[Unlike most nearly all other Digressions, this essay was initially solicited and so lacks attention to my own participation and rewards in what I describe.--ES]
Professional philosophy in the Anglophone world, and those areas that take their cue from it, inhabits very steep, intersecting status and economic hierarchies with very unequal working conditions. These allow some individuals, some research practices, and some traditions to flourish, which, in turn, feed back into these hierarchies and the intellectual (as well as gendered and colored) patterns of exclusion (and prestige bias). Nearly all major controversies and, alas, scandals of the last decade or two presuppose and circle around these hierarchies as well as the resentments, insecurities, and privileges they generate (e.g., the debates over the PGR reports, the Tuvel/Hypatia affair, the Pogge scandal, the publication pauses at leading journals, etc.--add your favorite one). In what follows I focus on some of the effects of these hierarchies. Of necessity the picture I draw is incomplete and I do not pretend to do justice to the many valuable things in today’s philosophical landscape, which may well justify our hierarchies.
I use the plural, ‘hierarchies,’ to signal that it’s not just one pyramid, although in practice (a) relatively small circle(s) of individuals benefit most. From these the professional gate-keepers and, what I call, ‘Aggregators’ are recruited (or self-selected). Aggregators are those peers that have status in the profession and in virtue of that speak on our behalf to society, policy-makers, NGOs, journalists, and grant-agencies (etc.). Because publication rates at leading philosophy journals are kept artificially low, editorial gate-keeping (factional control of journals, desk-reject decisions, referee selection, etc.) is very important in the profession.
One need not be a Marxist to recognize that these hierarchies reflect, in part, the olicharchic material conditions of our societies and the universities (and, in many places, grant agencies) funded by them. Such extremely unequal background conditions are not exceptional even in times of philosophical flourishing (think of Athenian slavery, medieval feudalism, the feudalism of the warring states period, and the caste system in India, etc.).[1] I mention this for two reasons: first, the profession is not fully autonomous in these matters. Its structure is determined, in no small part, by the choices of university administrators, state legislators (Stateside), grant-agencies (elsewhere), and even the choices of students. Second, with shifting geopolitical and material resources (centered on the Pacific) it is quite possible professional structures are about to undergo rather dramatic changes; it is open question whether these will improve matters. I do not deny we could – if we were to overcome coordination problems -- collectively decide to ameliorate the situation greatly within the profession. But these material conditions prevent us from becoming a flatter network.
Of course, professional philosophers also continue to shape their own reproduction and institutional structure. There are key decision-nodes that help influence greatly where one may end up in the profession. Given that only a few graduate schools dominate placement into other top research programs, graduate admission is one such node. Placement practices (letters, how CVs are interpreted, etc.) are another node. Because all research I am familiar with, going back to Merton, suggests that having access to resources (time, money, fruitful collaborators, willing readers of drafts, etc.) is a key factor in research success, and early opportunities provide the engine for later ‘productivity,’ these placement decisions have huge effects on career paths which, in turn depend, all other things being equal, on the supererogatory efforts of well-placed mentors, who may also shape special issues, conference programs, etc. This is especially so because the vast majority of hiring within the profession is done at the junior level. Senior hiring is relatively rare and, in turn, unequally distributed (more about that below). I doubt such early lock-in really makes intellectual sense in a discipline like ours.
Social hierarchies generate predictable behavioral patterns: those at the top become entitled, everybody kisses up, many, especially those at the fragile lower-middle, kick down, and one finds fierce animosities over crumbs. Hierarchies legitimate and reinforce authority, including epistemic and moral kinds; they make tolerating bullies and bullying useful strategies for those who benefit from silencing. They incentivize cultures of silence around abuses of authority. These broad facts should resonate with the details of most of the scandals in the discipline. The professional effect is that some people’s arguments and questions get a lot more attention (the scarcest resource) and interest than others.
While the material conditions under which people work (effective teaching loads, travel budgets, office spaces, access to course graders, being in a research intensive environment with frequent visitors, etc.) are most important, the convention of treating some areas as ‘core’ and some as ‘non-core’ express and reinforce the hierarchies. [2] To work in the ‘core’ is to have a defeasible leg up. Yet, these categories are not stable (for a very ambitious attempt that illustrates his, see Justin Smith’s book): for example, aesthetics and logic are traditional topics in philosophy that currently have ambiguous positions: logicians have high status, but are rarely hired. For much of the last half century aesthetics has been a niche topic (but that may be changing). Theological questions were once thought the purpose of philosophy, few would grant that today (etc.).
The contingency of what counts as core/non-core is also geographic. For example, those of us that work in grant driven research schemes have to show the social impact of our research: it is no surprise that in such places, applied ethics and philosophy of technology increasingly thrive.
One of the most pernicious intellectual effects of working with a core/non-core distinction is that intellectual trade among different intellectual niches is, in practice, assumed to be one-way. (That’s not a conceptual truth of course.) Ideas, ‘best’ practices, argumentative strategies, and peoples radiate out from the core (and the top of the hierarchy) to the non-core (and the lower rungs of the hierarchies), but not the other way around. It is quite common to see a call for papers in non-core areas where presentations on themes from the core are encouraged; the reverse is rarer than a Humean miracle.
This unequal trade pattern is reinforced by the fact (as Professor Pasnau noted recently) that hiring decisions over the future of non-core areas are shaped by people who have little expertise or interest in them and not, infrequently, have expressed some hostility to them in the past. Because senior hiring in non-core areas is so rare and often by people with little understanding, it is unusual for the most innovative non-core scholars to end up in leading research departments (especially if what they do seems ‘weird.’)
These mechanisms have predictable and somewhat stultifying effects: the core thereby reinforces the stagnation and backwardness of non-core areas. To offer an example, non-core areas sound like the core with a decade or two delay. So, for example, a decade (or two) ago there were a whole number of ‘naturalistic’ turns in aesthetics, philosophy of religion, Nietzsche-studies, Hume, Aristotle, and even Kant and Descartes! Now, we’re seeing an increasing turn to metaphysical interpretations (even in the philosophy of science), etc. (Fill in your favorite examples!) But this rarely involves autonomous intellectual developments in such niches. Rather they create Kuhn losses because there is no incentive to preserve the insights of the past.
The way the professional hierarchies function creates (i) a lack of exploration of the intellectual possibility space and it generates what I call (ii) intellectual servility (an idea fruitfully developed by Professor Olberding).
On (i): at any given time the ‘core’ has a high density of scholars and high competition. This encourages specialization and scholasticism (in the good sense) such that many moves and distinctions are explored in fine-grained detail. It also generates predictable barriers to entry (involving terminology or formal presuppositions). But the most important effects of barriers to entry are unexamined patterns of ignorance about the state of affairs outside the core.
Specialization is great. But barriers to entry make it increasingly difficult to find folk with overlapping expertise who can evaluate/spot degenerate research programs without having skin in the game, etc. Because in philosophy (with exception of X-PHI) we do not test our theories empirically or have to build working artifacts, we lack the reality checks of science and engineering which provide some constraints on such sociological facts. It means that a robust academic ethos is most needed precisely in those conditions in which social circumstances constantly undermine it.
By contrast, non-core areas lack such a critical mass. This means that a lot of issues and topics are never critically examined in those areas by a community of fellow scholars; uptake of good insights is, in large part, determined by idiosyncratic preferences of a small number of peers. (This is made worse by the fact that some non-core areas also have high [linguistic and cultural] barriers to entry.)
But (I now turn to (ii)) the combination of these factors has perverse effects on the way scholars in core and non-core areas interact. To close on a blunt note: these exhibit patterns of behavior that reinforce the intellectual and sometimes even professional subordination of non-core-scholars . (To be sure, this need not prevent respectful mutual engagement on an individual and department level.) By this I do not just mean the peculiar fact that folks at the top of the hierarchy are permitted to put stuff on print about topics on which they clearly have underdeveloped expertise[3] -- a courtesy that is almost never extended in the other direction --, but this attention is then quite often welcomed and received with obsequious gratitude by folk in non-core areas.
I do not mean to suggest obsequiousness is innate or uniform. For, most amazingly, when folks in non-core areas complain that their work is neglected by, say, newcomers from the core, the burden of evidence (and non-trivially time/energy) is shifted onto them to prove their case. And when this generates expressions of irritation by a relatively marginalized intellectual community, rather than seeing such annoyance, even anger, as evidence of the existence of manifest epistemic injustice and lack of intellectual recognition, folks in non-core are reminded of the academic norms of civility and politeness (if they are not also told they are ‘sloppy’ scholars)! This happens in a profession that venerates a non-trivial number of intellectual bullies in its leading departments.
[1] Monasteries, colleges, and universities are capable of being relatively flat in structure even if the larger society is not.
[2] I have been reflecting on this because of the debates over the PGR specialty rankings in non-core areas (e.g.) aesthetics, Chinese philosophy, etc.
[3] To be sure I think this is a good thing!
Comments