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Richard Pettigrew's avatar

Very interesting, Alex! As always! You might think that, if it’s peer review that’s responsible, we’d expect to see a switch to writing much less bland stuff after tenure in big US institutions. But I haven’t really seen that? I feel like most people tend to keep publishing as they did pre tenure or they shift a bit but the quality goes down. Of course, you might think peer review confers prestige and people want that prestige before and after tenure, but I feel like monographs really confer prestige for post-tenure people, and they’re much more amenable to doing interesting things. Yet people don’t, on the whole. I suppose another explanation is that we’re selecting out the more interesting people by demanding success at peer review in order to get a job. But again I haven’t really seen that in my interactions with grad communities. Of course many wonderful people don’t get permanent jobs, but I don’t think the job market is biased against innovation? Perhaps the selection is happening earlier than that—hard to tell. My own view is that there’s obviously terrible bland stuff in the journals, but there’s also terrific stuff there, and it doesn’t look very stylistically exciting, but the ideas are just as exciting as anything I’ve seen in attempts to de-blandify analytic philosophy. My own view is that some of the big questions we try to answer require lots and lots of detailed work to build the big picture. And that detailed work doesn’t look very exciting in its individual parts. But it is building towards a large scale view on an important question.

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Eugene Earnshaw's avatar

Interesting piece. I think the institution of peer review has interacted with the pressure to publish to create a culture of safe and boring scholastic disputation. The incentives in philosophy turn writing into an endless game of pleasing journal editors. There is very little connection to anything outside of that — no engagement with anything but words. I think this kind of a system predictably becomes insular, inbred, detached from consequences, and, yes, deeply boring.

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