More on ESL philosophers

Since the issue of ESL philosophers has been "in the news" recently, thanks to Gabriele Contessa, I would like to draw your attention, dear Cocooners and readers, to a comment made by Vincenzo Politi, which I think is worth reading.

Some of the comments above seem to suggest the following argument:

Philosophers who are native English speakers have an undeniable advantage over philosophers who are not native English speakers,

THEREFORE

non-native English speaker philosophers are underrepresented in USA.

Such an argument, HOWEVER, does not explain another interesting factor: why do papers and books authored by native English speaker philosophers tend to be much more cited than papers and books published in the same international journals/publishers but authored by non-native English speaker philosophers?

The point is: if a paper or a book by a non-native English speaker is published by an international peer-reviewed journal or publisher, it means that it is indeed a good piece of philosophical work which meets all the standards of the (Anglophone-dominated) international publications. (It also means that the author is not *that* disadvantaged with respect to the native English speakers when it comes to linguistic skills.) So why do people with non-Anglophone names get cited less than their more obviously Anglophone colleagues?

If you are looking for data supporting my claim, read the paper "European Humanities in Times of Globalized Parochialism" by Gereon Wolters (who is a German philosopher, in case you wonder).

Speaking of biases, in his paper Wolters also offers ample evidence suggesting that NOT having non-native English speakers in philosophy conference organised in US and Canada is the norm rather than the exception.

It is unbelievable (and a bit funny) how some native English speaker philosophers speak about the native English speaker philosophers' bias against some under-represented groups of native English speaker philosophers, and yet all these native English philosophers together seem so blind toward the biases against non-native English speaker philosophers.

You can find a copy of Wolters’ paper, which is also well worth reading, here.

Comments

[Manolo]

There's a copy of the Globalized Parochialism paper (I'm guessing uploaded by Wolters himself) at http://www.uni-konstanz.de/philosophie/files/2013_-_globalized_parochialism_-_bollettino_sfi.pdf

[NoNES Philosophy student]

I'm working in epistemology, and I read and cite Pascal Engel often, who is a French and works in Europe. The reason might be that I often see his works in good venues. So for non-native English speakers to get noticed, they need to publish a lot in highly-regarded places.

Hence, I think that the problem is still the greater burden of non-native English speakers to publish (and network). Of course, non-native English speakers should make themselves versed in English, or find someone to proofread their works. But the latter may cause some hardship for early career philosophers people in less developed countries. I hope that every journal can adopt the policy made by Sven Ove Hansson, Editor-in-chief of Theoria,

"Be fair to authors whose English is deficient. For people whose first language has a very different structure, English can be much more difficult to learn than it is for speakers of most Indo-European languages. If a paper is written in bad English but is nevertheless understandable, give advice on whether language editing can make it publishable."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/theo.12024/full

[Moti Mizrahi]

NoNES Philosophy student,

Thanks for drawing attention to Theoria's policy on ESL authors. I agree that more journals should adopt a similar policy.

[Filippo Contesi]

Great post!