MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--A COUPLE OF COMMENTS WERE CAUGHT IN THE SPAM FILTER, THEY HAVE NOW APPEARED
The text is here, and there is much that is interesting. I excerpt some of her remarks about pressure to publish and the pernicious effects of peer review:
Young people are expected to produce an absurdly large number of papers, preferably published in refereed journals, in order to get tenure, or even in order to get jobs. Some people even try to publish papers in order to get into graduate school. The papers are supposed to be blind reviewed, and these days many referees for journals require that papers should respond to the extant literature on the topic, whether responding to the extant literature enhances the author’s argument in some way or not. Because the sheer mass of the literature is growing exponentially, people draw the boundaries of their specializations more and more narrowly, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of time. The extant literature necessarily becomes the recent literature, which is a philosophically arbitrary category. Big, systematic philosophy of the sort we find in Kant and Aristotle, philosophy that is responsible to the ways in which one’s views in one area fit in with one’s views about everything else, has become nearly impossible, because someone trying to do that kind of work would supposedly have to know the literature in too many areas…
I also have some doubts about how helpful the system of peer review is in philosophy. For one thing, philosophy is not like the sciences, where there’s a fairly widely accepted method, and your peers can check whether you applied that method correctly or not. In philosophy, our methods themselves are as much up for discussion as anything else….
Peer review can be used as a way to enforce a kind of conformity that is not appropriate to our subject. I take it seriously that philosophy is a subject in the humanities, or as one might say on the “Arts” side of “Arts and Sciences.” Like artists, we go for expressing universal truths, but in an individual voice. I think that many young people in philosophy right now feel that they are not being allowed to find and express their individual voices.
Readers reactions welcome.