Digressions&Impressions

On Userfriendly Specialized Vocabularies; a responsible economist argues for nonuserfriendly terms

Not only is "calculated trust" a contradiction in terms, but userfriendly terms, of which "trust" is one, have an additional cost. The world of commerce is reorganized in favor of the cynics, as against the innocents, when social scientists employ user-friendly language that is not descriptively accurate-since only the innocents are taken in. OE Williamson (1993) "Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization," The Journal of Law & Economics 485

Oliver Williamson is often mentioned as a candidate for the won the Nobel in economics in 2009. The quoted article argues to limit the use of 'trust' in the "specialized vocabulary" of the "science of organization" (484). [Some other time I discuss Wiliamson's analysis of trust.] This is accompanied with a self-conscious nod to and citation to Thomas Kuhn's Structure (see note 127); specialist vocabulary facilitates scientific research -- say to "realistically and significantly describing...administrative organizations" (484) -- and community building (and policing). In Kuhnian terms, Williamsion is legislating the use of terms.

Williamson is not the first nor the last in economics (and social sciences) to try to develop a science along the template provided by Kuhn. What makes Williamson unusual among relatively successful would-be-scientific legislators is that he evaluates the utility of specialist vocabulary not just in terms of the costs and benefits to the scientific community, but also in terms of the uptake of these terms by non scientific agents (in this case folk who are also described by the social scientists). That is, to use a philosophical phrase, he has thought about the inductive risk of adopting a vocabulary.

And here he notes that adopting familiar terms in a highly specialist context may, in fact, have considerable costs. For while the terms are userfriendly to the specialists and also allow the specialist to convey (with a wink) to the folk that they are describing the familiar world (rather than some model-reality), some of the folk may get confused between the specialist use and ordinary use of the terms. (Not to mention that sometimes the experts confuse their model for reality!) This is why he thinks that the right vocabulary has an ethical even economic pay-off: "Commercial contracting will be better served if parties are cognizant of the embeddedness conditions of which they are a part and recognize, mitigate, and price out contractual hazards in a discriminating way." (485) The cognizance is facilitated if they have to think about the science that describes them. This adds a transactional cost to the interface between science and society, but if it prevents harms it may well be worth it.

The Psychologists Aid Ineffective Torture, Hobbes, and Incentives

In spite of the rhetoric employed by Damon and Colby concerning the search for higher moral truths, the basic moral principle that is consistently employed in this psychological literature is the bare Hobbesian one of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation. In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene warns that even those who seek pragmatic agreement need “an explicit and coherent moral philosophy, a second moral compass that provides direction when gut feelings can’t be trusted.” So in addition to questioning whether psychological research can vindicate moral norms, we also have to ask whether the minimal moral norm of cooperation employed by psychologists is sufficient to provide them with a reliable moral compass....

When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published its extensive report on official torture in December 2014, Jonathan Haidt tweeted a link to an article by Matt Motyl, his former Ph.D. student, claiming that the report would not change anyone’s views on the morality or effectiveness of torture, owing to the phenomenon of cognitive bias, which distorts people’s assessment of the relevant evidence. Motyl warned that none of us should assume that our beliefs about torture are based on facts. Nevertheless, there are established facts. One of them is that psychologists secured enormous financial gains by collaborating in official torture, while also having clear evidence that it was ineffective.

This should be an important lesson concerning our moral frailty, one that should make us wary of conferring moral authority on sources that have no plausible claims to such authority, such as scientists of human behavior. Psychological expertise is a tool that can be used for good or ill. This applies as much to moral psychology as any other field of psychological research. Expertise in teaching people to override their moral intuitions is only a moral good if it serves good ends. Those ends should be determined by rigorous moral deliberation.

Psychologists have long been essential to the military, performing valuable and humane functions, treating returning veterans, devising selection procedures, studying phenomena such as PTSD. But when the defense industry supplies hundreds of millions of dollars a year to support research (both basic and applied) that is related to military psychology, there is always a potential conflict of interest between supplying results that the military wants and producing objective science.--Tamsin Shaw "The Psychologists Take Power," (feb 2016) New York Review of Books.  [HT Jason Stanley on Facebook]

In her important article, in which she brings together several lines of debate, Shaw is right to take influential psychologists to task along five distinct lines:

1. The involvement of psychologists in the torture program of the US Military;
2. The financial incentives of those psychologists (and the APA) involved in the torture program
3.  The deplorable way moral theory is theorized in psychology and/or tacitly presupposed in psychology.
4. The replication crisis in psychology.
5. The psychologists' tendency to present themselves as the experts of the moral.

For those familiar with my previous blogging on the toxic mixture of expert overconfidence and expert lack of ethics, it should come as no surprise that I agree with the thrust of Shaw's article and also many of its details. Yet, Shaw also ends up promoting (a) the wrong solution (a moral theory that can provide a moral compass) to an institutional problem and (b) seems willing to discredit an assumption that she claims "is consistently employed in this psychological literature...the bare Hobbesian one of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation" on misguided grounds.  And, while this is not her intention, perhaps, (c) she seems to allow that if torture had been "effective" [this is not defined--it is certainly effective in generating harms to tortured and torturer alike], the psychologists involvement with the torture program would have been vindicated. In what follows I leave (c) aside, and focus on (a-b).

First, incentives matter, and large financial incentives matter a lot in distorting even corrupting integrity of scientists. Not everybody will be so corrupted, but this is why there are policies that favor disclosures, prevent conflicts of interests, etc. While a "moral compass" can help navigate these incentives, there is no reason to think that folk with a PhD an high social status in a specialized discipline have the requisite "moral compass." Unless one is committed to a very strong unity of the virtues thesis, there is simply no reason to expect that the possession of epistemic virtues carries over to possession of a moral compass.

To be sure, I am not against efforts at cultivating a moral compass during the long apprenticeship of PhD and post-doc(s). I have no idea if it would really make a difference in light of extremely corrosive incentives. But the status quo -- shortening of PhDs, increased emphasis on funding success, publication rat-race -- discourage such cultivation. So, unless we reform scientific education massively, this is simply a non-starter. We are much better off looking more carefully at the ways our institutions (including the media machine that makes stars out of scientists ) reward and incentivize successful folk. Universities and funding bodies have a non-trivial role to play here to encourage disclosure, align incentives with humane ends, withhold recognition from torturers, etc.

Second, it sometimes seems that Shaw is also out to discredit "the bare Hobbesian" assumption "of resolving disagreement, or promoting cooperation." But here we need to be careful: if this assumption is fruitful within psychological research and made explicit in that research, then I do not see why it should be given up. After all, (i) minimal assumptions are better than maximal assumptions; (ii) cooperation is not a harm as such (and may be the most one can hope for in many circumstances). That it fails to provide the moral compass  to would-be-torturers is no argument against it as an assumption within psychological research (unless psychologists promote it as a means toward such a compass). After all, there is no reason to think that a Kantian or neo-thomist psychologist is less likely to torture. (It would be nice I were shown to be wrong about this!) As we are increasing learning (Eric Schwitzgebel has made this research popular) knowing full blown moral theory is not exactly conducive to moral behavior. 

On Shyness and Disciplinary Norms

Since I suspect there are other early-career shy, introverted philosophers out there like 'postdoc' and myself, I thought it might be helpful if I opened up a discussion on these issues. If one is shy and/or introverted, are these impediments to professional success? Are they things one should aim to "overcome"? If so, how? I don't pretend to have "the answers" to these questions--but what I can do is offer up my own experience, and encourage readers to offer thoughts of their own.--Marcus Arvan at the Cocooners.

Marcus has written an excellent piece that has generated a very useful discussion that has also generated some important distinctions. For example, as Stacey Goguen notes networking is a skill that generates, or so I would argue, different kinds of challenges for different kinds of people. The discussion also generated lots of useful suggestions at how to handle yourself at, say, conferences; I would endorse Richard Yetter Chappell's suggestion: "don't feel obliged to socialize at absolutely every opportunity" at a conference. While I very much like networking and gossiping (I think both are compatible with being shy), I always eat some meals alone at conferences in order to allow myself 'off-time,' assimilate what I learned (philosophically or professionally) earlier in the day or, say, write a blog-post. So go check out Marcus's post (if you have not done so--it has already resonated with quite a few folk, including links by both Daily Nous en Leitterreports.) )!

It is notable, however, that, as an anonymous commentator points out, Marcus presupposes that most of the accommodation and change has to come from the introverts (Marcus generously conceded the point). Here I offer two observations, first, as that commentator notes, that without some such accommodation of the shy by non-introverts or by the norms that govern the profession, non-introverts may be denying themselves opportunities to learn from and acknowledge the existence of alternative perspectives; second, that professional success still is possible for introverts--after all, the introverted are no less good at publishing journal articles and writing grant proposals than the extrovert. I elaborate on both points below. In addition, the skill-set that is required for excellence in teaching may (as again some of the commentators note) by equally challenging (in different ways, perhaps) to outgoing and shy types--I firmly believe there are varieties of ways of being an excellent teacher. 

On the first point: the general concern with shyness is presumably due to the concern that those that are more outgoing have a leg up in the profession. And, indeed, folk that never go to conferences/workshops or that remain quiet at events, may well suffer because of all the ways in which the current review system (of grants, books, journal articles) also factor in (unfairly or not) one's public personality or one's status in a professional network. (But as somebody who has generated modest name-recognition in the profession, I also note that some people explicitly judge my work, even in the context of anonymous review, critically in light of my blog persona.) While I don't want to disagree with the general impression, it is worth noting that the kinds of qualities that often seem to give folk an unfair advantage (e.g., quickness of mind, cruel wit, fitting the part/looks, appearance of depth, factor X in boy wonder, etc.) are not all of them associated with extroversion which, in my experience, is at least sometimes also interpreted as a species of 'superficiality' (generally not a quality that is meant as praise among professional philosophers) or lack of 'depth' (the Wittgensteinian condemnation).   

On the second point: I have the sense that professional philosophy has become more careerist and less welcoming for reclusive and idiosyncratic scholars. (One can note this while also recognizing that the high tolerance for non-careerism allowed a lot of mediocrity and sexism (etc.) to flourish.) This has been facilitated by an academic culture in which 'winners take all' (grants, low teaching load tenure, etc.)--the stories are subtly different  in different academic environments (see for my indictment of the grant culture that rewards me and punishes fantastic scholars). What's key here is that intellectual communities should try hard to make sure that scholarly values (in the broad sense--this may well include political and moral values) determine our judgments of quality and interest/significance. This is not so easy in the best of times.

But...it does not follow (as some of Marcus's commentators suggest) that the shy person is better at listening than the outgoing person. (I would say that, wouldn't I?) And if it is true (the empirical world can disprove me after all), it is a contingent matter. After all, philosophical listening -- not unlike networking -- is also a skill not a feature of shyness.

 

don't feel obliged to socialize at absolutely every opportunity. - See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2016/01/grappling-with-shyness-and-introversion-in-academia.html#sthash.2xpxI1Ww.dp

When Journal Editors Reject; or further reflections prompted by the latest Synthese debacle

It is so incredibly hard to do a good job, and when things go well, no one says: well done, editor! (Well, on occasion I’ve had authors thanking me for the swiftness of the process.) When things go bad, however… (For example, as an editor I’ve rejected a paper which then went on to be published elsewhere and win a prestigious prize. My decision was based on careful referee reports, but it still seems to have been some sort of ‘mistake’ on my part.)--Catarina Dutilh Novaes Newapps.

A few years ago, an invited paper got rejected at the Monist. Even though I am very, very used to rejection [recall and here], this one stung (not so much because the paper was invited, but especially) because I thought the special issue editor (whom I respect immensely) should have recognized the incompetence of the referee and not farm out his judgment to somebody obviously less qualified than him. To be clear: ordinarily I tend not to think that the 'reject'-my-paper-referees are incompetent; most hostile referees simply disagree with my  interpretations/claims -- that's not surprising because I have a firm preference for exciting over obvious -- or find my writing style very annoying. (Since I blog, I do also get referees that let me know that they find me annoying--so much for masked review.) I have deplored the farming out of judgment to referees before (recall), so I won't harp on it here.

As it happens, that rejected paper found a home in another journal. I have had a quiet (and totally infantile) satisfaction of, while procrastinating on scholar.google, seeing that paper generating more citations than the papers published in the issue of the Monist from which my paper was rejected, bar one (by a very famous philosopher). Vanity is an ugly sentiment, and citations are a terrible guide toward quality; prizes may also be a bad guide--for all I know Catarina was right to reject that paper. The point, which stands without my autobiographical reflections, is that nearly all editorial mistakes generally carry no cost to the editor, while the harms incurred by the profession or particular individuals may be great.

The new Synthese affair is renewing attention to journal practices. Catarina's piece (partially quoted above) correctly reminds us that editing is a thankless job; her piece also resonates with what I noted earlier in the week, that is, the lack of genuine accountability and responsiveness of journal editors (key gatekeepers of the profession). This works, as Catarina notes, in two directions: when things go well journal editors are not really rewarded (I return to this below), and when they screw up it generally flies below the radar of the profession; individuals may notice, but most of us have to accept grudgingly that life is unfair.

Except, of course, that egregious screw-ups (like the current Synthese debacle and also here) remind us of the ugly truths about the system. Editing and refereeing is a human activity and it is, thus, subject to the biases and judgments of fallible agents. Even journals that rely on the very best practices (like Ergo, which I love to praise) still rely on judgments that can be corrupted or mistaken. Even without biases, the existing journal system works decent enough, albeit imperfectly, for some of its purported purposes -- e.g., dissemination knowledge, facilitating decisions for hiring and promotion as well as grant-awarding, generating discussion on valuable topics, etc. --, but its aggregate imperfections are not so hard to discern: it has a status quo bias built into it, generates extremely gender/race (etc.) biased patterns of outcome, and can obviously harm, deserving philosophical careers that do not 'fit' the dominant mold of journal article publication (with an increasing bias toward shorter articles).

As Catarina notes the system is very 'fragile.' Often the really right referees decline to review; other referees are inundated with requests. (I referee so much I now routinely forget to list all my refereeing, tenure reviews, etc. on my CV or my annual performance report--service to the profession is not valued much by free-riding universities that value grants and publications.) Journals respond by desk-rejecting without comment---to rule without giving a public reason is ordinarily taken as a sign of arbitrary, even illegitimate authority. Experiencing such desk rejections is now thought routine in the profession.

Are there no rewards to journal editing? Leaving aside to what degree some editing allows one to obtain either course release or, more rarely, (and often modest) income, editors can shape a field (niche, etc.). Given the significance of publishing to so many people's academic careers, and given the competing research traditions/schools in a zero-sum environment [imagine if Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Review had been controlled by Continental philosophers mid-twentieth-centuy--it's doubtful that American analytical philosophy would have 'won' in the way it did Stateside], editors decide the ways in which journals are more hospitable to some kind of work, rather than another kind--this shows up in publication patterns (and sometimes in public discussion [recall]). Such power can be rewarding; some people find such shaping rewarding or like it that their vision of philosophy is shared more widely. (Special issues of journals, especially, serve such purposes.] I mention this because I distrust the 'no rewards to editing' line. Obviously, that's compatible with those very same editors, or other editors, -- perhaps the majority [I really have no idea] -- acting from duty as they perceive it and commitment to the profession.

Ideally, the current Synthese debacle will lead to improved practices of review and publication. But the existence of very important structural pressures, to quote Catarina, "the importance we give to publications in philosophy, when it comes to hiring and promotion decisions," in a zero-sum environment with a scarcity of jobs and lots of folk desperate for quality publications, suggests that much optimism is not warranted. I have no solution. (Obviously, blog readership is no better guide to philosophical quality.)

Yet, I close with an observation. After the Monist rejected my paper, it went to a new journal, where two excellent, critical referees gave me stellar comments. The editor could have rejected the paper in light of these; instead she provided me with helpful guidance. I rewrote my paper in light of them, and ended up with a publication that I am very proud of. There are three morals here: we need luck; papers that get multiple refereeing are often improved (this is familiar from science studies literature); comparing citation rates of my paper with the papers in that particular Monist issue it never got into is bad methodology because the rejected paper was clearly inferior to the paper that was ultimately published.

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.]