Enough already, Too Many Philosophy Papers! (Really?)

The Directory of American Philosophers listed some 11,000 academic philosophers in the United States and Canada for 1975, and roughly 13,000 for 2005. It appears that the profession grew by somewhat under 20 percent during this thirty-year, generation-sized period. On the other hand, the membership of the American Philosophical Association (APA) grew from roughly 5,000 to around 11,000 over the same period....

Interestingly, the scholarly output of the profession has far outstripped its numerical growth. Over the period from 1975 to 2005, the number of professional journals increased from approximately 100 to approximately 300. And the number of philosophical publications (books and papers) increased from just over 5,000 to about 12,000. Over the period at issue, a profession that has grown by only some 20 percent has increased its published output well over twofold. Under the pressure to "publish or perish," the productivity of academics has seen a striking increase. By all visible indications, academic philosophy has become not only more professionalized but also substantially more professional.

But while all this is doubtless to the good, it has its negative side as well. For, perhaps inevitably, the growth in professionalism has been accompanied by a marked increase in specialization and division of labor. During this 1975–2005 period, the number of thematically specialized philosophical societies in America increased from around 50 to around 90. The discipline's topical fragmentation has kept pace with publication, and thereby far outpaced its population growth.

The proliferation of academic philosophers has served to impede rather than promote the sharing of common interests. Ironically, when philosophers look for discussion partners for sharing their own concerns with colleagues, the fragmentation of an enlarged profession affords them fewer rather than more opportunities.--Nicholas Rescher in American Philosophical Querterly [HT Dailynous]

When I first read this, I thought this must some kind of belated -- what is time anyway? -- April fool's joke (see Michael Kremer's useful quote from the Philosophical Lexicon). But it has generated a real discussion on Daily Nous with David Velleman encouraging a kind of moratorium on papers by graduate students. While I wasn't active in the profession in 1975, I am old enough to remember the good-old-days-when-graduate-students-were-discouraged-from publishing (recall this post & this post). 

Oddly unmentioned by Rescher is the impact of technology. Since, say, 1975, a lot of research has gotten  much easier and cheaper due to the development of scholarly resources on the internet. Even if there is no need to ever visit an archive, much time that was formerly wasted searching for potentially relevant work on library shelves that were managed by understaffed librarians has been eliminated. (Obviously, sniffling around library shelves could also be fruitful.) Email, discussion-groups, and even blogs have generated virtual intellectual communities in which new ideas travel much more rapidly than before. Along the way typewriters were replaced by word-processors and virtual clouds.

Moreover, due to lower travel costs and skype philosophers can talk to each other  face to face much more regularly. So, before we assume that increased division of intellectual labor generates de facto fewer opportunities for finding conversation partners, the velocity and intensity of communication has increased dramatically and this has allowed a lot of discussions (move, counter-move, new move, etc.) to be conducted much more rapidly than before. Not to mention the fact that it is not impossible that the present generation of PhD students is -- despite, perhaps, reduced skills in foreign languages-- far better prepared than earlier generations of PhD students. These kids often know more

Second, it is not obvious that there really are as many "common interests" as one might have thought ca 1975. Perhaps, the idea that there we so much "common interest" was an illusion generated by the lack of journal space, and other sociological barriers to entry (not to put too fine a point on it: the bullying and intimidation of those that wished to explore other issues; the small pool of academic departments that were thought to really matter;, etc.), as well as, say, a-too-homogeneous demographic. (I return to Rescher's point below.)

By contrast, Velleman focuses on other problems:

The pressure to publish...has flooded the literature with formulaic papers on the “puzzles du jour” and discouraged work that requires long gestation. It has overburdened existing journals, requiring referees and editors to make decisions on the basis of less and less thought. It has forced graduate students to publish their ideas prematurely, truncating their graduate studies. The resulting professionalization forced on graduate students seeking jobs has trickled down to undergraduates seeking admission to graduate school, crowding out undergraduates who majored in subjects other than philosophy — students who traditionally have brought fresh ideas to the discipline.

I share some of Velleman's concerns (referees and editors are clearly very stretched), especially because I work in a grant environment that has basically encouraged a publication-arms-race for PhD students and post-docs, where quantity of (decent) publications often seems to matter more than quality. In particular, Velleman is right that the pressure to publish has encouraged quite a bit of normal-science-style publications where the problem-space is predefined. But given that philosophy is -- by definition, no? -- pre-paradigmatic, the topics change, as Velleman suggests, with fashion, often based on a few influential folk's sense 'that it's time to move on' or 'we've seen too many epicycles.'

I am less a friend of the long-gestation-meme. In part, because it once helped sustain a culture of genteel mediocrity in which some privileged would be showered with resources (time, encouraging colleagues), while others languish in obscurity and less-than-ideal working conditions. To be clear: philosophy is very difficult and requires serious thought; but even the long gestation projects benefit from progress reports along the way--journal articles can do some of such work very nicely and reminds the gestator to write for an audience.

For, we tend to forget that writing journal articles is not just contributing to an ongoing discussion in (sub-)field, but it is also a discovery procedure. By this I do not only mean the non-trivial fact that writing out one's thought is often a way of discovering what one really (ought to) think(s), but that anticipating refereeing objections helps one uncover obscurities and otherwise hidden commitments (see Catarina's dialogical conception of proof).

So,am I claiming that specialization has no cost at all? Of course it does. But the costs --  presentist-bias, narrowness of soul, re-inventing of wheels in neighboring fields, etc. -- are on the whole not a consequence of too many (unloved, unread) publications, but rather broader trends in graduate education (uneven funding, shortening of PhDs, folk working on other people's designed-grants [European thing], etc.), especially the disappearance of the review article as a key feature of a PhD. 

Comments

[Enzo Rossi]

"I am less a friend of the long-gestation-meme. In part, because it once helped sustain a culture of genteel mediocrity in which some privileged would be showered with resources (time, encouraging colleagues), while others languish in obscurity and less-than-ideal working conditions."

Once? Maybe not in Europe any more, or not as much; but then most superstars, real and plastic ones, aren't made in (continental) Europe. I agree with pretty much everything else you say.

[Lynne Tirrell]

On the over-publication theme, a worthwhile read is Lindsey Waters' very short book, "Enemies of Promise". (Waters is the longstanding executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, and publisher of some amazing philosophical works.) I think Velleman is right, and this short treatise by Waters offers a publishers perspective on what's wrong with over-publication.