Digressions&Impressions

Synthese, redux

A new scandal is brewing at Synthese -- by some metrics the most important journal published in European analytical philosophy -- about this article. HT Audrey Yap. (See her post here.) The article is blatantly sexist and homophobic in ways that add nothing to the underlying argument about the nature of logic.* (It also contains mediocre history and philosophy of science and is written in an ersatz English--even I noticed a lot of mistakes.)+ The article was published in a special issue. I will follow the story with interest for two reasons: first, I am editing a special issue for Synthese at the moment [that's my disclosure]. Second, the coverage of and contribution to the Synthese controversy of a few years ago catapulted NewAPPS into the big leagues of philosophy blogs (for what it's worth), so this brings back quite a few memories. (The two issues are connected for me because one reason why I was willing to edit a special issue now is to express tacitly my confidence in the new editors.)

It will be interesting to see what exactly the new editors of Synthese have learned from the earlier debacle. (I return to this below.) The underlying problem at Synthese is probably that it publishes too much and so it is extremely difficult to maintain editorial oversight and quality control. (I have seen several folk suggest this in the first ten minutes of facebook discussion about the news.) My friendly suggestion would be to formally withdraw the article as quickly as possible, issue a generous apology to the intellectual community, and put future special issues on hold in order to review the special issue process again. (Yeah, that would be a big pain for me and my contributors.) But my suggestions have been ignored before.

The history of the original Synthese controversy has not been written yet. (There is a lot of work on Creationism controversies [see this interesting dissertation].) It will be a fruitful episode for future historians of philosophy because it exposed all kinds of practices common in the profession including, (i) the lack of genuine accountability and responsiveness of journal editors (key gatekeepers of the profession); (ii) the role of disciplinary heavies who can influence the editorial process informally behind the scenes. At the time these issues got mentioned in various places, but it is not my sense that the situation has improved since. (But that is a very defeasible judgment.) 

I am familiar with at least five more takes on the controversy: (iii) the varying standards of purported 'quality' within, say, HPS and analytical (Christian friendly) metaphysics; (iv) the political dangers of allowing 'religious Creationists' an academic platform to discredit one of their persistent critics; (v) the treatment of a not so well connected female scholar at the hands of influential male editors; (vi) the dangers of self-righteous bloggers bullying others; (vii) the normative rifts between American and European analytical philosophers. [At the time I explicitly embraced (iii), (v), and (vii); I remain quiet on (vi) here.]

I happen to reject (iv), I close with a reflection on it. My role in the Synthese controversy led some folk to discern an anti-Christian bias in my writings about it. I learned this after the controversy had died down when, at conferences, I was respectfully approached by serious analytical philosophers who also happen to be self-described Christians (in their philosophizing). These quiet confrontations surprised me.

Instinctively, I had long been a kind of dogmatic naturalist up until the last few years of graduate school. [Elsewhere I have recounted John Haugeland's role in curing me from this.] But by the time I had joined NewAPPS, I had already come to the conclusion that Christianity-inspired, analytical metaphysics had helped revive and improve analytical philosophy. More subtly, I had come to the Platonic view that religion was ineleminable from society (although the expression of it could vary), and that intellectual approaches to the varieties of religion should be encouraged. But not even my most loyal NewAPPS readers had anyway of knowing that about me at the time. So, while I  thought it a mistake to infer an anti-Christian bias from my critical posts about (inter alia) Beckwith and Plantinga, it was also an understandable mistake.

Even so, something else happened: by opening a dialogue with me about their concerns about my perceived stance, these Christian philosophers generated conversations that have inspired quite a bit of my subsequent blogging about religion and its role in the history of philosophy and political philosophy. That is to say, they did not rest content with their image of me, but were willing to be challenged in their views and, in so doing, helped teach me the nature of true intellectual humility.

On Being like Tamar Gendler

Yesterday, after I unpacked the book boxes in my new office, I suddenly remembered a colleague’s comment from my Syracuse years: “Between the two of you, you and Tamar Gendler know everybody in the whole discipline,” (or something to that effect). I was unsure it was meant as a compliment (about me or Gendler), and I didn't bother to ask. At the time, about a decade ago, Gendler (who had been faculty at Syracuse, too) was already a big deal (I was familiar with her work on thought experiments), and, while I was not quite suffering from imposture syndrome (but see here), I was not used to being compared, favorably or not, to a world class philosopher in the profession. Insecure minds are fragile; I was made defensive by the comment -- as if being a social hermit would be a sign of academic excellence? --, and I believe (in so far such memory can be trusted) I responded dryly that academic journeymen have plenty of opportunities to meet folk in the profession.

While the internet and a few philosophy blogs already existed, I had not yet heard of Facebook and other social media. Even so, professional philosophy is not a very large community. Yes, a thousand PhDs or so are annually produced in the English speaking world [don't ask me for a source--it's just a number I recall], and collective we publish way too much papers and books that go unread, but even Stateside the number of academically employed professional philosophers combined is the size of a small town. There are about 18,000 employed faculty or so; that's a lot more than the PGR ecology, of course, but not huge. If you spent most of your day interacting with the townspeople, you, too, would get to recognize a decent fraction of them (at least by gossipy reputation).

These days a decent chunk of professional philosophy is on Facebook, and so that facilitates recognizing names of one's peers and to put these names into some kind of (partial) context. (At first I found it very strange that people wanted to 'friend' me even though they had never met me in person.) But while Facebook generates its own social awkwardness and problems, it humanizes one's colleagues. This is especially useful if you encounter each other rarely in person and if some of these encounters are polemical or competitive (given scarcity of resources/jobs, etc.). In a small, specialized, scholarly sub-field like early modern Facebook has also proven to be a first class intellectual resource--I can literally canvass the world's experts if I am flummoxed by a scholarly problem and have world class discussion threads. 

These thoughts were prompted by this: my new department -- political science -- has about sixty full-time staff, and quite a few more temporary staff (PhD students, post-docs, and adjuncts). It feels huge. (Apparently, it's not as huge as the local psychology department, by the way.) Counting my BA and PhD departments, I am now on my eight university, and I had never encountered a philosophy department remotely that size. (The Syracuse department was pretty large, by the way.) I checked the Ohio State department size (assuming it would be among the biggest in professional philosophy) and it does not come close. Because I am a social scientist now, I decided to do a brief, further, empirical survey (N=5); it looks like that often political science/government departments are anywhere between 50% and 300% larger than philosophy departments at the same university. So, I am inferring political science really is a bigger discipline than professional philosophy.

In reflecting on this train of thought, I recognize that in my scholarship about the sciences (early modern physics, eighteenth century political economy, mid-twentieth century economics) I write about relatively small intellectual communities. This assertion is not just a function of a biased interest in canonical figures. For example, while there was lots of philosophy in the seventeenth century, there was not that much mathematical natural philosophy. It's a lot more than Kepler, Gilbert, Galileo, Wallis, Wren, Huygens, Newton, Fatio, Marriotte, and Leibniz, and, to be sure, there is more than I have tried to read (Leibniz alone can keep you busy), but I am reasonably familiar with the size of the corpus. In my work on twentieth century economics, I recognize that there is a post-war explosion of work in and differentiation within economics (or division of labor within it). Unless one just decides to read all of Samuelson's papers, there is probably no way to even try to master what economics looks like between, say, 1945-1990; one consequence of this, is that contemporary professional economists are really trained to be less (for lack of a better word) intellectual and sensitive (about philosophy and other disciplines) than earlier generations (in order to be cutting edge specialists).*

I am unsure what moral to draw from any of these impressions. I will note, that Gendler and I have not met in person, yet.

On Vindictive Referees

[A]nonymized peer-review seemed to bring out something vindictive in almost half of referees.--Kate Norlock.

Perhaps this section is the appropriate place to bring up a very serious point of criticism of the dossier submitted. Professor Schliesser vastly overrates the importance and the scientific interest of his online presence. He is an active blogger, and this is fine, but it is important to conflate this elective activity with actual scientific work....indeed, Professor Schliesser plays a valuable role in the philosophical community, and it will be good to have in this community for many years to come. But his strengths seem particularly compatible with a career profile that is more focused on teaching. In fact, there is every indication that Schliesser's skills as a communicator make him particularly well suited for more classroom interaction, and that in his current position as a research professor he is being kept from actualizing an important side of his philosophical talent.---Referee #2

By the strange laws of blogging synchronicity, during the last 24hrs Marcus Arvan and Kate Norlock have raised concerns over professional referee-practices. (Yesterday's post was also about refereeing, but only obliquely about that issue.) I have about fifty refereed publications (journal articles and book chapters); while I have received more than my fair share of (to use a technical term) idiotic (I return to this below) and blatantly political/ideological (I return to this, too) reviews -- although a small number relative to the more than hundred diligent reports I have received! --, I have not been on the receiving end of vindictive refereeing among them (i.e., designed to hurt, spiteful, etc.). So, from Norlock's vantage point my experience is fairly lucky. 

By contrast, my book and grant proposals do receive vindictive reports somewhat regularly (but still not half). In these reports, the proposer's identity -- my track-record, status, promise, etc. -- plays a non-trivial formal role. And here my shadow life as a public blogger is increasingly a presence in reports. (See the quoted paragraph above; I use this example because it turned out to be harmless in that it did not prevent me from obtaining the grant--I also share the referee's commitment to the significance of teaching.) Here's the rub: some such personal seeming criticism is completely licit because under grant-making rules that are common in Europe we're increasingly being asked to show detailed evidence of dissemination, impact, and (public) valorisation of our research (recall). While I wrote some editorials and gave lectures to non-academic audiences before my blogging career, the majority of such impact tends to be a consequence of my blogging profile.

Raising one's public profile (even modestly--I have never been on TV, and do not intend to be seen there) is a two-edged sword: while it facilitates some grant-making, (i) it generates criticism of one's persona among fellow academics in places where one does not expect it (no, I am not talking about anonymous blogs, but rather referee reports for, say, book proposals [that's happened a few times]); this is so, even if you think of yourself, as I do, as one of the gang for ordinary scholarly purposes. (ii) It can generate criticism about one's interventions among non-academics (when I was thought to criticize Dutch xenophobic politicians in a (self-published) editorial, I received hate-mail for a few weeks) [I call this the Socratic Problem].

The unpleasantness is far outweighed by the intellectual benefits, so on the whole I shrug off the vindictive referee reports; publishing and grant-making is, in part, a number's game and the key is to keep trying regularly. Obviously shrugging off vindictive referee reports is easier said than done, but in my case it helps that I have exceeded my professional aspirations.

Be that as it may, as my blog audience swelled, I have had to suppress the desire to start a monthly column in which I highlight the idiotic referee reports I have received and, say, name the journal editors that hid behind them in rejecting my papers. By idiotic I mean showing signs of intellectual incompetence. Again, I don't receive them very often, but, it happens. My reasons for suppressing this desire are entirely prudential [although fit with my larger tendency to try avoid self-advocacy (as opposed to self-promotion) on my blogs]: I wouldn't want to encourage journal editors to start simply desk-rejecting me (if word got out that I would be discussing their editorial decisions); so that's why I am not even offering a veiled example of it here. Even so the idiotic referee reports are especially annoying when journal editors, who have a policy (for whatever reason) of requiring multiple positive reviews, use them as a factor in a reject. 

I do regularly receive what I consider political reports where it's clear that the referee simply does not want my position or approach to get a public hearing. (I am not alone in experiencing this; recall this post about Graham Priest's Preface to the second edition of In Contradiction, which discusses the examples he has received.) I infer, but could be mistaken, that this can be due to it being an alternative to the referee's preferred position or intellectual orientation.* Receiving such reports when one is junior can be very discouraging (especially if one has worked hard to add copious footnotes discussing the alternative positions in the field). But here the cunning of history offers some modest consolation: in an age in which citation-metrics play a non-trivial role in promotion (grant-making, lateral moves, etc.) the folk that as gate-keeping referees, police their territory such that no competitors are allowed in end up -- by, in effect, reducing citations to themselves -- hurting themselves in the long run, too.

 

 

On refereeing

Schliesser: I am being overwhelmed by refereeing requests

Big Deal Philosopher: Life is short; I only review for the top journals.

Schliesser (enviously): define 'top'

Big Deal Philosopher: Healy 4; maybe Ethics, too.

Schliesser (even more enviously): I would feel as if I were free-riding. How about tenure reviews?

Big Deal Philosopher: no more than two or three a year.

Schliesser (whispering): I hate you.

One unexpected side-effect of blogging has been the marked increase in referee, tenure, and blurbing requests in my life. (I am not attributing the whole increase to blogging; undoubtedly some of it has to do with normal seniority.) I largely keep saying yes to many more requests than I would like. I doubt duty has much to do with my service. I self-justify my enduring commitment to refereeing with three reasons:

(i) I enjoy shaping the future of the field--call that the gate-keeper-function.

(ii) I have a vague sense that I need to give back to the profession that has treated me so well, including, especially, some very generous referees of my earliest papers; we're in it together, after all--call that the vocational spirit. (Maybe for some this would count as duty.)

(iii) I recognize that the really senior scholars I admire keep reading outside their own privileged circle; by refereeing I stay aware of what's happening and stave off the worst features of a certain form of intellectual narcissism common at the top (see Josh Armstrong's review of Searle for what I have in mind)--call that the stay fresh strategy.*

As my 'research days' get consumed by refereeing and other (often reviewing) obligations, (i-iii) start to seem increasingly quixotic.  I have never felt that refereeing is rewarded by academic employers. (The present post was prompted by this one at Dailynous; sadly the discussion is very brief.) In fact, in my experience, at institutions that incentive-ize refereed journal publications (as is increasingly common in European grant-driven research environments [recall]) there is a tacit, corrupting encouragement to free-ride on other people's editing and refereeing efforts.  Since I have been amply rewarded by these same institutions, I feel like I owe the system (see II above).

When I started blogging, I advocated -- following a suggestion by Alva Noë -- to give referees partial credit for accepted papers (this was an obsession at the time--there are a whole bunch of more posts I did). That is, their names should be listed on the published paper (in the manner of how some learned societies include the fellow who communicated a paper) and, ideally, their referee reports should be available online. While I imagine that risk-averse referees will let fewer papers through (and thereby stay secret), the proposal gives credit where (partial) credit is due. Implementing the proposal may also help expose refereeing echo-chambers/buddy systems. (I have seen some science journals include anonymized referee reports with publications.) I still defend the proposal, especially because more and more journals seem to be working with a-quasi-algorithmic demand of two positive reports before a paper can be accepted in effect entailing that the editor(s)'s name(s) on the mast-head does not convey a seal of quality, but (no less important) organizational skill and commitment.

There was a period in which I hoped that the (philosophical) blogosphere would facilitate the creation of a new knowledge economy in which journal publication becomes far less relevant to professional advancement. (Yeah, that is a self-serving hope because it would liberate me from writing such articles. Schliesser daydream: "Yes Dean X, I understand you want to hire me as Distinguished Professor of Digital Philosophy and your only demand is that I keep blogging?") But while some blogs certainly have created a (newish) version of the gate-keeping function, with (solid) jobs scarce relative to (increasing) number of PhDs, credentialing by a limited number of journals stands to become only more important.

At some point, I kind of expected that the system would simply grind to a halt--everybody with multiple papers under review waiting for some referee report. But editors are actually getting better at nudging us in various ways (undoubtedly relying on the journal for peer-reviewed nudge-technologies).

Having said that, I need to turn to that overdue report.

 

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.