It’s a good moment, then, to point out how bogus and counter-productive the demand for ‘coverage’ in the reviewing process has become and how it lends itself to just these sorts of abuses. The area of Tuvel’s work is at the intersection of many different styles of philosophy and other kinds of commentary and much of it is just plain awful. In this it is no different from most if not all other areas of philosophy. It’s the nature of creative work, especially when institutionalized and produced at great volume. Tuvel had every right to ignore work, even whole areas of work, that did not seem to her to be worth discussing or seemed outside the concerns of her article.
The sheer quantity of scholarly work is an unmanageable burden for everyone in the academy today. The ideology of ‘coverage’ as a scholarly responsibility takes this growing volume and inscribes it in the production of new work added to the pile. This is especially destructive for new scholars trying to break in to publication in journals. The laziest and most automatic response for any overburdened journal reviewer to give to a submission is to say something of the form ‘Well, what about Professor X, or journal article Y and Z? What do you say to that?’--Richard Moran (July 24) @Leiterreports
While I was on holiday, enjoying Animal Farm on a pleasant French vineyard not far from Narbonne-- Orwell has become bourgeois consumption --, my friends in the philosophical blogosphere were enthusiastically sharing Richard Moran's remarks. A week later, the remarks by another influential moral psychologist, David Velleman, were greeted with derision.* Before I comment on this juxtaposition. I quote the gist of Velleman's remarks:
First, philosophy journals should adopt a policy of refusing to publish work by graduate students. Second, philosophy departments should adopt a policy of discounting graduate student work in tenure and promotion reviews. These policies would be designed to halt the arms race in graduate-student publication.--David J. Velleman (July 31) @Dailynous
As Velleman notes, there are costs that follow from the arms race in publication among PhD students alongside the (now successful) efforts to limit the length in graduate school. Here are four: (i) late-bloomers (like my former self) become systematically disadvantaged; (ii) intellectual risk-taking is systematically discouraged; (iii) time consuming literature reviews are disappearing; (iv) peer review is being overwhelmed. (Velleman notes (ii & iv)). Even so, regular readers will recognize that I am no fan of Velleman's proposal because (as many others noted) it obviously would benefit PhD students in more prestigious departments like his. (As regular readers now, I am inclined to change our review/editorial process.) But the derision was peculiar. For, if Moran is right, that most publications in all areas of philosophy are "plain awful,"** then, all other things being equal, somebody should try to limit publication. I am not endorsing Velleman's proposal because I am no friend of limiting expression.
More seriously, we should be a bit suspicious of remarks like Moran's for three reasons: first, we should not be giving people excuses and cover to ignore others. For the best way to entrench status quo bias in philosophy -- and, thus, to promote the interests of the sociologically influential -- is to promote outlooks that allow objections, and would be objections, to be dismissed without hearing. This is one reason why I am always so critical of attempts to insert Kuhnian ideas (about paradigms, normal science, consensus, etc.) into the self-conception of professional philosophy. To put it simply: the dismissal of other scholarly work has to be earned through careful engagement. Our abiding vice, in analytic philosophy (we're just like humans sometimes), is that we allow both the dismissive gesture and the unfair (albeit funny!) take-down (by the young wolf) to replace such care.
Second, and connected, philosophy is a difficult topic. Our training -- I mean the analytic kind -- is especially good at finding what's wrong in (other people's) arguments. It's not especially well-calibrated in recognizing what's potentially interesting and insightful in other people's work, especially contributions we deem unclear (and, sorry to say, not promoted by a high status figure in the field).+ A generation ago, leading analytic philosophers were nearly unanimous that Judith Butler's work was, unworthy of attention, merely verbal garbage (as late as 2012 Brian Leiter could be construed as suggesting she was a charlatan.) But now we know that her views have been very fruitful in order to articulate and make visible all kinds of social phenomena well beyond the ones she addressed in Gender Trouble. (The whole thing is also ironic because one -- perhaps overly simplistic -- way to understand Butler is to see that she took analytic ideas and applied them to new phenomena with a sensibility inspired by Derrida.)
Because original contributions to our collective enterprise can come from many areas we do ourselves a disservice by discouraging engagement with work of others. (One reason why I am a relatively loyal reader of Velleman's work is that he engages with non-analytic work.) Especially in fields where lots of disciplines and academic practices come together, one should read widely. (It would also slow down publication!) Not just because there are plenty of opportunities for arbitrage, but also because the fertility of such an area lies precisely in the possibility of recombining existing concepts and methods in promising new ways. (I leave aside my usual focus on responsible speech [recall] and the ethics of displacing of scholarly perspectives that originate in lived experience of vulnerable peoples [I found Kyle Powys Whyte at Dailynous insightful on this point.]) Now that analytic philosophy has no viable institutional competitors in professional philosophy, I sometimes wonder if our leading lights worry that our students and, thus, the whole enterprise, will be contaminated by the lack of clarity and muddled thought they will find in works we should ignore.
Third, I found Moran's comments on the critics of Tuvel peculiar. Here's one of the most prestigious and established people in the field, interpreting the behavior of others largely in political terms. I quote (selectively):
among the signers ... were various philosophers and others who were furious that their own work on transgenderism and related issues was not given respectful attention in Tuvel’s article. This created an unholy mixture of academic status consciousness and political self-righteousness, as well as the unedifying spectacle of tenured professors protecting their turf against a younger colleague. Among the later defenders of the original statement denouncing Tuvel’s article the tone often moved back and forth between criticizing Tuvel for violating a professional scholarly responsibility to respond to the existing literature on a subject, and an insistence on a kind of political representation in scholarly work. The invocation of the supposed scholarly responsibility of ‘coverage’ acted as a cover for the insistence on political representation, which in turn, for some of the original signers, served as a cover for a demand that their own work be given a kind of attention that Tuvel may not have thought it merited.
Now, regular readers know I try not to be naive about even the most principled and majestic politics of philosophy (recall my piece on David Lewis). Incentives, status, and a whole variety of politics matter in professional philosophy and many of our speech acts could, in principle, be reduced to them. As it happens, I thought the petition and its demands foolish (and, yes, unprofessional), and I went against the desire of some of the signers of a policy of principled non-engagement with Tuvel's piece (recall). Moran may well have discerned some of the ugly motives in play. Yet, not for the last time, I conclude (inspired by Ruth Chang) that too much time in the social hierarchy of professional philosophy warps our reactive attitudes. For, when confronted by the demand for recognition (for the worth of one's lived experience, scholarly work, attention, etc.) one ought not refuse to grant even minimal good faith to the supplicant's speech act.
Let's toast the prosperity of The Manor Farm!
*I was exposed to both in person in graduate school.
**The awful deserves further scrutiny some other time.
+I am (recall) a big fan of this statement by G.A. Cohen:
Sometimes one senses that a consideration has some sort of bearing on a controversy...and it is nevertheless worthwhile bringing the consideration forward, if only because it may provoke a discussion that leads to a clearer idea of the polemical significance of the consideration, that is, into which box(es) in our matrix it falls. One should aspire to clarity, but one should not avoid possible insight for the sake of avoiding unclarity. A bad way never to make a mistake is to shut up and say nothing. (226)
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