I 100% agree with what you said -- which is why we need a reform of philosophy journals.
It's great to explore new ideas but, like you said, philosophers are great at making them seem plausible. Since most ideas are wrong if we want philosophy to be a net epistemic benefit it should spend more time knocking down ideas and showing where arguments are flawed than introducing new ideas.
This is exactly the opposite of how journals work now days. They mostly won't accept direct point by point rebutalls and while you can write an article like "I define Xism to be ... as has been seen in papers like cite. It's wrong" still has the problem that it requires you to produce an argument that X must be false not merely show that the author has a fallacious argument for X or relies on implausible assumptions.
This is why I think each philosophy journal ought to commit to publishing a rebuttal for each paper it accepts -- say the best response that meets minimum standards within a year.
I wish blogging were more recognized and appreciated. Do you think things might change or are those of us out blogging mostly not doing anything to advance our academic interests by doing so?
I'd like to get a better handle on journal attitudes towards rebuttals and response papers. Do they really not like them? I have a couple critical response pieces I am working on and I've heard more than once that it'll be hard to get them published.
In philosophy most journals have a policy of *never* publishing point by point response papers unless they are a response to something in that journal and even then rarely. That essentially makes them unpublishable for most people because the chance of a paper being rejected at one journal and then being unpublishable is too much.
But the notion of being a point by point response is relatively narrow. If you can find a couple papers making similar arguments for X (or even 1 influential argument) you can argue against that *type* of argument.
Whether this is your problem depends on your epistemic views. As a mathematican, I believe that it's frequently super hard to argue that a type of argument can't work even if it's easy to knock down each claimed argument. For instance, it took a long time for people to show no relatovizeable diagonalization can decide P v. NP by building oracles relative to which both possiblities are realized but we could see a flae every attempt to prove it this way.
So I believe that it causes serious epistemic problems but as long as you aren't literally going through a single paper and pointing to specific unjustified inferences you might be fine.
Are these official policies? Or is this an unstated norm? Why do they have these policies?
I am working on a paper right now that is a direct response to a specific paper. The objections are specific to that paper. It will be really unfortunate if this is effectively unpublishable. What I don't understand is why journals would have a policy of not publishing this sort of thing. I had thought that the whole point of philosophy was to publish exactly the sort of exchanges like this. What are they supposed to publish then? Why would they be narrow in this way? Why would they not publish responses?
The limit on direct responses is a policy at many journals. Just look up the crazy long instructions for authors the journals have and it's often going to be included there.
But i've seen plenty of papers get published that substantially have the form of direct replies. At least my vague sense is that you can get away with a response that has the form: no argument like Y could work because you can just word everything in general terms but if you want to just say that line 125 in such and such paper doesn't follow it's harder unless you can point to several papers that make the same move.
But really you should just email an editor at some journal or at least someone who is actually a philosopher. I have some knowledge because my grad program included philosophy and it's what my wife does but I'm still not the ideal person to ask.
That's awful. Direct responses are a great way to do philosophy.
It's absurd that people can use loopholes and workarounds. This is gaming the system and results in writing philosophy *for the purposes of publication.* This is toxic Goodhartianism at work.
I'll contact people directly who know. This is a topic I am going to explore more and perhaps write about. The sociology of philosophy, that kind of thing.
To be clear, the policy at most journals isn't to ban all direct replies. It's just to only accept them for papers published in that journal. The understandable thought was, especially back in the day, that people aren't going to want to read a paper that only makes sense if they've read a different article in some other journal they may not even have.
The problem is how it interacts with the rest of the system. Since you can only submit a paper once to any given journal limiting direct replies to a single journal essentially means that even though it takes the same amount of effort to write you have a tiny fraction of the chance to get it published (say a decent paper has a 10% chance to be accepted on any submission that's a 90% chance at least one of the leiter ranked top 22ish journals publishes it).
Ultimately, like most problems in academia, it's a holdover from an earlier time when journals really were supposed to be read monthly rather than searched
I agree with the main points made in the article. I'm a bit puzzled at the emphasis on Matthew Adelstein's blog. I also post critiques of his blog. Was the comment on it being very failed a joke or a serious remark? In any case, I do think you could have leveraged more from Matthew's own work in making your point. Matthew seems wildly overconfident in what philosophy can accomplish and how readily and reliably it can do so. Philosophical arguments should be taken with with many grains of salt, as there are multiple failure points in a long inferential chain.
Regarding the comment Matthew made that got things started:
"I suspect one reason so many people think that ethics is subjective is that they think that it’s beyond rational thought in this important sense. While arguments and analysis can help elucidate politics, math, and other domains that there are truths about, people think that ethics is beyond persuasion. It involves both sides simply declaring their views, and that’s the end of it."
This may be true, and it's the sort of thing that's testable and that one could learn about via conversation with people who are subjectivists or antirealists. Unfortunately Matthew seems to me to be a bit impatient and dismissive with how antirealists like me think and why we think what we do, going so far as to suggest that some of us are conceptually impoverished and should defer to people like him, who allegedly have functioning intuitive faculties.
You wrote "I suspect part of what explains this is that examining reasons is hard, and it is easier to simply pick a belief that is held by others. And given the opportunity cost of thinking through a difficult philosophical issue, most people would rather spend their time doing something else. Not to mention, the cost to them of being wrong about this or that ethical or philosophical issue—as far as they can tell, anyway—is negligible."
That passage contains several reasons why someone might not go through the trouble of looking at reasons for their moral and philosophical views. But I doubt that any of those reasons is what's actually behind the lack of reasons-based moral/philosophical thinking. The things you cite are *potentially* explanatory, but I think that in most cases they don't apply to people.
Instead, I suspect that the idea of "examining reasons" just doesn't even occur to most people. Almost all of us virtually never see anyone do this, at least outside of a class in school. The rest of our lives we don't encounter the phenomenon, or only very briefly and then we turn our attention to IG or TV. So, it's not on our radar after a number of years. We *are* happy to examine reasons when trying to figure out something at work, or when discussing who will win the Super Bowl. But the road to examining reasons is almost never seen by most people after they've left college.
'Instead, I suspect that the idea of "examining reasons" just doesn't even occur to most people.'
I agree. It doesn't even occur to most of my undergraduates until we go through the process in class. 😂
Also I suspect they don't occur to people due, at least in part, to the costs. The costs are explanatory even if folks aren't aware. But that's a guess.
Nice piece! I like this paper by Hilary Kornblith, which defends some ideas in the same ballpark. Roughly, the overlapping thought is that rationalization is really common, and being appropriately on guard against the possibility that some intricate argument (whether your own, or someone else's) is mere rationalization might often look like "ignoring arguments":
I 100% agree with what you said -- which is why we need a reform of philosophy journals.
It's great to explore new ideas but, like you said, philosophers are great at making them seem plausible. Since most ideas are wrong if we want philosophy to be a net epistemic benefit it should spend more time knocking down ideas and showing where arguments are flawed than introducing new ideas.
This is exactly the opposite of how journals work now days. They mostly won't accept direct point by point rebutalls and while you can write an article like "I define Xism to be ... as has been seen in papers like cite. It's wrong" still has the problem that it requires you to produce an argument that X must be false not merely show that the author has a fallacious argument for X or relies on implausible assumptions.
This is why I think each philosophy journal ought to commit to publishing a rebuttal for each paper it accepts -- say the best response that meets minimum standards within a year.
That's a great suggestion for improving journals. More blogging would help too! I'm a trend setter.
I wish blogging were more recognized and appreciated. Do you think things might change or are those of us out blogging mostly not doing anything to advance our academic interests by doing so?
Yup! And I'm trying to share that suggestion as widely as possible and maybe one day it will happen.
I'd like to get a better handle on journal attitudes towards rebuttals and response papers. Do they really not like them? I have a couple critical response pieces I am working on and I've heard more than once that it'll be hard to get them published.
In philosophy most journals have a policy of *never* publishing point by point response papers unless they are a response to something in that journal and even then rarely. That essentially makes them unpublishable for most people because the chance of a paper being rejected at one journal and then being unpublishable is too much.
But the notion of being a point by point response is relatively narrow. If you can find a couple papers making similar arguments for X (or even 1 influential argument) you can argue against that *type* of argument.
Whether this is your problem depends on your epistemic views. As a mathematican, I believe that it's frequently super hard to argue that a type of argument can't work even if it's easy to knock down each claimed argument. For instance, it took a long time for people to show no relatovizeable diagonalization can decide P v. NP by building oracles relative to which both possiblities are realized but we could see a flae every attempt to prove it this way.
So I believe that it causes serious epistemic problems but as long as you aren't literally going through a single paper and pointing to specific unjustified inferences you might be fine.
Are these official policies? Or is this an unstated norm? Why do they have these policies?
I am working on a paper right now that is a direct response to a specific paper. The objections are specific to that paper. It will be really unfortunate if this is effectively unpublishable. What I don't understand is why journals would have a policy of not publishing this sort of thing. I had thought that the whole point of philosophy was to publish exactly the sort of exchanges like this. What are they supposed to publish then? Why would they be narrow in this way? Why would they not publish responses?
The limit on direct responses is a policy at many journals. Just look up the crazy long instructions for authors the journals have and it's often going to be included there.
But i've seen plenty of papers get published that substantially have the form of direct replies. At least my vague sense is that you can get away with a response that has the form: no argument like Y could work because you can just word everything in general terms but if you want to just say that line 125 in such and such paper doesn't follow it's harder unless you can point to several papers that make the same move.
But really you should just email an editor at some journal or at least someone who is actually a philosopher. I have some knowledge because my grad program included philosophy and it's what my wife does but I'm still not the ideal person to ask.
That's awful. Direct responses are a great way to do philosophy.
It's absurd that people can use loopholes and workarounds. This is gaming the system and results in writing philosophy *for the purposes of publication.* This is toxic Goodhartianism at work.
I'll contact people directly who know. This is a topic I am going to explore more and perhaps write about. The sociology of philosophy, that kind of thing.
To be clear, the policy at most journals isn't to ban all direct replies. It's just to only accept them for papers published in that journal. The understandable thought was, especially back in the day, that people aren't going to want to read a paper that only makes sense if they've read a different article in some other journal they may not even have.
The problem is how it interacts with the rest of the system. Since you can only submit a paper once to any given journal limiting direct replies to a single journal essentially means that even though it takes the same amount of effort to write you have a tiny fraction of the chance to get it published (say a decent paper has a 10% chance to be accepted on any submission that's a 90% chance at least one of the leiter ranked top 22ish journals publishes it).
Ultimately, like most problems in academia, it's a holdover from an earlier time when journals really were supposed to be read monthly rather than searched
I agree with the main points made in the article. I'm a bit puzzled at the emphasis on Matthew Adelstein's blog. I also post critiques of his blog. Was the comment on it being very failed a joke or a serious remark? In any case, I do think you could have leveraged more from Matthew's own work in making your point. Matthew seems wildly overconfident in what philosophy can accomplish and how readily and reliably it can do so. Philosophical arguments should be taken with with many grains of salt, as there are multiple failure points in a long inferential chain.
Regarding the comment Matthew made that got things started:
"I suspect one reason so many people think that ethics is subjective is that they think that it’s beyond rational thought in this important sense. While arguments and analysis can help elucidate politics, math, and other domains that there are truths about, people think that ethics is beyond persuasion. It involves both sides simply declaring their views, and that’s the end of it."
This may be true, and it's the sort of thing that's testable and that one could learn about via conversation with people who are subjectivists or antirealists. Unfortunately Matthew seems to me to be a bit impatient and dismissive with how antirealists like me think and why we think what we do, going so far as to suggest that some of us are conceptually impoverished and should defer to people like him, who allegedly have functioning intuitive faculties.
'I also post critiques of his blog. Was the comment on it being very failed a joke or a serious remark?'
It was obviously a joke given how successful he is lol
Successful at attracting readers, not so successful in my estimation of actually writing much that's correct.
You wrote "I suspect part of what explains this is that examining reasons is hard, and it is easier to simply pick a belief that is held by others. And given the opportunity cost of thinking through a difficult philosophical issue, most people would rather spend their time doing something else. Not to mention, the cost to them of being wrong about this or that ethical or philosophical issue—as far as they can tell, anyway—is negligible."
That passage contains several reasons why someone might not go through the trouble of looking at reasons for their moral and philosophical views. But I doubt that any of those reasons is what's actually behind the lack of reasons-based moral/philosophical thinking. The things you cite are *potentially* explanatory, but I think that in most cases they don't apply to people.
Instead, I suspect that the idea of "examining reasons" just doesn't even occur to most people. Almost all of us virtually never see anyone do this, at least outside of a class in school. The rest of our lives we don't encounter the phenomenon, or only very briefly and then we turn our attention to IG or TV. So, it's not on our radar after a number of years. We *are* happy to examine reasons when trying to figure out something at work, or when discussing who will win the Super Bowl. But the road to examining reasons is almost never seen by most people after they've left college.
'Instead, I suspect that the idea of "examining reasons" just doesn't even occur to most people.'
I agree. It doesn't even occur to most of my undergraduates until we go through the process in class. 😂
Also I suspect they don't occur to people due, at least in part, to the costs. The costs are explanatory even if folks aren't aware. But that's a guess.
The more I get away from higher education, the more I realize how utterly weird philosophers are compared to other people. We’re aliens.
We really are. But necessary aliens.
Nice piece! I like this paper by Hilary Kornblith, which defends some ideas in the same ballpark. Roughly, the overlapping thought is that rationalization is really common, and being appropriately on guard against the possibility that some intricate argument (whether your own, or someone else's) is mere rationalization might often look like "ignoring arguments":
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-4975.00010