalities by which I had been so charmed. I would put in a word for the virtues of blogging not just one's ideas at their rough stages of development, but on topics on which one would never dream of publishing, because one doesn't have the necessary expertise but might easily offer three hundred interesting words. Now I admit that takes even more courage, certainly more than I have myself.

[Eric Schliesser]

Neil, yes, blogging allows for a kind of non-professionalism/non-specialization with all the pitfalls that entails. But it's also a way to get potentially interesting stuff out there without writing for referees.

[Michael Meijler]

Nice post. One question though: the assholes that you mention, are they connected to the asses and half asses the way that I imagine them to be?