Digressions&Impressions

On Kate Manne's "Losing Battle"

[Yo]u have to learn to accept the rejections themselves gracefully...But sometimes, they simply confirm that you are fighting a losing battle. This referee report was one such. The reviewer complained about my use of feminist terms and concepts throughout the paper – e.g., “hegemonic dominance”, “messages that are not only false but oppressive,” and “hermeneutical injustice,” being the specific phrases which they listed as objectionable. And they went on to remark more generally that “the rhetoric of the ms. is such that it will, I think, (1) turn off some readers and (2) distract from the author’s argument. The author brings in some concepts and language which, whatever their merits, seem dubious to many of us in the analytic tradition.”

As a feminist philosopher in the analytic tradition, this is a very disappointing reaction to encounter. Many of us...take the above terms and concepts to be standard, useful, and indeed vital, stock-in-trade. And the people who the reviewer feared would be so “turned off” by the language as to be “distracted” from my argument seem to include the reviewer themselves, ironically. They not only managed to completely miss, but handily illustrated, my central point in the paper. The point being that if one espouses politically marginalized views within philosophy, then one is disproportionately likely to be dismissed, disparaged, silenced, or even excluded from the discipline altogether. One is less likely to be given a platform in leading journals, for one concrete example, in view of which one is of course less likely to be able to earn a living wage, let alone get tenure.

...Feminist philosophy is virtually absent, and plausibly systematically excluded, from top journals...

These points have important epistemic as well as political implications. (This was the main intended lesson of my paper, which the reviewer missed entirely.) Some epistemologists have argued recently that, if you discover that you are in the minority in philosophy, insofar as most of the philosophers who you take to be smarter and more expert than you take a different view, then you should doubt your own judgment. Generally speaking, you should defer to the experts. In my paper, I argued that this idea fails to be compelling when it comes to philosophy, specifically. For suppose that one forms a certain idiosyncratic philosophical view or judgment. It is difficult to know if one’s view is just foolish (as is admittedly quite likely if no one else has ever or would ever share it), or whether one’s natural intellectual allies have been selected against, essentially. For if (e.g.) feminist voices in philosophy have been silenced or suppressed, all I will hear is silence. Much the same goes for my reviewer, naturally.

So should I be especially worried about the plausibility of my position in virtue of the fact that there are admittedly a fair number of smart, knowledgeable analytic philosophers who think like my reviewer, and are dubious about, or even positively contemptuous of, feminist views and methods? I don't think so. For there might have been plenty of smart, knowledgeable feminist philosophers who would have agreed with me, were they only around and given the platform from which to do so. The problem is that people like my reviewer are the ones with most of the power. And the more they wield this power to exclude feminist philosophers, the more their sense of what ‘we’ do will in fact be accurate.

The final irony is that this is hegemonic dominance par excellence. And it is the fact that it persists, not the concept, which is bullshit.--Kate Manne (of Facebook) [quoted with permission].

I sometimes joke that analytical philosophy has so evolved that it is now easier to get a paper defending the modal intuitiveness of the Trinity published in Philosophical Review than it is to get a hearing for work inspired by, say, De Beauvoir, Fanon or Du Bois. The not-so-funny point is that the methods and technologies deployed by analytical philosophy generate few intellectual barriers to introducing substantive views. This makes it actually easy to discern, if one is willing to do so, that if some views are not being aired, then there are almost always certainly sociological mechanisms that explain the barriers to entry (recall my post on Lewis's intervention on behalf of Priest). 

One interesting, such sociological mechanism is the use of images of science in order to create an image of philosophy that make it reasonable to deny alternative views a hearing or to respond to known objections. By an 'image of science,' I mean a list of characteristics of science, often associated with a bunch of epistemic virtues, that get trotted out in polemical or self-justifying context. Two elements of the most pernicious image of science are (i) the idea that experts mutually adjust (or haggle)--this is a view (recall) that has its clearest expression in the work by Aumann (the game theorist who won a Nobel in economics); (ii) the Kuhnian, technocratic idea that science is about paradigmatic consensus. These underwrite the idea of expert deference within philosophy (which understands itself as producing something akin to scientific knowledge, often with some appeal to inference to best explanation). What is often forgotten is that what (i) and (ii) have in common (and this is true of Aumann as much as it is true of Kuhn) is the commitment that science is usefully thought of as perfectly free market in ideas. But even if one arranges one's institutions of knowledge (journals, promotions, tenures, prizes, grants, etc.) to facilitate the reality of (i) and (ii) [this is sometimes called 'social engineering'], it can still be the case that market of ideas is not free.

The reason why we know that the market of ideas is not free in analytical philosophy is that our methods are, as Katrina Hutcheson notes, often non-transparent [quick example: the nature of analysis (recall and here)], which is why there has been a salutary turn to meta-philosophy, and that our top journals have been run as (often in house) factional fiefdoms. Undoubtedly the latter served a purpose in order to ensure the survival and even dominance of analytical philosophy in light of various competitors. It also lead to a lot of toleration for hyper-analytical approaches in areas where they are manifestly not suitable (quick and dirty example: the philosophy of art).*

Manne titled her Facebook post "Losing Battle." Analytical feminism is not losing the battle (recall my post on analytical ideology studies). I say this because analytical feminism has succeeded at attracting a lot of young talented folk (including Manne!), who, in turn, are mining -- and by the magic of philosophical alchemy are transforming -- rapidly some of the best ideas developed outside of analytical philosophy in order to create something genuinely new and important (e.g. Dotson, Haslanger, Stanley, Langton, Saul, Maitra, Fricker, etc.).**

For those of us with a historical sensibility, this sponge-like ability to absorb, transform -- and sometimes unfairly present as wholly new -- is in fact, one of the beautiful, shameless essences of analytical philosophy. The lack of proper shame, alas, also entails that we regularly generate bullies and gatekeepers that confuse their second-rate philosophical abilities for true philosophy.

When the Experts will be Ignored in Politics (Thomas More's Utopia on Teaching Virtue)

The [foreign] seamen were not unskilled in managing wind and water; but they were most grateful to him, Raphael said, for showing them the use of the compass, of which they had been entirely ignorant. For that reason they had formerly sailed with great timidity, and only in summer. Now they have such trust in that loadstone that no longer fear winter at all, and to be careless rather than safe. There is some danger that through their imprudence this device, which the thought would be so advantageous to them, may become the cause of such mischief.—in Utopia (by Thomas More), Part I. (Edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams; Cambridge)

Centuries before social scientists started to worry about so-called risk compensation, More has one of his characters recognize that acquiring novel technology can generate overconfidence (from timidity to imprudence) and move agents’ so-called risk-appetites (perceived advantageousness). If the accompanying harms are social/political then the introduction (or teaching) of new technologies has to be managed carefully (for more on law & economics style reasoning in Utopia, recall). One attentive reader of More, Francis Bacon,[1] makes this issue an important theme in his New Atlantis, where even very useful technologies are regularly shielded from government and population by a secretive scientific elite.

More returns to the issue of technological transmission in Part II when he shows the reader how Utopians acquire foreign technologies and learning from Raphael. So, in what follows I do not wish to pretend that I have dealt sufficiently with More’s perspective on the topic. But it’s also possible to read the compass episode as an parable on the nature of teaching (of philosophy, broadly conceived), responsible speech, and expert guidance.[2] For one of the main set-pieces of Part I of Utopia is an exchange over what to do when expert advice is unwelcome:

“Now don’t you suppose if I set these ideas and others like them before men strongly inclined to the contrary, they would turn deaf ears to me?”--Raphael

“Stone deaf, indeed, there’s no doubt about it’, I said, ‘and by heaven it’s no wonder! To tell you the truth, I don’t think you should thrust forward ideas of this sort, or offer advice [to kings] that you know for certain not be listened to. What good can it do? When your listeners are already prepossessed against you and firmly convinced of opposite opinions, how can you win over their mind with such out-of-the-way-speeches? This academic philosophy is pleasant enough in the private conversation of close friends, but in the councils of kings where great matters are debated with great authority, there is no room for it.”[--More]

“That is just what I was saying’, Raphael replied. ‘There is no place for philosophy in the councils of kings.’

‘Yes, it is true’, I said, “that there is no place for this school philosophy which supposes ever topic suitable for every occasion. But there is another philosophy, better suited for the role of a citizen, that takes its cue, adapts itself to the drama in hand and acts its part neatly and appropriately. This is the philosophy for you to use…If you cannot pluck up bad ideas by the root, or cure longstanding evils to your heart’s content, you must not therefore abandon the commonwealth….Instead, by an indirect approach, you must strive and struggle as best you can to handle everything tactfully – and thus what you cannot turn to good, you may at least make as little bad as possible. For it is impossible to make everything good unless all men are good, and that I don’t quite expect to see for quite a few years yet.’[--More]

‘The only result of this,’ he said, ‘will be that while I try to cure the madness of others, I’ll be raving along with them myself….You wouldn’t stand a chance of changing anything for the better by that “indirect approach”. This is why Plato in a very fine comparison declares that wise men are right in keeping from public business.’[—Raphael.]

More distinguishes between academic philosophy, which speaks truth directly without regard to context. This would be prudential only in public circumstances where much of such advices would be dispensable anyway, that is, in context of well-ordered public institutions (or with philosopher-kings). Direct truth speaking is only appropriate for the ivory tower and among private friends. As an aside, a few centuries later Hume would bemoan the rarity of such intellectual friendship, wistfully looking back at Cicero’s circle; and Adam Smith would commemorate Hume as having such intimate friendships (see here and here). Either way, More implies that sticking to such a theoretical approach to philosophy is uncivilized.  

As More’s characters recognize the demand side for expert guidance structures the content of speech among prudential experts. And only experts that are willing to play the game will be heard. This means that in non-well-ordered societies, the available (that is spoken) public council will be sup-optimal from the point of view of truth and general social utility. Note that More’s insight holds even if there is no explicit censorship. More points to a whole range of mechanisms (from group-think, to status seeking, to misaligned incentives) that will be prevent explicit truth from having a seat at the decision-making table.

The character More suggests that civilized philosophers (so-called theoreticians) lower their standards not just in terms of truth speaking – he clearly implies they need to adopt the art of flattery and Raphael is explicitly concerned it also entails practicing Noble lies --, but also in terms of ends sought: now she aims to ameliorate the bad rather than seeking the good. (It could be worse, of course; the expert could just be optimizing her own position.)

Rather than resolving the debate between academic and civilized philosophy, it is worth noting that in the compass example, Raphael learns that his intellectual philanthropy is not sensitive to the unexpected consequences of his education on his students. It is not obvious that transferring technology has made the recipients better off (if they become more accident prone). So, we can say, that Part I of Utopia raises two kinds of concerns about context-insensitive forms of education: in one (e.g., the compass) case it can make the recipient worse off—we are not told if this makes Raphael more cautious in the future. In the other (that is, speaking truth to corrupt power) it is self-undermining and Raphael has learned from experience to avoid supplying it.[3] At the close of part I of Utopia, More leaves his reader with the question if truth-telling, or philosophocal education, can ever be appropriate in public. But he does so in a format -- what I would call philosophical prophecy -- that is far removed from the academic and not wholly the civilized philosophy.

 [UPDATE: this version is slightly modified from the original post thanks to Ed Kazarian's comments.]

On Top of the World

While I was thus dividing my thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes, it occurred to me to look into my copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, a gift that I owe to your love, and that I always have about me, in memory of both the author and the giver. I [Page 317] opened the compact little volume, small indeed in size, but of infinite charm, with the intention of reading whatever came to hand, for I could happen upon nothing that would be otherwise than edifying and devout. Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself. My brother, waiting to hear something of St. Augustine's from my lips, stood attentively by. I call him, and God too, to witness that where I first fixed my eyes it was written: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not." I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain...--Petrarca (1336).

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible--Burke.

Today's post is an act of escapism after spending a morning serving on a committee that allocates grant money to scientists that have perfected the art of sincere over-promising and diligent accumulation  of strategic publication records; I picked up Cassirer and Kristeller's The Renaissance Philosophy of Man.

I used to associate Mt. Ventoux with the ritualized memorial of the death of Tom Simpson and, more favorably, the awe-inspiring time trial win by Jean-François Bernard in 1987 to be followed by disastrous team-tactics toward Villard-de-Lans. But now I can set those alonside Petrarca's account of his climb* of the mountain which, according to Wikipedia is 1,912 m (6,273 ft). (I read it in Nachod's translation in the Kristeller/Randall volume, but link to another one.) The logician, Buridian, is said to have gotten there first, but Petrarca's account is worth reading if only because of his astute comments about the trickiness of selecting travel companions.

The passage quoted above is near the end of Petrarca's description of his thoughts once he reached the top of the mountain together with his brother and two servants. In fact, the reported thought occurs at the start of sun-set. I am not the first to note that Petrarca, who describes his conflicted will alongside his narrative of the day-long journey up the mountain, echoes the conversion moment in Augustine's Confessions, where, carried along by the chanting kid's voice, which he decides to interpret as a command from God, Augustine picks up Scripture and is inspired to convert to Christianity by Romans 13:13-4, which induces a serenity of heart without doubt [quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt].

Petrarca quotes a passage from the Confessions in which a post-conversion Augustine describes people's hankering after the sublime while lacking self-knowledge.** It is tempting to say that Petrarca treats Augustine as teaching him the significance of the spiritual life.

That's not all false, of course, but it is worth noting that in Petrarca this spiritual journey is re-interpreted as a call to a philosophical life. I don't just claim this just because of the emphasis on self-knowledge. Rather, I recognized (recall this post) Petrarca's quote from Seneca's eight letter (one of those "pagan philosophers"), nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for the soul, if it be great, naught is great, which characterizes the greatness of soul of the self-sufficient, even sublime mind--one that attains immortality by skilled emendation or posthumous fame.

The physical, strenuous exercise of the climb prepares the body for a turn to philosophy, that is, the transformation of a weak, unstable mind into one that can face even death with equanimity. That the turn to philosophy is treated as a transformative, Pauline experience in the manner of our very own L.A. Paul is, of course, no surprise as such. But precisely at that transformative moment Petrarca is not just unable to talk with his pious brother (who had been extolled as the perfect climbing companion),*** but his brother's need is a source of possible irritation. Petrarca's account is so beautiful that one might miss the ugliness of the moment in which fellow-feeling is not permitted.

I do not wish to rule out ways that are philosophical yet permit exquisite co-affectivity rather than a withdrawal from human need, that is, philosophical escapism. But not for the first time I am struck by how alluring philosophical escapism can be felt from within and how discordant it can be seen to be from without; Petrarca's poetic-philosophical-confessional shows that mountaineers can indeed see farther.

Citation, or Change the Conversation

Grad student to one of his supervisors: I liked your manuscript a lot and have only added some minor suggestions, but some of its major claims were anticipated by X.

"I discovered these claims independently."

Grad student: but why don't you cite X; he got there first [by a decade]?

"I don't have to cite X because I did not read X and I am not going to read X."

Thanks to more Healy data (aided by Bloom) about some purportedly generalist high prestige journals and blogging by Meena Krishnamurthy, citation practices in analytical philosophy are back in the harsh spotlight. Familiar patterns of exclusion are magnified at the top of the citation pyramid; if I understand Healy's analysis, women and other minorities are (largely) absent in the 1%.

The exchange I quoted at the top of this post really happened. In reflecting on it over the years, I assumed initially that the supervisor, who teaches at a research-focused university, was just ungenerous to X, who teaches at a small college and not even in professional philosophy. (I will leave the identity of the grad student vague so as to protect my sources.) At the time I also treated the information as evidence of a lack of inquisitiveness by the professor. This particular professor did not have the juvenile pride in lack of philosophical literacy common among some analytical philosophers (of an older generation), so I was surprised by his stance. Later, as a true empiricist, in glancing through the book to check if X was, in fact, cited, I learned that X was indeed never mentioned. In fact, non-citer's book has been cited three to four times as often as X since. There is no justice.

As I became more at ease in professional philosophy, I learned that this incident was not an isolated event. Professional philosophers rarely cite (as Healy notes we average less than fifteen citations per paper). As I became an experienced historian of philosophy who could distance himself a bit from his own intellectual culture, I concluded also upon further reflection on analytical citation practices the following:

• Low citation rates of others create an illusion of originality; 
• low citation rates of others create and participate in historical effacements and cover-ups;
• low citation rates of others make one's background commitments opaque and, thereby, creates barriers to entry to outsiders;
• if citation is a scarce good it becomes a valuable commodity to be given as either a form of (aspirational) tribute or a rare act of generosity.

That is to say, citation within analytical philosophy is primarily a form of status signaling (recall). It tells the reader what peer group the author belongs or aspires to. 'Peer group' is a polite way of saying faction. This is no surprise, of course, if we look at institutional factors (and pay attention to the empirical evidence recall). The journals that Healy draws his data from are captured by particular groups within professional philosophy. (As is well known some of the most famous and celebrated philosophers of the twentieth century are barely mentioned in their pages [recall].) This intersects with the by now well known demographic patterns of exclusion (and a number of other biases).

To be clear, now that more and more analytical philosophy takes place in an institutional grant environment where 'objective performance metrics' play a role, we should expect citation practices to change (perhaps, led by Synthese or blog-driven citation-echo-chambers). It is an open question to what degree these grants, which tend to divide the academic world into chosen winners and the rest, will facilitate new demographic patterns of outcome alongside, say, the globalization of Anglophone professional philosophy.

Okay, the stage is set for my observations on Healy's analysis of this state of affairs. Healy writes:

Most of the time, publishing in a high-status journal is in effect a permit to talk about other people’s work. Your contribution must be framed by the central items in your field. And while it’s hard to clear that bar, a much, much smaller number of articles move from being items in the literature to being topics of the literature. Most of the articles in our dataset are “contributions to the literature” in the first sense, but not the second. In this case the agenda-setters, as opposed to the participants, are all men.

As I’ve said before, an academic discipline is a kind of exclusive conversation. Even for very successful entrants, “participation” usually means being present as a contributor, but not as a topic-maker. It’s a little like attending an ongoing public debate. You need a ticket to enter and sit in the audience. You may be called on by the moderator to ask a question or make a point from the floor. But the agenda for the discussion is set by a much smaller panel of people up on the stage—people who started out as audience members. Most of academic life has this structure, from departmental talks to conference panels and plenaries to journal exchanges. A key issue then becomes how work gets selected for attention up on the stage, who gets engaged with from the stage, so to speak, and how this process plays out as new audience members come in the door.--Healy. [Italics in Healy's original; but emphasis added in bold--ES.]

It is no surprise, and legitimate, that attention is now focused on the ways in which deserving women are excluded from setting the discipline's agenda and to offer reforms to this state of affairs (see here). I have no doubt that the discipline's conversation would be enriched and improved with women among the 1%. For example, as my regular readers know I think it was a near-disaster for analytical philosophy that Stebbing was forgotten while Max Black, a very fine philosopher, but nowhere near as original and interesting as Stebbing, set parts of our collective agenda (recall and here).   

Healy's analysis takes the institutional status quo as given. (That's not meant as a complaint--he is doing empirical sociology, after all.) Healy's analysis emphasizes the commonalities between the practice of philosophy and other academic disciplines without pausing at this fact. Philosophy is, on the whole, not an empirical science and so largely not driven by empirical or computer results (yes, I have heard of X-PHI!) or investment in experimental systems that drive lab research. In scientific fields, the sociology of citation is influenced by the organization of science, of course, and existing norms of citation, but citation does not only aim to participate in the discussion but also to advance (fill in your favorite epistemic goal here). While undoubtedly bits of philosophy undoubtedly aim at something more than participating in the discussion, large chunks of philosophy are nothing but attempts at keeping the beautiful, noble, (etc.) and, yes, exclusive conversation going. Of course, this is not merely a dis-interested enterprise because there are success goods to be derived from being the center of some conversations.

We learn from the example of Socrates, that keeping the conversation going without aporia and anger is no simple matter; we learn from the fate of Hume's Treatise that even in an extremely literate and philosophical age a work's philosophical significance can be overlooked. We learn from the profession's ignorance of, say, early modern feminists, female and male, that ignoble historical cover-ups succeed.

I end on a reflexive, narcissist note. After my first two years in the profession, I recognized that there was no place for me in the audience of the agenda-setters. My papers were being rejected without comment at the top journals (recall) and I experienced being invisible at professional events. (I am a white above average-length male, by the way; I have long arms.) I became aware of the often invisible barriers to participation; after all, when they do not do so themselves, the agenda-setters rely on trusted gate-keepers to pre-select the approved audience. Part of the story is that I got trained into the wrong conversations at Chicago--the leading factions had moved in another direction (recall). I accepted that my work would appear in supposedly less prestigious outlets and through 2010 I would average under ten citations per year (the vast majority of which self-citation).

Then I co-founded NewAPPS with the aim to change the institutional status quo; I have very much enjoyed directing attention to other people's work overlooked by the agenda-setters of yesterday. Amazingly, too, the scholarly citations to my work increased five-fold per year since--not enough to be in the 1%, but beyond my expectations. This is not a matter of justice (recall X). But sometimes you should not buy the ticket to the main attraction because it is a corporate re-run; enjoy a walk in fresh air, instead, and seek out more interesting and more diverse (and, thus, epistemically more robust) conversation partners--it's not impossible that before long inquisitive folk will want to join in the fun.

On a Rigged System

Philosophy and Public Affairs seems to me to have a real problem with bias. Because I suspected that it had such a problem, I went through back issues last year, looking at volumes 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41, in which there are 57 papers. Of those 57 papers, 17 had at least one author who received their doctorate from the same institution as the current Editor, Oxford. Another 13 were written by authors whose doctorates were from Harvard, where a number of editorial staff work or studied. The next most common place for authors to have received their doctorate is Princeton, where the journal is based. Of the ten papers in those five volumes published by authors who were last year employed by institutions in the western United States, four are by members of the editorial staff, three are by former visitors at Princeton, where the journal is based, and two are by people who were supervised by members of editorial staff. Only one of the ten has an author with no obvious links with editorial staff. It is impossible to be sure, simply on the basis of that sort of data, that there is anything untoward about its editorial policy, let alone anything deliberately so. I suggest though that it places the burden of proof on those who claim that it assesses all submissions in the same way.--Anonymous at DailyNous.

Let's assume that anonymous counted correctly. If not I apologize to the good folks at PPA. Let's also stipulate that all the papers published in PPA are of high quality. I have only one experience with the journal (a desk-reject).

I am always surprised by folk that are surprised that the system in professional philosophy is rigged, consciously and tacitly, in all kinds of ways. It is, of course, amusing to notice that the hard-core proceduralists (and ethical theorists) among us discretely and conveniently tend to play along with all of this. (Recall that yesterday I argued it's okay to have a few transparently biased journals in the profession. [I also linked to a small fraction of my previous blogging about this.]) This kind of stuff is noticeable to anyone that reflects on and has experience with referee practices, boy-wonder pathways, and all that. I also pointed out that in my experience plenty of other journals are captured by factions and/or overlapping factions, and reminded readers that such capture does not even require explicit cartels. In the broadest sense this (journal capture] is a near truism because for over half a century North American (and UK/Aussie?) analytical philosophers ensured that the Continental types would have almost no access to 'top' journals thereb quietly eliminating them from a presence in the 'top' departments until enough analytically trained philosophers could claim they were covering the same Continentalish material 'more rigorously' (etc.).

I have benefitted from the system, although during the last few years I have also benefitted from being a modest critic of the status quo. I am not one of the victims without a job displaced by a better connected insider. Even so, it is worth exploring how even the most priviliged insiders are diminished by this state of affairs. For example, all of professional philosophy is diminished when those that communicate philosophical positions to the world, and attempt to be, say, normative authorities qua professional philosophers, are the product of a system that at the elite level is not open to systematically engaging with alternative approaches and known objections. I will not suggest causation, but it is noteworthy that professional political philosophy's standing in the public sphere has, it seems, catastrophically diminished during the last four decades. It is equally noteworthy that the recent analytical work on ideology and bias (Langton, Fricker, Haslanger, Maitra, Saul, Dotson, Stanley, etc.) has not originated in political philosophy, and thereby bypassing some of the obstacles to being heard.

Ordinarily, I tend to blame hyperspecialization and professionalization (and a larger cultural anti-intellectualism and commercialism) for philosophy's relative public irrelevance, but perhaps part of the problem is the ways in which professional philosophy is a clubby system that is incapable of reforming its practices. (For the record: I think the worst of the clubbiness is past us; and I am hopeful the situation is vastly improved during the last decade.)

Let me close by moving from the abstract to the personal. I have an enduring interest in political philosophy. But when I was a PhD student, I recognized that if I wanted to stay in professional philosophy there would be little place for the kinds of questions and problems I was interested in exploring. Nobody explicitly said, 'don't do political philosophy,' but I could also sense a decidedly lack of excitement for the issues that unsettled me; I am neither Rawlsian nor Libertarian nor much enamored by the Capabilities Approach. And I didn't quite see where my interests in political economy, technocracy, ideology, and my more recent interests in situated knowledge and their intersection could find a home in political philosophy, especially with my quasi-historical sensibility. (Eventually I recognized that I could find a home for some of these interests on the fringes of philosophy of economics and the growing science and values literature housed in philosophy of science.) I thought it was far more sensible to present myself as a historian of philosophy than, say, a political philosopher (recall).

On leaving evidence of one's missteps

In 2013, Annals received nine hundred and fifteen papers and accepted thirty-seven. The wait between acceptance and publication is typically around a year. When a paper arrives, “it is read quickly, for worthiness,” Nicholas Katz, the Princeton professor who is the journal’s editor, told me, and then there is a deep reading that can take months. “The paper I can’t evaluate off the top of my head, my role is to know whom to ask,” Katz said. “In this case, the person wrote back pretty quickly to say, ‘If this is correct, it’s really fantastic. But you should be careful. This guy posted a paper once, and it was wrong. He never published it, but he didn’t take it down, either.’" From "The Pursuit of Beauty: Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery." By Alec Wilkinson-New Yorker. [Emphasis added--ES]

After my friend, M. Ali Khan, the mathematical-economist, called my attention to this piece during his trip to Tokyo, I saw it posted and discussed all over the internet among fellow academics.  Evidently, narratives about a lone, non-bragging (male?) genius that while working in obscurity, even at times outside academia, gets a big, non-applicable question right resonates with our desires for purity, beauty, and truth. Wilkinson's piece is full of comments by fellow mathematicians who comment on the fact that Dr. Zhang's public disposition does not conform to academic self-promotion that is the norm.

As the quoted passage at the top of the post reveals, the odds of getting a paper published in the top mathematics journal are very low. (This is also the case in philosophy.) Not unlike the once too common norm among philosophy journals, the referees apparently knew the identity of the author of the paper.  Moreover, this identity was not sterling, but rather damaged goods. It is to the credit of the journal's editors and referees that they were willing to look past their partially informed bias here. Perhaps, it's their sense of fairness, or, perhaps, the expected pay-off ("really fantastic") and initial plausibility made it worth everybody's effort to dig deeper into a paper by a lowly regarded peer.

It must be a well established fact that first impressions matter a lot in most psychological judgments. Among professional philosophers it used to be the case, and presumably still is the case, that making mistakes (or, worse, blunders) can mark one as untalented/unskilled and unfit for professional philosophy. Among the highest virtues, if not the highest (after clarity?), prized by analytical philosopy is carefulness. This virtue -- and it has a lot in its favor -- has a status quo bias built into it because it discourages experimentation and boldness. For to be bold means to work on topics where the side-constraints that can prevent obvious-to-others' mistakes are less evidently available (because not as well explored). Of course, once one is senior/established in the field people are more forgiving of one's mistakes. (Life really is unfair that way.) But one rarely gets established in fields with advanced intellectual division of labor by being very bold in the first place.

Evidently "he left it [the posted paper--ES] up because he hopes to correct it." If we take this at face value, it seems the paper was left as a kind of externalized pre-commitment to keep working on a project that had run into barriers. To have something incomplete, or something falling short of professional standards, visible to the world can be a way to motivate oneself to complete or purify it; it can also be a way of quietly asking for help on the project from one's peers. But...in a zero-sum, almost unforgiving, competitive environment it is also a way of risking not getting an audience at all. 

On getting credit for One's Students' Publications

One by-product of the publishing arm's race (recall this post and the discussion at Dailynous) that the role of graduate educators (supervisors and others) is increasingly geared toward making sure that their students publish during their doctorates. This has been facilitated by the ongoing trend toward the 'PhD as a number of collected articles.'  These trends are magnified in Flanders, where I work; our grant agency is oriented toward rewarding publications. The rule of thumb right now is that you won't even be considered (!) for a post-doc without at least four refereed journal articles. In effect, this encourages graduate supervisors to act as lab-heads (obtain grants and all that) and also to hire post-docs, in part, to help professionalize graduate students on a day-to-day basis.

One way to acquire the skill of writing a journal article is to work with somebody who knows how to do it.* Some of my colleagues work extremely closely with their students; it is time-consuming and also -- depending on the circumstances -- not always the most rewarding work, especially if one reads and re-reads as well as re-writes many multiple drafts of the same paper. Not surprisingly, although not always without some tension, graduate supervisors put their names, too, on the final publication. Predictably, this is not always a happy outcome; in some cases the student is a glorified research-assistant; it's not clear that such graduate students really learn to become independent thinkers and develop their own philosophical voice. In other cases the supervisor is a powerful free-rider exploiting their status; when the ability to obtain research-leave or research grants is tied to research-output this is a predictable outcome. (To be clear: on the whole I avoid publishing with my own PhD students, although I have published with other people's graduate students.) Human nature being what it is, one is always likely to overestimate one's own contribution to the final publication-outcome in a supervisor-graduate student relationship.

Of course, having only co-authored papers is still, I suspect, a mark against you in hiring decisions in much of professional philosophy even though it shows skill at team-work, developing professional relationships, and acquiring that most valuable resource -- an other person's philosophical time. So, in addition to avoiding free-riding, it's not always an optimal option to reward the supervisors's role in publication by adding their names to the byline. There are, however, other ways to reward their roles, including (but not limited to) tenure and promotion or generous acknowledgment in the first footnote. For example, at my university, supervisors and co-supervisors get extra, generous credits to their research accounts for some of the publications of their students at successful completion of the PhD.  In fact, the supervisor can choose to share this credit with others who contributed to the effort.

 

*This post was promted even encouraged by facebook discussion with Michael Weisberg; the usual caveats apply.

On 'Me 2 Research' and English-as-Second-Language Citation Rates

A few years ago, Gereon Wolters initiated public discussion among philosophers of science about the "ever increasing use of the English language also in the humanities, and here particularly in disciplines like logic and philosophy of science." (I am quoting from his 2013 paper, which refers back to the discussion on the HOPOS list in 2011. [The discussion has been renewed by Gabriele Contessa and my friends at philosopherscocoon.]) Given the grant and reward structure(s) in Europe, there are lots of incentives for publishing in English in internationally recognized journals. (Such incentives exist elsewhere, too, but I will restrict my observations to Europe.) This generates barriers to entry to non-native English speakers. Think about it for a second: philosophy is difficult as such; yes, really; now add linguistic hurdles, and, then add, say, tacit biases that make us treat sub-standard English as inferior. (Linguistic snobbery is not limited to the French, really!)

The incentives to publish in English in international journals have also generated a culture in which publications that are not in English are often assumed (a priori) to be inferior than the ones published in English. This inference is not silly--Europe is full of 'in-house-journals' with extremely intellectually-nepotistic publication practices that publish papers of, let's say, parochial interest. For this reason alone, I would be willing to defend the general claim that encouraging publication in English in international journals (etc.) has probably raised average quality of European philosophy (but I am about to qualify this claim). Simultaneously with the move toward English as the lingua franca of European philosophy, there has been (not surprisingly) an influx of young scholars trained in, or returning from, the USA/UK/Canada/Australia--many of these scholars automatically privilege the work they are familiar with. These scholars flourish in the increasingly common grant environment in Europe; their CVs are of the right sort: publications in English in the right sort of journals, etc.  [These remarks are autobiographical, of course.] If they are like me, they also have a built-in-bias against the parochialism, in-crowd, be generous to the Chair-culture so common in much of the European academy. 

Above I said  that I would be willing to defend the claim that average quality of European philosophy has increased by encouraging publication in English in international journals. But it does not follow that all the work not in English is bad. In particular, a claim about averages is compatible with the further thought that (a) there can be quite a bit of excellent work not in English, and (b) that raising average quality also means encouraging a lot of 'me 2 research' by which I mean 'the Nth publication' on a topic that works on other people's epicycles, especially those people producing work at leading Anglophone departments. That is to say, average quality can go up while the work becomes more derivative. Even if the reader distrusts my use of 'quality' and 'derivative,' you may note that encouraging publishing in English tends to homogenize the philosophical landscape.

Sincerity is the Denial of Complexity

[T]he arbitrariness of art careers, or were they really arbitrary? Who gets to speak and why?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (164)

[I]sn't sincerity just the denial of complexity?--Chris Kraus I love Dick (181)

These letters're the first time I've ever tried to talk about ideas that I need to, not just to amuse or entertain.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (192)

"[D]on't forget you live by compromise and contradiction cause those who don't just die like dogs."--Chris Kraus I love Dick (240)

A few weeks ago, when I was a bit low after a bruising encounter with fierce, confident philosophically trained minds, I wrote a friend how much I admire her uncompromising ability to combine being a philosopher and being, well, her. She wrote me back that while my fine thoughts reflect well on my image of her, the real, more fragile her was struggling with suicidal despair through the Summer. It's not that the despair as such that caught me by surprise—all the people I admire let their fragility and despair into their lives, and it's their capacity to do so that gives their words, professional and informal, an urgency that I treasure—but I had always half expected her to reach out to me if she would hit bottom. Upon reflection I consoled my wounded vanity with the thought that, of course, she had sunk so low she had become incapable of reaching out to me; my conscience answered, in turn, 'maybe she expected to be pushed further down by Professor Schliesser?' 'Would she think me really capable of such cruelty?' 'Who isn't?'

Around the same time I noticed that a young scholar listed Chris Kraus's I love Dick in a top-10 book-list that have been popular on Facebook. I had never heard of it before which I decided spoke in its favor. Despite the book's humor, it makes for uncomfortable reading—the deformation of the moral reflexes of pretentious academic men (you know, like me) and their impact on (to quote) a Serious Young Woman are exhibited in eerily familiar fashion. The deformation is captured in many scenes, but this passage presents it in a nice one-liner:

Because emotion's just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (196)

Kraus here holds out to the possibility of disciplined emotion. We might say an analysis in which the head is coupled to our feelings. The idea that emotion can be terrifying resonates with my experience; it need not be yours, of course. When I was a teenager I was cautious about letting anybody get close to me intimately. (I still prefer baby-steps.) And so now I wonder if I prefered the company of books because they kept me distant from my feelings (and other people's).

Even so, Kraus's book is not anti-intellectual. In fact, it offers a remarkable defense of the idea that books can offer a life-line to those capable of grabbing it:

Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly can ever fulfill—getting larger cause you are entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.--Chris Kraus I love Dick (207)

The view from up here

He who studies with a philosopher should take away with him some one good thing every day: he should daily return home a sounder man, or in the way to become sounder.--Seneca Letter 108

In the bowels of cyberspace, philosopher Eric Schliesser (Ghent) has earned the amusing nickname "the Ghent Balloon," in recognition of the amazing amounts of hot air he can generate on any topic, no matter how trivial.  Since he is a serious scholar and philosopher, my own suspicion is that he really doesn't believe a lot of the stuff he blogs, and that he does it mainly to garner attention or to satisfy his apparently   enormouos appetite for righteous posturing.  Whatever the explanation, his latest balloon ride warrants a couple of observations.  First, regarding its juvenile title, there was no "dust-up":  Prof. Haslanger made a claim, and I disgreed with it for the reasons given.  I often agree with Prof. Haslanger on issues in the profession, but I did not agree with her about this.  That is not a "dust-up," but Prof. Schliesser apparently would like to make it one.  Second, if Schliesser does not believe that meaningful qualitative judgments are possible, and that all we can do is meet the demands of each "constituency," then he should cut through the hot air with a bracing burst of icey directness and say so clearly.  Third, his feigned uncertainty about this line from my original comments--"Only if one thought every intellectual constituency within the APA produced good philosophical work could [representing them all] possibly be a desideratum:  but does anyone really believe that?  (One need only look at the MIT faculty to see that no one there does.)"--is a bit incredible, even allowing for his rhetorical tendencies.  If anyone at MIT believed that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work, then MIT would have--maybe just once in the last 25 years, say--hired a philosopher trained at a SPEP department, or a philosopher affiliated with the Society for American Philosophers.   In fact, MIT hires (even when they hire Continental and feminist philosophers) only from a small handful of departments, about a half-dozen (Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, two or three others on occasion).  I conclude that no one there believes that all the intellectual constituencies in the APA produce high quality philosophical work.  I also think that is the only reasonable view to hold, and I would be astonished if it were not Eric Schliesser's view, posturing to one side.--Brian Leiter.

I have always admired balloons, from a distance. They courageously glide, silently through the sky, yet vulnerable to the unpredictable elements. They represent our noble inquisitiveness and sense of adventure, while reminding us of the fragility of our control over the environment. Piloting a balloon requires skill and judgment as well as a bit of luck. It's a lovely aesthetic; come visit us in Ghent some time (here).

But, yes, I have somehow managed to become a character in a Swiftian plot. And I know than when you have been defined in some such way, it's wiser to incorporate the new meme into one's identity than to pretend it away. After all, to give you my metaphysical thought of the day, the comedy of life is constituted by potentially contrary impressions! So, I give you an image of Ghent from a balloon as a reminder to myself that my aspirations look ridiculous to some as well as a mark of my timidity.