Honderich/McGinn Dispute Makes the Guardian

Story here.  A short excerpt, from near the end of the article:

"People have complained about my tone in reviews for the past 30 years," says McGinn proudly. "I've made definite enemies in the past 30 years in important departments. People are too cautious. Hard things need to be said."

...

What will happen now? Will Honderich and McGinn kiss and make up? It seems unlikely. Not only is McGinn unrepentant about his review, but Honderich is demanding compensation from the Philosophical Review. "They should not have published it," he says. "It makes them look ridiculous." And then he adds something that, just possibly, is mollifying: "In a way, I'm glad it's been published. My book is now getting the attention it deserves. The mighty little McGinn has done me a service."

For the earlier installments, see (in order) here, here, and here.

Comments

[Alex Leibowitz]

Perhaps I'm late in joining this discussion -- but was it ethical for McGinn to write what he did, even assuming that it's true? What is the "ethics of reviewing"?

Also, it seems that McGinn himself relies on the assumption that holding an academic post can be wrong in some circumstances -- which is also interesting. It's as if one has some sort of rank, where it's blameworthy to hold a position above one's (as it were) position.

[Geoff Arnold]

See also my blog piece here - http://geoffarnold.com/?p=1849 - which I've also excerpted for my Amazon.com review. It really is an awful book; McGinn's comments are entirely appropriate.

[Jon Cogburn]

I think the most gratuitously nasty thing McGinn has ever written was in his autobiography, where he described Michael Dummett as looking like a fat man with perpetually wet lips who had been rolled around in flour. I've never been able to make fried chicken or even coq au vin after reading that.

With Alex, I also thought it was interesting that McGinn said he was only nasty to people at better institutions. I'm not sure it comes from a feeling that his enemies don't deserve their affiliations though. Maybe his point is simply that the nastiness can do a lot more harm to somebody without tenure or somebody with tenure but at a less prestigious institution.

I think the point is clearly sound for people without tenure. Humility should teach anyone that you might be wrong about even strongly felt philosophical disagreements, and also that in the vast majority of cases proving your point is not worth the chance of robbing someone of tenure or a job.

In the case of people at less prestigious institutions I think with some reflection it makes sense too. When my wife was in Library Science school, she studied data by academic psychologists that showed that the same papers had a different rate of acceptance at comparable journals as a function of both academic fame and institutional affiliation. They submitted scads of the same papers from people with different affiliations and different levels of previous citation, and then statistically analyzed the acceptance rates. Interestingly, there was a statistically significant difference even at triple peer reviewed journals.

So perhaps McGinn's thought is that being publicly nasty to even tenured people at lower ranked schools will put too much burden on them?

This issue is also related to the ethics of anonymous reviewers for journals, some of whom listen to the McGinn devil on their left shoulder instead of the kindly Hillary Putnam angel on their right. I try to listen to the Putnam angel, at the very worst still finding what's good in the piece and then giving the person really detailed advice about how to rewrite the thing. The thought that the article might be by some kid just out of grad school teaching four classes with no security (which of course would lead to some sloppiness and precipitous submissions) forces me to do this in every case. A couple of really great anonymous reviewers and great editors did the same for me when I was in that situation. Is it too much to ask all reviewers to do this, or would that be too much of a burden on the institution?

Probably McGinn's statements just reflected the inchoate conviction that people out to pick on people their own size though. . .

In any case, I haven't read McGinn's review. I can't risk the chance that his Boschean images will ruin me for other kinds of food preparation.

[Michael Huemer]

I've only just discovered this debate, and I haven't read Honderich's book. But I'm inclined to agree with McGinn on two things:

1) That Ted Honderich is a bad philosopher. I have no personal animus towards Honderich, whom I've never met. But I thought his contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Free Will (which I also reviewed for the Phil Review) to be among the worst philosophy papers I've ever read, excluding student papers.

2) That it is ethically and professionally appropriate to use harsh words in reviewing a book that you judge to be very bad. (It is not, however, in one's self-interest to do so, which is probably why few people do it.) I think this because I think the main job of the reviewer is to give a sense of the book, both its content and its quality, for the benefit of the readers, and I think this is a legitimate and valuable job. If Honderich's book is among the worst that McGinn has ever read, then that is something a reader would like to know when deciding whether to buy the book.
I even disagree with those who say that one should not pan a book by a junior person or a person at a lower-ranked university. I think the concern that one might stop a person from getting tenure or otherwise harm a person's career is misplaced. Tenure is not an unqualified good: some people *shouldn't* get tenure. In particular, people who are bad at philosophy shouldn't get tenure at research universities. Of course, you could be mistaken in your judgment, but mistakes can be made either way: someone could be denied tenure who should get it, and someone could be awarded tenure who shouldn't. The latter has the result that more bad philosophy will be produced, and that there will be one job fewer available for more deserving candidates to get. So there is a harm to giving tenure to too many people--that's why we have tenure reviews in the first place, instead of just giving tenure to everyone. The best thing we can do to enable the best tenure decisions to be made--avoiding errors of both kinds--is just to give our honest opinions of others' work. It is then up to the tenure review committees to assess that information, taking into account the possibility that some of those opinions may be mistaken. It isn't the job of a reviewer (whether a book reviewer or a reviewer in a tenure case) to censor himself preemptively.

[Jon Cogburn]

I'm not saying that everyone with a tenure track job should get tenure or that we need to sit around a campfire banging on drums and reciting Robert Bly poetry in between singing Kumba-Yah. That indeed would be inimical to philosophy.

First, censoring one's desire to use an abusive tone is not the same as censoring one's philosophical critique of an idea, argument, or the way either is expressed.

Second, yes one has obligations to the general readership and the community, but one also has obligation to the person being reviewed, namely to be as charitable as possible. The moral obligation to be more charitable towards those less fortunate is reasonable. In the case of blind reviewing for journals, this is a great chance to help younger people sending out unpolished stuff be better philosophers by giving them detailed advice concerning how to improve their work.

Third, philosophy does not subject itself to a Robert Parker style scoring system (neither does wine really, but that's another debate), and just as in aesthetics it is a mistake to think of philosophical criticism as primarily in terms of how good something is. When Leibniz said he'd never read a falsehood I think he meant that he was resolved to always see what he could learn from what he was reading. This is related to a final point.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time with people in other fields knows that philosophy professors have a reputation for being not only argumentative, but also epistemically hubristic, ingeniously rationalizing a strongly held negative view on what anyone else would regard as insufficient evidence. This is particularly striking to anyone who has done hiring for both philosophers and non-philosophers (my experience is in philosophy and also in doing academic hiring with computer scientists, engineers, and art types who use technology in innovative way). In my experience philosophers tend to bring a degree of unjustified certitude about their ranking of the candidates that people in other disciplines do not.

This is probably the outcome of the central role of dialectic in our field, as spend a tremendous portion of our intellectual energy finding fault with other's arguments, and writing these faults up and then arguing about them in conferences. For the fault finding to contribute to the dialectic it often needs to be expressed more fervently than is justified. If you went deeply into every possible problem with your own argument, you would never be able to finish a paper. I'm not griping about this; it is as it should be if we are to be Plato's heirs. However, it would be surprising if a discipline this centered around this activity did not produce unhealthy hubris among some of its practitioners.

And whether or not McGinn is correct in his appraisal of Hondreich, the hubris is there in our field and is not healthy. It is quite damaging to be as genuinely dismissive as so many academic philosophers are. You might not like Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or non-cognitivists, or Dummett, or Peacocke, or Jerry Fodor, or John McDowell, or whomever, but a lot of very smart people of good will find a lot of philosophical insight in the philosophers and positions you don't like. So what justifies the sneering condescension philosophers and position's opponents adopt in conversation so many times? Nothing.

Given the ubiquity of this, and the way in which it cuts us off from the Muse, I think we should consciously try to err on the side of humility. And for that reason, no matter how bad Hondreich's book is, I still find the abusive tone from the excerpts in the Guardian article to be distressing.

[Neil Tennant]

The Guardian article by Stuart Jeffries contained the following puzzling comment:

"McGinn ... is the world's leading proponent of the so-called new mysterian position ... whereby some philosophical problems, consciousness among them, are insoluble.

What is puzzling is the use of the word 'new' in this context.

The position was clearly stated by Thomas H. Huxley in 1866, in his classic textbook 'Lessons in Elementary Physiology'. It was also the position famously advanced by Emil du Bois-Reymond in his 1872 lecture 'Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens'. It ignited the celebrated 'Ignorabimusstreit', which lasted well into the twentieth century.

Jeffries quoted Honderich's reference, in his (H's) 2001 autobiography to "[t]he envy of my small colleague, Colin McGinn" and then wrote: "Honderich is 6ft 4in of gangly Canadian socialist philosopher, so most people must seem small". But this is disingenuous. It's not just Honderich's height of 6ft 4in that would make McGinn seem small to him; it would also be McGinn's own height (or lack of it). In fact, the two men could very plausibly be cited as intuitively indisputable instances of 'tall' and 'short' respectively, for the construction of a Sorites series.

All that should be beside the point. But perhaps, deep down, it isn't. Eliminative materialists and social and evolutionary psychologists might have to discover for us the real reason for the apparent animus between the two of them, since they themselves apparently cannot agree on what it is. Is it their difference in height? Or their difference in stature? Or H's snarky remark about M's plain girlfriend? Or is it an objectively certifiable difference in philosophical aptitude and accomplishment?

This reader has neither a pro-attitude nor an anti-attitude to McGinn's choice of words in his review of Honderich (although he agrees with Jon Cogburn that McGinn's insulting remarks about Dummett, in his [M's] own autobiography, were beyond the pale). Everyone loves to see an intellectual slicing and dicing done really well. Indeed, part of the enjoyment is anticipatory: for one waits with bated breath for the tables to be turned, when past reviewer is new author, and new reviewer is past author. Honderich should simply wait for McGinn's next book (for surely there will be one soon), and an invitation to review it (for surely some editor will delight in extending one immediately) and then see if he can repay the compliment of close attention to the work.

[kid bitzer]

Neil Tennant draws our attention to the lamentable ignorance of the history of philosophy displayed by the Guardian's reporter.

But far more appalling, surely, is his ignorance of the history of rock and roll.

Mr. Jeffries writes of "the so-called new mysterian position (named after the rock band Quark and the Mysterians)".

But as any cultured person knows, the ground-breaking proto-punk band that gave us "96 Tears" was called "Question Mark and the Mysterians", or even better, simply "? and the Mysterians" (the band' leader having anticipated by several decades Prince's attempt to "change his name to a squiggle").

Surely all right-thinking defenders of learning and literacy should insist that the Guardian post a correction, and allow the famous "?" himself to publish a reply.

[Neil Tennant]

kid bitzer writes 'Neil Tennant draws our attention to the lamentable ignorance of the history of philosophy displayed by the Guardian's reporter.' Actually, the 'lamentable ignorance' (bitzer's phrase, not mine) is displayed by those contemporary philosophers who take themselves to be finding something new to say about matter and consciousness. I wouldn't hold Stuart Jeffries, as a journalist, accountable for not knowing enough about the (relatively recent) history of philosophy. Anyone who takes the trouble to read the writings of the great figures in the late 19th-century debate (Huxley, du Bois Reymond, Tyndall and others) will find admirably clear statements of materialism, supervenience, mysterianism, the explanatory gap---even anticipations of Swampman. [Any reader who is interested in this topic will be able to find more about it in my forthcoming paper 'Mind, Mathematics and the Ignorabimusstreit', in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.]

As for Jeffries' not knowing it was 'Question Mark', not 'Quark', and the New Mysterians ... I'll just have to leave the appropriate remonstrations to those way cooler than myself.

[Michael Huemer]

Jon -

You raise some good points. Philosophers are an excessively cantankerous bunch, and often wind up with surprisingly confident opinions in conflict with their colleagues. Maybe we should take the evidence that the judgment of philosophers in general is unreliable, and lower our confidence in most of our philosophical beliefs. Perhaps in particular, our negative opinions about each other's work are usually unjustified. Even so, I think that at least in *some* cases one would really be justified in making a strongly negative judgment about someone else's work. So then I think the interesting question is whether, assuming one has formed this opinion in an epistemically responsible way, one should make that opinion plain in print.

I wasn't sure what you had in mind when you spoke about the "moral obligation to be more charitable towards those less fortunate." In moral philosophy, it seems reasonable to posit an obligation of charity, and to say that one ought to be more charitable toward those in greater need. But the "principle of charity" in philosophy does not work that way, because it does not concern charity in the same sense of the word, nor is it a moral principle. As I understand it, the principle of charity is epistemically based: roughly speaking, if you think that some smart person has stated something very stupid, then it is more likely that you have misunderstood them, or that what they said is not as stupid as it appears. And, if there are two ways of interpreting some statement someone has made, then the one that makes the statement more reasonable is more likely to be correct, other things being equal.

On this understanding, the principle of charity is *less* applicable when one is reading the work of a person of lesser professional stature (for example, a person at a lower-ranked university). This is because it is more likely that such a person would make a stupid mistake than it is that a person of higher professional stature would make a stupid mistake. I think we all recognize this sort of thing in practice: when we read an undergraduate paper, for instance, that appears to contain an egregious error, we will typically accept without much fuss that it indeed contains such an error. But if we read a paper by a leading expert in some field that appears to contain an egregious error about the subject of that person's expertise, we will second-guess ourselves a lot more, thinking, "I must have misunderstood this."

While I think it is fair to give a harsh book review, I generally agree with you about refereeing papers. That is because the referee comments are directed at the author (at least the ones that are, are), whereas a book review is not. The referee should make an effort to be helpful to the author, and in particular to make very clear the *reasons* behind a negative decision. There is no need for the referee to insult the author in doing so. I also think referees have a blameworthy tendency to reject papers for bad reasons, and especially to reject papers due to the referees' philosophical disagreement with those papers. But that is a topic for another time.

I also agree with others that McGinn's remarks about Dummett are out of line. That is because the remarks, as described, are more along the lines of personal insult than assessment of anything intellectually interesting.

It may be that Colin McGinn has a greater than normal degree of contempt for others and a less than normal degree of inhibition against expressing it. I suspect that the same is true of Ted Honderich, making the two men natural candidates for getting into this sort of row.

[Peter Mexbacher]

Addressed to a previous poster: the only work of Ted Honderich I know of so far is his participation in the Oxford Handbook of Free Will - interestingly enough, I found it to be the _best_ contribution of the volume, not the worst.

The problem is that much of the philosophy of Free Will is in shambles - and Honderich cut's right through it.

[Michael Huemer]

For the record, here are a few examples that I can recall of what I thought was bad about Honderich's free will article (these are mentioned in my review):

a) The titular thesis that compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false.

b) The central argument given for determinism: that he has never observed an event that had no explanation. For instance, he has seen no levitating spoons.

c) His remarks about quantum mechanics, to the effect that there is "no experimental evidence in a standard sense" for the existence of "quantum events", accompanied by the summary dismissal of all indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics.

d) His "proof" that probabilistic explanations are not genuine explanations: "This is dead clear because, ex hypothesi, everything might have been just the same without [the explanandum] occurring at all."

Both here and in my published review, I have refrained from criticizing Honderich as harshly as would be justified. I leave it to the reader to assess what, if anything, is bad about (a)-(d) above. My overall characterization of the tone and intellectual style of the article is that it consists largely of highly controversial assertions made as if they were self-evident; question-begging and contemptuous dismissals of contrary positions; and a very loose and uncomplicated style of thought. And the first sentence of this paragraph is still true.

[Paul Raymont]

This kerfuffle is now being covered by the NY Times (Sunday edition, Jan. 13).

[John Protevi]

A superb typo in the NYT article! Instead of having Honderich's autobiography be Philosopher: A Kind of Life, it says Philosopher: A King of Life. If only it were so, Plato would have died a happy man.