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.
Thanks! And you’re right. I didn’t mean to ascribe sole responsibility to peer review (nor does Heatherwick exclusively blame the “crit” for what happened to architecture). As I suggested in my reply to one of the other comments here, I now see that the way peer review works in philosophy might be a mere symptom of some deeper cultural issue.
I’m not sure if you meant to suggest that, by publishing monographs, tenured academics are avoiding peer review. In my experience of academic presses, that’s not the case. First you need reviewers to sign off on your book proposal in order to get a contract, then you have reviewers looking at the draft manuscript and requiring changes. You face the same pressures as with journal articles and likewise end up with something that reads like a legal contract. Trade presses are a very different story. I can’t express how much I’ve loved having an editor, and how much the editorial process seems to push in exactly the opposite direction to academic peer review: towards bolder, more engaging, less defensive, more personal, more beautiful writing.
I am, however, going to try hard to see the apparent blandness of journal articles in a different light, following your suggestion. So far, however, I struggle to see how a lot of unexciting works could be adding up to an exciting picture. I think this comes down to meta-philosophy. Your vision makes sense in the sciences: a lot of boring little results in chemistry might together constitute an exciting paradigm shift. But I regard philosophy as a branch of literature, as I explained in my earlier post. I can’t imagine a lot of boring poems adding up to an interesting metapoem. But maybe the obstacle is my failure of imagination.
Yes, I suspect the meta-philosophy point is the crux of this. And I think it's also quite possible that the correct meta-philosophy is different for different areas. After all, philosophy doesn't seem a very unified enterprise to me, and I suspect we go wrong if we try to think about all parts of it similarly--people often point out that the modern university has created barriers between disciplines where there should be no barriers, but it's less often noted that it's given the misleading impression of unity in disciplines where there is little. So perhaps the areas that interest you more are more like literature and the areas that interest me more are more like the sciences.
I also wonder whether enthusiasm for paradigm-shifts divides us as well. For lots of the questions that I'm interested in, there isn't much evidence at the moment that any sort of paradigm-shift is necessary. So I wouldn't really want all the papers in a journal to add up to one. I just want them to add up to a true picture of the target of study.
On the monographs vs articles point: I just meant that it's a lot easier to get stuff past book referees than journal referees. And even academic press books really do seem to permit a lot of leeway that journals don't. But even if we wouldn't see the better stuff in books, we'd likely see it in blogs or other sorts of unreviewed writings, or perhaps in trade books. Perhaps in edited collections, where the editorial standards are much laxer. And I haven't really seen that. I've seen very good stuff in all these, of course, just not better than in journals (possibly easier and more pleasing to read, I'll grant you, but I haven't seen better or bigger ideas--but again, this might be a function of the areas that interest us; I can only speak to a smallish part of philosophy).
Thank you for engaging on this. Conversations like this are exactly what I hoped for when I started this substack!
I suspect you’re right about our differences. I do perceive bigger and more exciting ideas in blogs and books than in journals, but that’s in my areas of interest. I’m reading Brook Ziporyn’s new book at the moment, which goes so much deeper than most of the philosophy I read. I can’t imagine it getting through what William Petty called the “gauntloop of all petulant wits” and into the journals. Of course, published with an academic press, it had to get through some. Elsewhere I’ve mentioned Ellen Marie Chen’s extraordinary self-published book, In Praise of Nothing, which is so good it would never have got past even the review process of an academic book. And then there is some wonderful stuff here on substack.
I don’t have a great love of paradigm shifts, I should say. I was just trying to think of how, in the sciences, a lot of boring small things could add up to a big exciting thing. Maybe my example of a big exciting thing should have been a major discovery arrived at by incremental steps. As far as paradigm shifts go, I’d prefer it in philosophy if there were no paradigm in need of shifting in the first place.
Fundamentally, I think we differ on this: I agree that we should work towards a true picture of the target of study in philosophy, but I think there is no end of true pictures to be taken, and if we get stuck on one we are neglecting infinite others. I just think it’s in the fundamental nature of reality, at its deepest level, that we can frame things in endless ways and capture them from endless perspectives, but none is ever exhaustive or decisive. To me the magic lies in finding new framings. Otherwise not only do things get boring, we create the hubristic illusion that we’ve found the ultimate truth, and then nemesis follows.
Oh, I'm glad the engagement is OK! What you say at the end here really helps. I'll have to think more about that. And I'll have a look at those books as well. I do like the idea of multiple perspectives on the truth! That sounds like the sort of thing that fits with my general philosophical views as well -- and who doesn't love a meta philosophy that matches their first-order philosophy?!
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.
Yes, it's false--not least because philosophy and architecture are the same thing.
But it turns out you can know false things. This surprising result was discovered in a nearby epistemology lab. They're still running some further tests, but I expect to see the results hit the newspapers very soon.
In a sequence of comments on Daily Nous I began by contending that ‘the idea that either the ethos of analytic philosophy itself or the incentive structures governing philosophy as a profession somehow restrict the range of topics that you can write about [is] absurd. Hence ‘people who complain that they are constrained to discuss only a narrow range of topics for fear of professional failure are like people who forge themselves a set of manacles and then complain that they are in chains.’ My basic argument was that I have had a successful career with plenty of citations despite the fact that I have published on a wide variety of topics well outside my original AOS, often with exotic illustrations, whilst pushing contentious opinions. Indeed, I have got a well-cited paper, half of which consists in a dialogue on conspiracy theories in blank verse with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as my mouthpiece. Similar things are true of several colleagues.
But I got pushback . Basic argument: That was then this is now. Maybe overprivileged oldsters such as myself could get away with this sort of thing but not young philosophers nowadays. The incentive structures in Philosophy encourage well-argued modest and stylistically staid contributions to existing debates that do not rock the boat.
At first I was inclined to resist. However, a conversation with a friend (about five years younger than myself) persuaded me that I might be wrong:
‘Well it seems that I owe you guys an apology and a retraction. All my professional life (including my period as a member the precariat) , I have been writing about topics that weren’t part of my original AOS and only became ‘areas of competence’ in the process of writing about them. Furthermore, even within my AOS,I have been writing papers that challenged the reigning orthodoxies or were offbeat in various ways. ..... And I have gotten away with it too, since I am reasonably well-cited and most of my articles having been published in the first or second journals that I sent them to.
But I have been talking to a friend from another university who has convinced me that my interlocutors may be correct and that, at least for JUNIOR philosophers, the free-wheeling days when one could get away with this sort of thing may be going or gone. . My friend is about five years younger than I but he is both better-published and better-cited. Furthermore, he too has published on a wide variety of topics and has not been afraid to challenge the reigning orthodoxies. But he tells me that his junior colleagues envy the breadth of his interests and publications but do not dare to emulate him. The difference between now and then (that is between the relatively recent past and the present) is not the pressure to publish which has remained a constant for fifty years or more, nor the precarious nature academic employment for junior staff, which may have increased but has been a Thing throughout my academic lifetime. The difference lies in the growth of an increasingly conservative editorial culture in the leading academic venues. Papers go to referees who won’t accept challenges to their paradigms and demand copious citations to the paradigmatic literature which are likely to be lacking in more heretical pieces. So what you get is Kuhnian ‘Normal science’ but without the science, puzzle solving within a paradigm. Furthermore the referees are often rather narrow so they simply cannot cope with cross-over papers which use (real or supposed) insights from one area of Philosophy to illuminate another. Thus papers of the kind that I and my friend have been accustomed write are less likely to be accepted. (This phenomena is likely to be masked for late-career academics, especially reasonably successful ones, since a lot of our publications are invited.) A straw in the wind: My friend cowrote a paper with an even more distinguished colleague, challenging the orthodoxy wrt a particular problem. In their opinion it was well up to their usual standard. It was rejected seven times.
Young philosophers, being aware of this, write the kind of thing that XXX and YYY complain that they are incentivised to ‘churn out’–solid, respectable, but slightly boring (just ‘slightly’ boring?) publications or ‘hyper-specific work’ in their AOS. This is not a happy situation and I am glad that it has not been mine. Moreover the incentives are, from a teaching point of view, perverse. In small-to-medium departments breadth and versatility are at a premium. You simply cannot provide adequate coverage if everyone sticks to their offical areas of specialisation or competence. In my department for instance, the paraconsistent logician teaches existentialism, the Philosopher of Time teaches ethics, the Spinoza specialist teaches Lakatos and one of the meta-ethicists teaches, Marx, Mandeville and little bit of the economics of Adam Smith.. From what XXX andYY are saying it seems that in order to get a job teaching philosophy, you have to become less capable of teaching philosophy. Something needs be done, though I don’t know what or by whom.
You make a good point, which had led me to reflect on my own experience. I also think that I didn't feel very constrained, having finished my PhD in 2011. E.g., I published a book that went into philosophy of finance and economics when I had no academic credentials beyond those of an early modern scholar.
All of the feelings I express in these posts about peer review come from observing the situation of my junior colleagues and supervisees. I think I perceive the same cultural shift that you do, towards increasing conservatism. I love your phrase "normal science without the science". I wonder what his driven this cultural shift.
I think there might be some institutional factors, but I'm only familiar with the UK situation. Here the big story has been a series of changes to the research funding model since 2010, which have all gone in the same direction: towards *targeted* funding. Research funding increasingly depends on external grants, and even the internal funding handed out directly to universities is awarded on a "quality-related" basis. To get an external grant or to score well on "quality-assessment" exercises, you have to show that your research advances a programme whose value the relevant judging panel will recognise. The stakes are high, and the only safe strategy is to be solidly in-paradigm. You also generally have to prove that your work will contribute to a whole "research environment". That also means being in-paradigm: "research environment" is just a euphemism for normal science.
The number of topics a handful of bureaucratic panelists recognise as important is incredibly narrow. And they too are under conventionalist pressures. If you fund something unconventional and it fails, you can be in trouble for taking too big a risk; if you fund something conventional and it fails, it must have been the researcher's fault. And so you end up with the situation today, where every funding competition is won by another redundant AI researcher (except during COVID, when every competition was won by research on pandemics--just in time to deliver results 15 years after the end of the pandemic).
Control the money for long enough, and you inevitably control the culture. The UK funding model has been inherently conservative and paradigm-preserving for over a decade now, which is long enough for researchers to have thoroughly internalised the decision patterns. Thus, perhaps, the conservative culture that now dominates peer review. Just a guess.
Perhaps it's just a different manifestation of a similar impulse but in academic literary studies journals we find no repression of the linguistic ornate or grotesque but suffer the same central issue, which is a tendency toward sameness and a lack of originality. The words are there (sometimes way too many) but the ideas aren't.
Like you, I do think peer review and its cognate in graduate school "training" are a part of this but I'd lay the problem at the feet of disciplinarity as such. The very idea of "the discipline" is undergirded by gatekeeping and policing. Scientism can't be the main cause of the blanding across humanistic disciplines as e.g. peer review in literary studies does exist but is far indeed from scientific. Rather it is those who embrace humanistic work as discipline model the most feverently who believe and practice the idea that there is a wrong way and right way to do such work, and the wrong way must be repressed in favor of the right way. Of course the right way is never to struggle with big questions, or to call the very idea of the right way to account.
I don't know if it's necessarily that maintaining scholarly standards will always lead to the Harrison Bergeron effect, although I wouldn't be surprised if so. I do think that the more invested powerful people are in the "the discipline" model of scholarly work, the less interesting it gets.
Thank you—this is highly plausible. It’s a very good point that disciplinarity plays a homogenising and therefore blanding role. In philosophy there’s a useful paper on this: Kirstie Dotson’s “How Is This Paper Philosophy?”
A first-time reader, here. You are a wonderful writer. As someone who complains (but, for I am a good and patriotic citizen, that is all I do: complain) about contemporary architecture all the time, and who loathes the rigidity and cookie-cutter articles of much of contemporary philosophical articles, I found myself agreeing with you for most of this. I have been a research assistant in philosophy, a president of my college's philosophy club, and write my blog here and do my own research. I say this to say, I have come across immense barrages of dogshit philosophy articles--which, by the way, is a phenomenon that begins to take on the facade of an antinomy, given how hard it is to get published: that difficult to cut through the process, but that is the result?
I will say, the analogy section of the post to philosophy is intuitive and agreeable, but not quite persuasive in itself, as you do not give many examples. Neither do you mention that there are philosophical equivalents to The Marine Building in article-form: philosophy that somehow rises above to a beautiful and elegant form, without sacrificing any argumentative rigor. I think about articles like Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat," or I would also suggest anything by Janet McCracken, "Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly," for example, or her recent article on the aesthetics of gadgets and phones, or honestly a lot of stuff in the field of everyday aesthetics. I'm just skimming off of the top of my mind here for the examples, so it's not exhaustive or representative, but there are philosophers who fight back successfully. But, why I remain in agreement with you is that it is a "fighting back," that the norm and usual-case is ugly. And I've read essays that come out in places as esteemed as The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, where I'm like...Huh? How?
You’re right that I didn’t give examples of boring articles—I didn’t have any specifically in mind. Browsing through a recent issue of a Leiter-ranked journal just feels to me how looking at Vancouver harbour must feel to Heatherwick.
You’re also right that I could have mentioned exceptions. Do you think Nagel’s article was peer reviewed? I don’t know if Phil Review was doing proper peer review in 1974.
I’m intrigued to check out Janet McCracken’s writing.
you don't mind me asking, what has your experience with academic peer-review been like? I for the most part agree with the points you raise in this post (both architecture and philosophy _do_ need a more varied landscape than the trends, bandwagons and bureaucratic hellholes of the contemporary offer), but I would be hesitant to place the blame on peer-review processes (especially when in my experience they have actively operated in favour of diverging from already existing thought) when far more likely and egregious culprits exist in, say, the copy-paste syllabi of philosophy and philosophy adjacent courses. There's nothing wrong with rereading, of course, (nor is it a crime for two different departments to employ the same theoretical traditions and authors) but it comes at the cost of being exposed to alternative theories and models of thinking. The canonisation of and repeated exposure to specific scholars seems to me more responsible for the blandemic.
Then again, for transparency's sake, I am not a philosopher by training; I study Cultural Analysis in the Dutch tradition, which is a considerably younger field and which may not yet have fallen as deeply into the particular traps you have detailed here. Anyways, short rant of insights over, I enjoyed the article and am curious to hear what you have to say!
Thank you—this is a very useful comment! I’ve been arguing that peer review in philosophy functions to enforce conformity and entrench bias. But your comment makes me see that I might have confused cause and effect. You’re right that peer review can function to diversify thinking, by forcing authors to engage a wider range of ideas and see things from more perspectives. In philosophy (in my experience as an author, reviewer, and editor), peer review seems to work in the opposite way. It narrows thinking, because it gets interpreted as a sort of industry certificate. For the average reviewer, accepting an article is saying: this qualifies as the sort of thing that gets published in the Big Journals. But I’m now starting to think that this isn’t because of peer review itself; rather, it’s a deeper cultural norm within philosophy that makes peer review work in that way.
And as for canonisation, I couldn't agree more. We teach a required module at St Andrews called "Reading Philosophy", in which advanced undergraduates have to read set series of articles--all Western, almost all from the analytic tradition. It's totally Confucian and might as well be called "official exemplars".
Thanks for clarifying! I think there is certainly something to be critiqued about the entanglements present between philosophical (and more broadly intellectual/academic) research and the bureaucratic/profit-oriented institutions that prop up Big Journals and allow them to operate, and the ways these inherently ideological entanglements encourage demand for (here I am loosely gesturing towards because I haven't yet thought of a name for these categories, if they exist as I imagine them) theory-as-archetype ("this is a critique of postmodernism!") and theory-as-identitarian ("I hope they can tell I'm not a classist pig!"), rather than theory-as-insight. 100% with you that the attention and status which the "industry certificate" affords is a threat to the potentials (and real-world applications) of research.
If peer review is (part of) the problem it has only become so fairly recently. See my post above. In a forty-year career (my first publication, a review, came out in 1984) I have had almost all my papers accepted by the first or the second journals that I have sent them to despite the fact that I was often arguing against orthodoxies with an off-beat choice of illustrations and sources. Here are just four examples, three from long ago and one relatively recent:
1) a critique of Anscombe's famous paper 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. arguing that it was founded on historical errors, with extensive citations from Cicero's 'on Duties' [Philosophical Quarterly, a top -ten general journal] ;
2) a critique of the then-very-famous R.M Hare's arguments for Ought-Implies-Can citing Luther and Erasmus (with defence of semi-Pelagian free will thrown in) [Sophia, a lower top-thirty journal, but still respectable/]
3) a critique of Popper on conspiracy theories (my most cited paper) citing Lord Hervey's memoirs, Procopius's 'Secret History' and Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' [Philosophy of the Social Sciences, then the number one specialist journal in its field];
4) A qualified defence of Thrasymachus in the Republic with extensive citations to Marx, Engels, Bertrand Russell and Adam Smith.
So it was possible to get away with this sort of thing the past , but less so, apparently, nowadays. Hence if peer review is part of the problem, this is because standards have *changed* and ossified, not because peer-review *as such* is inimical to either heresy or intellectual adventure.
This is a nice post Alex, the book sounds interesting. Another thing I notice with peer review in philosophy, which you may have already thought about, is a sort of weird pretence about making very small differences appear like huge consequential differences. It seems like a counter reaction of the conformity. I find this a lot in papers in moral philosophy and meta-ethics. I sometimes feel the same happening with architecture, when an architect friend of mine might ask what I think of a new building, and I find it hard to see what makes it different from all the other angular glass covered buildings.
Thanks Saranga! That’s a really good point. Two stories on this.
1. The journalist Will Storr was walking with Heatherwick somewhere in London. Heatherwick pointed at a building—a glass and concrete rectangle surrounded by other glass and concrete rectangles—and said: “That building won a very prestigious award”. Storr, baffled, asked why. “Look closely at the windows”, Heatherwick replied. “They’re tinted slightly white”.
2. This one is from Heatherwick’s book. He was at a launch for a design of a new hospital. The architect said he’d designed it to resemble a “Tuscan hill town”. When he revealed the design, all Heatherwick could see was a ten storey concrete box, with a few smaller boxes around it. Yet the expert audience was charmed by the “Tuscan hill town”.
Storr told his story to make precisely your point: a culture of conformity exaggerates tiny differences to hide its own conformism. And yes, I see this in philosophy journals too.
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.
Thanks! And you’re right. I didn’t mean to ascribe sole responsibility to peer review (nor does Heatherwick exclusively blame the “crit” for what happened to architecture). As I suggested in my reply to one of the other comments here, I now see that the way peer review works in philosophy might be a mere symptom of some deeper cultural issue.
I’m not sure if you meant to suggest that, by publishing monographs, tenured academics are avoiding peer review. In my experience of academic presses, that’s not the case. First you need reviewers to sign off on your book proposal in order to get a contract, then you have reviewers looking at the draft manuscript and requiring changes. You face the same pressures as with journal articles and likewise end up with something that reads like a legal contract. Trade presses are a very different story. I can’t express how much I’ve loved having an editor, and how much the editorial process seems to push in exactly the opposite direction to academic peer review: towards bolder, more engaging, less defensive, more personal, more beautiful writing.
I am, however, going to try hard to see the apparent blandness of journal articles in a different light, following your suggestion. So far, however, I struggle to see how a lot of unexciting works could be adding up to an exciting picture. I think this comes down to meta-philosophy. Your vision makes sense in the sciences: a lot of boring little results in chemistry might together constitute an exciting paradigm shift. But I regard philosophy as a branch of literature, as I explained in my earlier post. I can’t imagine a lot of boring poems adding up to an interesting metapoem. But maybe the obstacle is my failure of imagination.
Yes, I suspect the meta-philosophy point is the crux of this. And I think it's also quite possible that the correct meta-philosophy is different for different areas. After all, philosophy doesn't seem a very unified enterprise to me, and I suspect we go wrong if we try to think about all parts of it similarly--people often point out that the modern university has created barriers between disciplines where there should be no barriers, but it's less often noted that it's given the misleading impression of unity in disciplines where there is little. So perhaps the areas that interest you more are more like literature and the areas that interest me more are more like the sciences.
I also wonder whether enthusiasm for paradigm-shifts divides us as well. For lots of the questions that I'm interested in, there isn't much evidence at the moment that any sort of paradigm-shift is necessary. So I wouldn't really want all the papers in a journal to add up to one. I just want them to add up to a true picture of the target of study.
On the monographs vs articles point: I just meant that it's a lot easier to get stuff past book referees than journal referees. And even academic press books really do seem to permit a lot of leeway that journals don't. But even if we wouldn't see the better stuff in books, we'd likely see it in blogs or other sorts of unreviewed writings, or perhaps in trade books. Perhaps in edited collections, where the editorial standards are much laxer. And I haven't really seen that. I've seen very good stuff in all these, of course, just not better than in journals (possibly easier and more pleasing to read, I'll grant you, but I haven't seen better or bigger ideas--but again, this might be a function of the areas that interest us; I can only speak to a smallish part of philosophy).
Thank you for engaging on this. Conversations like this are exactly what I hoped for when I started this substack!
I suspect you’re right about our differences. I do perceive bigger and more exciting ideas in blogs and books than in journals, but that’s in my areas of interest. I’m reading Brook Ziporyn’s new book at the moment, which goes so much deeper than most of the philosophy I read. I can’t imagine it getting through what William Petty called the “gauntloop of all petulant wits” and into the journals. Of course, published with an academic press, it had to get through some. Elsewhere I’ve mentioned Ellen Marie Chen’s extraordinary self-published book, In Praise of Nothing, which is so good it would never have got past even the review process of an academic book. And then there is some wonderful stuff here on substack.
I don’t have a great love of paradigm shifts, I should say. I was just trying to think of how, in the sciences, a lot of boring small things could add up to a big exciting thing. Maybe my example of a big exciting thing should have been a major discovery arrived at by incremental steps. As far as paradigm shifts go, I’d prefer it in philosophy if there were no paradigm in need of shifting in the first place.
Fundamentally, I think we differ on this: I agree that we should work towards a true picture of the target of study in philosophy, but I think there is no end of true pictures to be taken, and if we get stuck on one we are neglecting infinite others. I just think it’s in the fundamental nature of reality, at its deepest level, that we can frame things in endless ways and capture them from endless perspectives, but none is ever exhaustive or decisive. To me the magic lies in finding new framings. Otherwise not only do things get boring, we create the hubristic illusion that we’ve found the ultimate truth, and then nemesis follows.
Oh, I'm glad the engagement is OK! What you say at the end here really helps. I'll have to think more about that. And I'll have a look at those books as well. I do like the idea of multiple perspectives on the truth! That sounds like the sort of thing that fits with my general philosophical views as well -- and who doesn't love a meta philosophy that matches their first-order philosophy?!
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.
"I know that philosophy is much less important than architecture." But you can't know this, it's false, isn't it?
Yes, it's false--not least because philosophy and architecture are the same thing.
But it turns out you can know false things. This surprising result was discovered in a nearby epistemology lab. They're still running some further tests, but I expect to see the results hit the newspapers very soon.
In a sequence of comments on Daily Nous I began by contending that ‘the idea that either the ethos of analytic philosophy itself or the incentive structures governing philosophy as a profession somehow restrict the range of topics that you can write about [is] absurd. Hence ‘people who complain that they are constrained to discuss only a narrow range of topics for fear of professional failure are like people who forge themselves a set of manacles and then complain that they are in chains.’ My basic argument was that I have had a successful career with plenty of citations despite the fact that I have published on a wide variety of topics well outside my original AOS, often with exotic illustrations, whilst pushing contentious opinions. Indeed, I have got a well-cited paper, half of which consists in a dialogue on conspiracy theories in blank verse with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as my mouthpiece. Similar things are true of several colleagues.
But I got pushback . Basic argument: That was then this is now. Maybe overprivileged oldsters such as myself could get away with this sort of thing but not young philosophers nowadays. The incentive structures in Philosophy encourage well-argued modest and stylistically staid contributions to existing debates that do not rock the boat.
At first I was inclined to resist. However, a conversation with a friend (about five years younger than myself) persuaded me that I might be wrong:
‘Well it seems that I owe you guys an apology and a retraction. All my professional life (including my period as a member the precariat) , I have been writing about topics that weren’t part of my original AOS and only became ‘areas of competence’ in the process of writing about them. Furthermore, even within my AOS,I have been writing papers that challenged the reigning orthodoxies or were offbeat in various ways. ..... And I have gotten away with it too, since I am reasonably well-cited and most of my articles having been published in the first or second journals that I sent them to.
But I have been talking to a friend from another university who has convinced me that my interlocutors may be correct and that, at least for JUNIOR philosophers, the free-wheeling days when one could get away with this sort of thing may be going or gone. . My friend is about five years younger than I but he is both better-published and better-cited. Furthermore, he too has published on a wide variety of topics and has not been afraid to challenge the reigning orthodoxies. But he tells me that his junior colleagues envy the breadth of his interests and publications but do not dare to emulate him. The difference between now and then (that is between the relatively recent past and the present) is not the pressure to publish which has remained a constant for fifty years or more, nor the precarious nature academic employment for junior staff, which may have increased but has been a Thing throughout my academic lifetime. The difference lies in the growth of an increasingly conservative editorial culture in the leading academic venues. Papers go to referees who won’t accept challenges to their paradigms and demand copious citations to the paradigmatic literature which are likely to be lacking in more heretical pieces. So what you get is Kuhnian ‘Normal science’ but without the science, puzzle solving within a paradigm. Furthermore the referees are often rather narrow so they simply cannot cope with cross-over papers which use (real or supposed) insights from one area of Philosophy to illuminate another. Thus papers of the kind that I and my friend have been accustomed write are less likely to be accepted. (This phenomena is likely to be masked for late-career academics, especially reasonably successful ones, since a lot of our publications are invited.) A straw in the wind: My friend cowrote a paper with an even more distinguished colleague, challenging the orthodoxy wrt a particular problem. In their opinion it was well up to their usual standard. It was rejected seven times.
Young philosophers, being aware of this, write the kind of thing that XXX and YYY complain that they are incentivised to ‘churn out’–solid, respectable, but slightly boring (just ‘slightly’ boring?) publications or ‘hyper-specific work’ in their AOS. This is not a happy situation and I am glad that it has not been mine. Moreover the incentives are, from a teaching point of view, perverse. In small-to-medium departments breadth and versatility are at a premium. You simply cannot provide adequate coverage if everyone sticks to their offical areas of specialisation or competence. In my department for instance, the paraconsistent logician teaches existentialism, the Philosopher of Time teaches ethics, the Spinoza specialist teaches Lakatos and one of the meta-ethicists teaches, Marx, Mandeville and little bit of the economics of Adam Smith.. From what XXX andYY are saying it seems that in order to get a job teaching philosophy, you have to become less capable of teaching philosophy. Something needs be done, though I don’t know what or by whom.
Thank you very much for engaging!
You make a good point, which had led me to reflect on my own experience. I also think that I didn't feel very constrained, having finished my PhD in 2011. E.g., I published a book that went into philosophy of finance and economics when I had no academic credentials beyond those of an early modern scholar.
All of the feelings I express in these posts about peer review come from observing the situation of my junior colleagues and supervisees. I think I perceive the same cultural shift that you do, towards increasing conservatism. I love your phrase "normal science without the science". I wonder what his driven this cultural shift.
I think there might be some institutional factors, but I'm only familiar with the UK situation. Here the big story has been a series of changes to the research funding model since 2010, which have all gone in the same direction: towards *targeted* funding. Research funding increasingly depends on external grants, and even the internal funding handed out directly to universities is awarded on a "quality-related" basis. To get an external grant or to score well on "quality-assessment" exercises, you have to show that your research advances a programme whose value the relevant judging panel will recognise. The stakes are high, and the only safe strategy is to be solidly in-paradigm. You also generally have to prove that your work will contribute to a whole "research environment". That also means being in-paradigm: "research environment" is just a euphemism for normal science.
The number of topics a handful of bureaucratic panelists recognise as important is incredibly narrow. And they too are under conventionalist pressures. If you fund something unconventional and it fails, you can be in trouble for taking too big a risk; if you fund something conventional and it fails, it must have been the researcher's fault. And so you end up with the situation today, where every funding competition is won by another redundant AI researcher (except during COVID, when every competition was won by research on pandemics--just in time to deliver results 15 years after the end of the pandemic).
Control the money for long enough, and you inevitably control the culture. The UK funding model has been inherently conservative and paradigm-preserving for over a decade now, which is long enough for researchers to have thoroughly internalised the decision patterns. Thus, perhaps, the conservative culture that now dominates peer review. Just a guess.
Perhaps it's just a different manifestation of a similar impulse but in academic literary studies journals we find no repression of the linguistic ornate or grotesque but suffer the same central issue, which is a tendency toward sameness and a lack of originality. The words are there (sometimes way too many) but the ideas aren't.
Like you, I do think peer review and its cognate in graduate school "training" are a part of this but I'd lay the problem at the feet of disciplinarity as such. The very idea of "the discipline" is undergirded by gatekeeping and policing. Scientism can't be the main cause of the blanding across humanistic disciplines as e.g. peer review in literary studies does exist but is far indeed from scientific. Rather it is those who embrace humanistic work as discipline model the most feverently who believe and practice the idea that there is a wrong way and right way to do such work, and the wrong way must be repressed in favor of the right way. Of course the right way is never to struggle with big questions, or to call the very idea of the right way to account.
I don't know if it's necessarily that maintaining scholarly standards will always lead to the Harrison Bergeron effect, although I wouldn't be surprised if so. I do think that the more invested powerful people are in the "the discipline" model of scholarly work, the less interesting it gets.
Thank you—this is highly plausible. It’s a very good point that disciplinarity plays a homogenising and therefore blanding role. In philosophy there’s a useful paper on this: Kirstie Dotson’s “How Is This Paper Philosophy?”
A first-time reader, here. You are a wonderful writer. As someone who complains (but, for I am a good and patriotic citizen, that is all I do: complain) about contemporary architecture all the time, and who loathes the rigidity and cookie-cutter articles of much of contemporary philosophical articles, I found myself agreeing with you for most of this. I have been a research assistant in philosophy, a president of my college's philosophy club, and write my blog here and do my own research. I say this to say, I have come across immense barrages of dogshit philosophy articles--which, by the way, is a phenomenon that begins to take on the facade of an antinomy, given how hard it is to get published: that difficult to cut through the process, but that is the result?
I will say, the analogy section of the post to philosophy is intuitive and agreeable, but not quite persuasive in itself, as you do not give many examples. Neither do you mention that there are philosophical equivalents to The Marine Building in article-form: philosophy that somehow rises above to a beautiful and elegant form, without sacrificing any argumentative rigor. I think about articles like Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat," or I would also suggest anything by Janet McCracken, "Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly," for example, or her recent article on the aesthetics of gadgets and phones, or honestly a lot of stuff in the field of everyday aesthetics. I'm just skimming off of the top of my mind here for the examples, so it's not exhaustive or representative, but there are philosophers who fight back successfully. But, why I remain in agreement with you is that it is a "fighting back," that the norm and usual-case is ugly. And I've read essays that come out in places as esteemed as The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, where I'm like...Huh? How?
Cheers, and thanks for the post.
--Nicholas
Thanks!
You’re right that I didn’t give examples of boring articles—I didn’t have any specifically in mind. Browsing through a recent issue of a Leiter-ranked journal just feels to me how looking at Vancouver harbour must feel to Heatherwick.
You’re also right that I could have mentioned exceptions. Do you think Nagel’s article was peer reviewed? I don’t know if Phil Review was doing proper peer review in 1974.
I’m intrigued to check out Janet McCracken’s writing.
bravo
you don't mind me asking, what has your experience with academic peer-review been like? I for the most part agree with the points you raise in this post (both architecture and philosophy _do_ need a more varied landscape than the trends, bandwagons and bureaucratic hellholes of the contemporary offer), but I would be hesitant to place the blame on peer-review processes (especially when in my experience they have actively operated in favour of diverging from already existing thought) when far more likely and egregious culprits exist in, say, the copy-paste syllabi of philosophy and philosophy adjacent courses. There's nothing wrong with rereading, of course, (nor is it a crime for two different departments to employ the same theoretical traditions and authors) but it comes at the cost of being exposed to alternative theories and models of thinking. The canonisation of and repeated exposure to specific scholars seems to me more responsible for the blandemic.
Then again, for transparency's sake, I am not a philosopher by training; I study Cultural Analysis in the Dutch tradition, which is a considerably younger field and which may not yet have fallen as deeply into the particular traps you have detailed here. Anyways, short rant of insights over, I enjoyed the article and am curious to hear what you have to say!
Thank you—this is a very useful comment! I’ve been arguing that peer review in philosophy functions to enforce conformity and entrench bias. But your comment makes me see that I might have confused cause and effect. You’re right that peer review can function to diversify thinking, by forcing authors to engage a wider range of ideas and see things from more perspectives. In philosophy (in my experience as an author, reviewer, and editor), peer review seems to work in the opposite way. It narrows thinking, because it gets interpreted as a sort of industry certificate. For the average reviewer, accepting an article is saying: this qualifies as the sort of thing that gets published in the Big Journals. But I’m now starting to think that this isn’t because of peer review itself; rather, it’s a deeper cultural norm within philosophy that makes peer review work in that way.
I’ll have to ponder this more…
And as for canonisation, I couldn't agree more. We teach a required module at St Andrews called "Reading Philosophy", in which advanced undergraduates have to read set series of articles--all Western, almost all from the analytic tradition. It's totally Confucian and might as well be called "official exemplars".
Thanks for clarifying! I think there is certainly something to be critiqued about the entanglements present between philosophical (and more broadly intellectual/academic) research and the bureaucratic/profit-oriented institutions that prop up Big Journals and allow them to operate, and the ways these inherently ideological entanglements encourage demand for (here I am loosely gesturing towards because I haven't yet thought of a name for these categories, if they exist as I imagine them) theory-as-archetype ("this is a critique of postmodernism!") and theory-as-identitarian ("I hope they can tell I'm not a classist pig!"), rather than theory-as-insight. 100% with you that the attention and status which the "industry certificate" affords is a threat to the potentials (and real-world applications) of research.
If peer review is (part of) the problem it has only become so fairly recently. See my post above. In a forty-year career (my first publication, a review, came out in 1984) I have had almost all my papers accepted by the first or the second journals that I have sent them to despite the fact that I was often arguing against orthodoxies with an off-beat choice of illustrations and sources. Here are just four examples, three from long ago and one relatively recent:
1) a critique of Anscombe's famous paper 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. arguing that it was founded on historical errors, with extensive citations from Cicero's 'on Duties' [Philosophical Quarterly, a top -ten general journal] ;
2) a critique of the then-very-famous R.M Hare's arguments for Ought-Implies-Can citing Luther and Erasmus (with defence of semi-Pelagian free will thrown in) [Sophia, a lower top-thirty journal, but still respectable/]
3) a critique of Popper on conspiracy theories (my most cited paper) citing Lord Hervey's memoirs, Procopius's 'Secret History' and Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' [Philosophy of the Social Sciences, then the number one specialist journal in its field];
4) A qualified defence of Thrasymachus in the Republic with extensive citations to Marx, Engels, Bertrand Russell and Adam Smith.
So it was possible to get away with this sort of thing the past , but less so, apparently, nowadays. Hence if peer review is part of the problem, this is because standards have *changed* and ossified, not because peer-review *as such* is inimical to either heresy or intellectual adventure.
We are in agreement! The process of peer review as method is only as flawed as the the standards which inform and guide it :)
I forgot a very important "If" at the beginning of my first sentence, my apologies!
This is a nice post Alex, the book sounds interesting. Another thing I notice with peer review in philosophy, which you may have already thought about, is a sort of weird pretence about making very small differences appear like huge consequential differences. It seems like a counter reaction of the conformity. I find this a lot in papers in moral philosophy and meta-ethics. I sometimes feel the same happening with architecture, when an architect friend of mine might ask what I think of a new building, and I find it hard to see what makes it different from all the other angular glass covered buildings.
Thanks Saranga! That’s a really good point. Two stories on this.
1. The journalist Will Storr was walking with Heatherwick somewhere in London. Heatherwick pointed at a building—a glass and concrete rectangle surrounded by other glass and concrete rectangles—and said: “That building won a very prestigious award”. Storr, baffled, asked why. “Look closely at the windows”, Heatherwick replied. “They’re tinted slightly white”.
2. This one is from Heatherwick’s book. He was at a launch for a design of a new hospital. The architect said he’d designed it to resemble a “Tuscan hill town”. When he revealed the design, all Heatherwick could see was a ten storey concrete box, with a few smaller boxes around it. Yet the expert audience was charmed by the “Tuscan hill town”.
Storr told his story to make precisely your point: a culture of conformity exaggerates tiny differences to hide its own conformism. And yes, I see this in philosophy journals too.