Philosophical Encounters May 19, 2008
Posted by Colin in Publishing.trackback
Around the philosophy blogosphere there have been some pretty heated exchanges recently, witness this and this and this and this and this. It got me thinking about how we do philosophy.
This question has been occupying my mind quite a bit recently because I have been trying to frame a paper for submission and worrying a lot about what will go over well with readers. This has caused me some frustration because I have come to realize just how much non-rational bias is involved in one’s reaction to a paper. When you really care about the reaction of your audience you find yourself paying careful attention to details which would seem otherwise completely insignificant. You find yourself trying to pander to your intended audience. There are, of course, some good reasons in some cases to tailor the presentation of your writing, to try to catch and hold the attention of your audience even though such elements of style have nothing to do with the substance of your contribution. These facets of the work of the profession bother me less than the influence of trends. This is the best concept I can summon under which to categorize those non-rational influences which can most detrimentally bias one’s reaction to a paper.
In polishing this paper for submission I find myself worrying about the fact that the topic of concern is largely seen as a fringe issue. I worry about the fact that the thesis in question at the heart of my paper has been dismissed or at least rejected by a number of philosophers, some of whom are very influential. But none of this has anything to do with the content of my work and I resent feeling that I have to pander to such considerations. It wouldn’t matter if Plato had rejected the thesis I am discussed, so why should it matter that Quine or Kripke rejected it? I don’t know exactly what I am trying to put my finger on, but the conduct of philosophy seems to have jumped the track.
It may be clearer put this way: if the point of doing philosophy is to get at the truth, then why does so much philosophical disagreement originate with divergent intuitions, assumptions, or otherwise unreliable sources (the so-called authorities)? Don’t get me wrong, all of that foot-stomping, fist-pumping, fireworks and mayhem and clash of egos makes for great entertainment. And trends can be spun as research programmes (which we have legitimate need for). I am just concerned that we, as a profession, sometimes lose track of the fact that we are in this to figure things out, not to fight with each other or to help our ‘team’ ‘win’.
Somewhere beyond the grave Friedrich Nietzsche (and probably Richard Rorty too) are smiling. They would probably claim philosophical system-building as an expression of the will to power, rather than a search for objective truth… In addition to originating with divergent intuitions, etc., much of philosophical disagreement seems to end up there, once arguments have been exhausted–this may have been in part what the Pyrrhonian Skeptics were all hyped up about.
On the nastiness of philosophical exchanges–I agree. I don’t know if I’m just more attentive to it now, but it seems like there’s been a decrease in civility in the last few years. Strange–maybe more of us are becoming disgruntled because of the increasing lack of respect philosophers seem to be getting in the academy in general (one example being U. Florida’s PhD program getting the axe). I’ve seen some exchanges recently that cross the line from being academically combative to being downright personally disrespectful. I’ve heard some straight fighting words out there, man–insultings of integrity and intelligence…just nasty stuff. This stuff rubs off as well. I’ve caught myself dishing out some pretty heavy mess (though not nearly as bad as the worst I’ve seen), and have had to try and cool it down.
Colin: Ahmen brother!
But Alexus, I don’t really think this is anything new…check out Russell’s response to Strawson for instance, or any of Fodor’s responses to anyone!
“These facets of the work of the profession bother me less than the influence of trends… It wouldn’t matter if Plato had rejected the thesis I am discussed, so why should it matter that Quine or Kripke rejected it?”
You raise an interesting issue. To be fair, I don’t imagine that anyone would explicitly cite “because Quine or Kripke rejected it” as their reason for thinking something a “fringe” issue! Their influence is more indirect: insofar as one is working in a philosophical tradition that has been significantly shaped by their work, this may affect whether one’s own work is perceived as a valuable contribution to the state of the field as it stands today.
You say: “none of this has anything to do with the content of my work and I resent feeling that I have to pander to such considerations.” But isn’t that part and parcel of contributing to an intellectual community? If you were just writing for yourself, that would be one thing. But if you take yourself to be writing for a broader audience, whose concerns and interests (etc.) may diverge from your own, I’m not sure it makes sense to resent this. It isn’t “pandering” to show how your work contributes to the broader philosophical tradition; it’s the whole point!
Returning to the earlier point: note that there is always going to be some background intellectual ‘culture’ to a philosophical community: some shared beliefs or assumptions about what questions are of central importance and which are more peripheral (or even non-issues). I don’t see any alternative to this. (Anything goes?) But sometimes those assumptions are misguided and need to be shaken up, so I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours to convince that you have hit upon one of those cases!
(I wouldn’t take any of this as indicating that mainstream philosophers are more interested in ‘winning’ than discerning the truth, though. Again: what alternative behaviour would you expect from truth-seekers?)
P.S. I’m not sure whether you intended your later remarks to apply to the “heated exchanges” you link to at the start of your post. But just in case: I do not think that those particular disagreements, at least, stemmed from “divergent intuitions, assumptions” or the like. That would hardly call for “fireworks”, I agree. Rather, those disputes were over higher order issues such as alleged misunderstandings of a proffered argument, whether an alleged parody was really analogous to the proffered argument, etc. In other words, it was a matter of basic philosophical understanding, concerning the state of the dialectic (in abstraction from whether one actually accepts any given premise or argument), rather than a first-order dispute in which people might reasonably disagree.
Thanks everyone…
RC: it is probably true, at least for practical purposes, that we can do no better than to work within a culture and a philosophical tradition where shared beliefs and assumptions guide the dialetic, in part. But perhaps more importantly: yes, anything goes! This is philosophy, right? What are the established results that cannot be called into question? I don’t know of any. I do understand that when we share beliefs and assumptions, or for that matter, when we fix various assumptions for the sake of argument, it can save a lot of time, but in the grand scheme I say anything goes. I think that should be pretty clear to anyone who is doing philosophy. There are some weird issues here about the extent to which philosophy can be valuable to the individual philosopher v. the extent to which philosophy done by that individual can be valuable to the community. I concede that this tension is something we all simply have to confront and navigate to the best of our abilities. The only – unappealing – alternative is to defect from the community. As to the “heated debates” that I linked, sure there was some methodological dispute involved, but I am unconvinced that divergent intuitions or the like played no role.
Sorry, I was unclear. I didn’t mean to suggest that there are any “results that cannot be called into question“, but simply that an intellectual community will inevitably be somewhat ‘exclusive‘ — making (defeasible) judgments about what questions are worth pursuing, and pushing others to the ‘fringe’. I think it’s fine that this happens in general. But, more to the point, it’s also fine to challenge any particular instance of it! :-)
I don’t want to high-jack Colin’s post here, or restart a pointless argument; but I can’t resist one comment.
RC says, “In other words, it was a matter of basic philosophical understanding, concerning the state of the dialectic (in abstraction from whether one actually accepts any given premise or argument), rather than a first-order dispute in which people might reasonably disagree.”
Uh, that’s just false. The whole point was that there are people who don’t accept the premise of the argument (and for good reason to, since it’s false), and for that reason don’t accept the argument. Something which you said, might I remind you, that you didn’t see any reason to care about…rather than responding to the argument you instead accuse the other person of ‘misunderstanding’ or not being an ‘epistemic peer’, which is code for ‘gee, isn’t this guy stupid; he can’t see that I’m right’. That’s exactly the kind of stuff I took Colin to be concerned with…
Oooopppssss…That’s supposed to be “gee, isn’t this guy stupid; he can’t see that my intuitions are right”
Sorry about that.
Well, look, I certainly am concerned that disagreement might sometimes boil down to a brute refusal to recognize the possibility that one is incorrect, or might get mired down in intuition mongering, or that divergent views might originate in nothing more authoritative than different starting assumptions. That said, I certainly did not mean to be accusing Richard (Chappell) (or Brown for that matter) of invidiously dismissing the perspective and/or arguments of his interlocutor.
With apologies to Colin, I really must correct the record:
RB: “The whole point was that there are people who don’t accept the premise of the argument… and for that reason don’t accept the argument”
That was never in dispute. Again, the only things I was arguing about there were higher-order, dialectical issues: whether your parody was genuinely analogous to my earlier argument, the nature of question-begging, etc. (Like you say, I wasn’t interested in arguing about the intuitive premise of the zombie argument. Since I explicitly disavowed engaging in that dispute, that obviously couldn’t have been “the whole point” of any disagreement in which I was an active participant.)
So, again, I certainly wouldn’t think anyone was stupid just for having different intuitions. If you really think that’s what I was arguing about, then that just further establishes that you don’t understand what I was arguing. I don’t mean to be rude, and I don’t mean this as code. It’s just a fact, and it means there’s no point in me talking with you further.
Well, I certainly agree with you there, since you (still) obviously don’t understand what I was arguing.
getting back on topic,
I have a strong opinion that in academia we spend too much time worrying about these things.
It is easy to defend what academics say and do in the same way as you can defend politicians saying “what alternative behaviour would you expect?”
But that is a very different issue from what would be good standards.
P.S. Its a little ironic that in the comments to a post about Colin’s concern that we are spending too much time fighting to win we would get a fight over “the record”.
GNZ: I completely agree that we spend too much time worrying about the sort of minutiae I was pointing to in my post. Let me try to restate my original worry in the following way. I have what I take to be a pretty good grasp on a certain focused literature and I have an idea which would make a nice positive contribution to that literature by articulating an interesting position in logical space which most others have ignored. But that is not enough! If one wants to get such an idea published, one has to spend a lot of time framing the issue and presenting it in a way that will pander to the tastes reviewers.
Yes I know… I am actually (I’m sure to the surprise of some) pretty good at that, but I also resent it for I expect the same basic reasons as you.
Two corrections to GNZ:
(1) Correcting the record is not “fighting to win”. It’s truth-oriented fighting to dispel misleading falsehoods.
(2) I did not mean “what alternative behaviour would you expect?” in the sense that people say this of politicians, namely that you can’t expect any better of them. Rather, my point was precisely about good standards. I was asking what alternative behaviour we should expect to see from truth-seekers who were following good standards. My point is that the actual academic practices Colin points to in his post are not evidence that philosophy has “jumped the track” at all.
(Behaviour X is only evidence that something is wrong if you are morely likely to see X when something is wrong than when everything is right. Hence my question: what alternative Y would you expect to see in a “better” world?)
Colin,
I remember one young fellow was one of my favorite (and almost all student’s favorite) lecturers. Not just for being a very personable character but also for having the most interesting course and being fairly bright and probably a bit of an idealist.
I suppose his field was a bit fringe – like yours, but not as a result of it being considered ‘useless’ or for there to be no suitable journals. Anyway the point is that he didn’t publish much (not in any major journal).
I could guess why without seeing his papers (but I did see one anyway) and you can probably also guess. That contrasted starkly with others, but best not to go into detail regarding them.
Richard, thanks for reiterating your point. Now that I think about it, what alternative Y would I expect to see in a “better” world? I guess really, when you get right down to it, my complaints have less to do with the channels through which publications are routed and more to do with the demand for publication. The fact that reviewers make life hard for those trying to get published, the perhaps ineliminable fact that an arbitrary reviewer is likely to read a given paper through the lenses of some questionable assumptions, would be somewhat uninteresting if there wasn’t such a demand that one publish to be part of the profession.
There are good and bad literatures out there. I’ve been really frustrated on occasions when writing on topics where—it seemed to me—there were really oddly motivated entrenched opinions, and where it seemed that you had to spend huge amounts of time fencing off misunderstandings.
Sometimes if you look hard enough, you can find interesting hidden motivations for the apparent oddities. But if that’s not the case, and there’s a literature that is misfiring in some way, setting out super-clearly what’s going wrong with it is something that needs to be done. As a contribution to the wider enterprise of getting things back on track, improving the philosophical conversation etc, all that work can be very worthwhile. David Lewis’s papers were often amazing examples of this—often the groundclearing is what stays with you, even beyond the particular positions he adopts. Of course, it’s a judgement call whether it’s worth the effort to sort out confusions in any particular case—but maybe thinking of this as a way of making positive and (maybe) influential contributions to the literature is a way of getting a bit more satisfaction out of it.
Of course, a lot of this assumes that we can think of the activity of publishing papers as an exercise in communicating with an audience that isn’t out to *wilfully* misunderstand us—so that even if there’s hard work to do, once it’s been done, people will be receptive. It’s just awful when that’s not the case, and people end up grandstanding. For one example, I really get annoyed with the current vogue for certain kinds of anti-metaphysics rhetoric (as opposed to the sober, detailed criticisms of metaphysics—I find those quite interesting). I’ve seen a few cases recently where that sort of talk seems to veer into something that’s just plain rude.