On Retraction in Philosophy

Hypatia is published by Wiley and so falls under Wiley’s policy on retraction, which reads, in relevant part: “On occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. This may be due to major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, or in cases of ethical issues, such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” Wiley also subscribes to the Code of Publishing Ethics (COPE), which give further guidance on dealing with direct and social-media reports of problems with papers, including a requirement to contact the author and get a response from them, and an instruction to separate complaints that “contain specific and detailed evidence” from those which do not.

At least on the basis of what’s in the public domain, there seems to be no case at all for retraction...

2) If (1) is set aside and the open letter is interpreted as a list of problems meriting retraction, it seems pretty clear that it falls wildly short of Wiley’s retraction policy. There is no suggestion that there are any ethical problems with Professor Tuvel *in the sense meant by Wiley’s policy* : she does not fabricate data nor plagiarise; she conducts no formal research with subjects and so cannot have failed to get research permission; she has not published the article elsewhere. (Her alleged failure to “seek out and sufficiently engage with scholarly work by those who are most vulnerable to the intersection of racial and gender oppressions” would fall ridiculously short of counting as an ethical failing in this sense, even if the open letter provided specifics.)

So retraction would have to rely on “major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article”. In scientific contexts, that normally means straightforward errors with mathematical or technical tools, of the kind that everyone in the field – including the author(s) themselves – would recognise as invalidating the conclusions of the article. (It’s telling that COPE doesn’t even give guidelines of how to handle disputes with an author on “error” issues of this kind, presumably because scientists themselves would want to retract a paper if it had a straightforward error of this kind).

I’m not sure that *anything* could count as “major scientific error” in a philosophy article (except when that paper borrows the formal methods of other disciplines, but there is no mathematics or scientific technique in Prof. Tuvel’s article). In any case, as can be seen from this thread itself the errors in Professor Tuvel’s article, if any, are a matter of academic dispute between members of the community and so fall far short of this standard.

3) The open letter itself urges retraction not primarily on the grounds of academic failings but on wider moral grounds. (“More importantly, these failures of scholarship do harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia.”) But there is absolutely nothing in Wiley’s retraction policy (or COPE’s guidelines on such policies) permitting retraction on those kinds of grounds....David Wallace @Dailynous commenting on the Hypatia debacle. [HT also Brian Leiter]

It's fair to say David Wallace is the best commentator on any philosophy blog thread he comments on: he is contrarian, level headed, always informed (does his homework), and reasonable.  His comment on the Hypatia affair were widely shared. And at the time I agreed with his view so did not feel the need to chime in. In general, I am averse to retraction (for bland liberal reasons), and I think the question of retraction prevented the more important discussion (ahh) about my points (recall here, here, here; and here), especially because so few people (unlike me, of course) actually engaged with the details of the  paper. I still think Wallace's procedural points are extremely important and admire his courage for presenting his principles amidst controversy; I won't challenge these here. (It is striking, however, that we are all supposed to take on trust that the review process of Tuvel's article was dandy--to best of my knowledge there is no public evidence.) He was right and wise to stress them and won't revisit that part of his argument.

But it is also notable that the tenor of David's remarks suggests he sees no reason for revisiting Wiley's or COPE's guidelines or for reinterpreting the way these are understood. While that's a fine legalistic stance amidst a controversy, a controversy is also occasion to revisit one's standards. And rather than inviting further consideration David's comments seems to treat -- perhaps unintentionally -- the case as settled. For, the tenor of David's remarks also suggests he is a rather narrow understanding of what counts as an ethical violation. Before I get to that, three qualifications: (i) I think his representation of what occurs in science is only partial; as a regular reader of retractionwatch can tell (see this week), a lot of retractions occur because of factual errors (in diagrams, pictures, or set up [see today] etc.)--presumably David did not comment on this because he thinks that in philosophy our arguments rarely rest on facts. (II) I agree with David that almost nothing in philosophy counts as a “major scientific error.” This merits further reflection because in philosophy we rarely think our technical errors merit retraction. If I show that Rawls's argument on X is invalid and, thereby, undermines his conclusion, nobody thinks we should retract Rawls (although, perhaps, Rawls would have asked for a retraction). (iii) Nothing I say here is meant to imply I advocate retraction of Tuvel's article (my substantive views on the article are here).

It is notable that the "ethical issues" that Wiley lists first (and cited by David)  -- “ duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, etc.” -- involve its intellectual property rights and profit margin. But it has gone unnoticed that Wiley also recognizes other issues, two of which reflect wider concerns: "(a) privacy of a research subject and (b) errors.... that, if followed or adopted, would pose a significant risk to health." These clearly reflect the thought that some publications, even good faith efforts, can be retracted due to some possible harms to society and individuals. Somewhat frustratingly, David was silent about this. That is, Wiley's own guidelines reflect some commitment to (what I call) principles of responsible speech and show awareness of inductive risk and, even when taken completely legalistically, David was mistaken to ignore this feature altogether.

This matters, for while I agree with David's conclusion that procedures for retraction ought to be followed, he is a bit too quick in suggesting both what the scope of Wiley's retraction policy is and by implying, I think, that "wider moral grounds" are irrelevant to evaluating the case for retraction.That is, even Wiley recognizes that one can go well beyond a merely procedural conception of legitimate publication (where proper rules followed, referee-ing, etc.) in evaluating retraction demands. (I fear a lot of my friends like such a procedural conception because it can put politics in the un-examined and unaccountable hands of referees.) In fact, because of the kind of arguments that David has put forward, and the more general cultural polarization, there has been no fair and balanced effort to evaluate the wider moral grounds *given* Wiley's own commitment to principles that allow that articles may be retracted due to some possible harms to society and individuals. The real question is given the political and activist roots and mission of Hypatia, what are the proper criteria and processes for evaluating such possible harms. (I reject the idea that professional philosophy is incapable of producing such harms.) It strikes me that we cannot postpone such a discussion indefinitely because the problem has not been resolved merely in virtue of a changing of editorial guard at Hypatia.

Finally, an orthogonal point. David also ignores (understably given his focus on Tuvel's piece), the fact that the Wiley criteria for retraction also mention "failure to declare a conflict of interest" may lead to retraction. Judging by the complete silence on this topic in the APA's Code of Conduct, and our practice, we philosophers tend to think that's merely a problem for bio-medical sciences and economics. As regular readers know, I think conflicts of interest (financial and personal) are endemic in philosophy (not just in applied ethics, although there, too), and, if these were policed more, there would be more grounds for retraction. But about that some other time more.

Either way, I hope to have made a case for the thought that if we take the integrity of scholarly publication seriously, there are non-trivial non-hypothetical grounds for retraction of work in philosophy on moral grounds and that, if there were political will, we could also identify cases were these would be met, or at least worth discussing.

 

Comments

[Matt]

A lot to think about here, but I wanted to ask about this point:
"It is striking, however, that we are all supposed to take on trust that the review process of Tuvel's article was dandy--to best of my knowledge there is no public evidence."

Of course, that's what we do with peer review in general, but beyond that, what sort of evidence do you think both could be produced and would be appropriate to produce? I know that if I were a referee, and my work were brought out into this controversy (or any controversy) without my prior approval, even if anonymous, I would be very unhappy, and would certainly never referee for the journal again. So, in thinking about these issues, I would be interested to know what you think is both possible and proper, if anything.

[Eric Schliesser]

Well, as you may know I am a critic of anonymous review, so I think we need to reform the system anyway. (In fact, in the post I link to a proposal that is meant to improve referee process for socially relevant philosophy.) But I agree with you that as the system is currently organized, having one's review made public -- although it happens in historical cases, often when most participants are dead -- is a justified reason to feel aggrieved. I think there may well be cases where, say conflicts of interest exist, or where something really improper makes it into print that then it might be worth opening the black box of the procedure.

[Ramona]

COPE is the Committee on Publication Ethics, which offers a code of conduct. (There is no code of publication ethics.)