In a recent post focusing on the work of Avner Baz, I raised concerns about the extent to which philosophers engage each other's ideas. Baz is far from the only example of someone whose work I think has been unfairly neglected. Time and again, I read papers that (in my view) ignore a lot of really good recent work...usually work by less well-established scholars. Indeed, I just read another paper that came out yesterday--in a very good journal, on an issue that a lot of young scholars have published on--and the article only cited the most famous people in the topic's subfield. Since it is a subfield I happen to work in, this really frustrated me. Further, as Kieran Healy has shown with actual data (see also here), "hardly anyone is getting cited." By and large in philosophy, the same small cadre of people get cited again, and again, and again, while most everyone else's work languishes in relative obscurity.
I do not think this is a sign of healthy discipline. It makes philosophy seem less of a serious exchange and conscientious engagement and evaluation of ideas, and more of a feudal system of lords and serfs: 'lords' who dominate the philosophical landscape, and 'serfs' whose ideas are all but ignored. Moreover, as I have explained before, it seems epistemically bad, calling into question whether philosophy is actually moved forward by good arguments, as opposed to mere sociological forces (jumping on bandwagons started by a few esteemed figures, etc.).
Anyway, if you find yourself at all persuaded by me (as well as by Healy's data) that there is something wrong--that philosophers do not engage adequately with others' ideas, particularly the ideas of less well-established people--this raises the obvious question: what, if anything, could be done to improve the situation?
I've suggested one thing before: improve citation practices. As I have argued before (see here, here, and here), many philosophers appear to have bizarre and unjustifiable citation practices. They think citations exist to recognize "good work" or "work that influenced them", this despite the fact that in every other discipline on the planet, citations exist to simply recognize work that exists--and for good reason: practices of citing "good work" or "work that influences you" can lead to systematic failure to cite people, wrongly excluding them from the literature because you don't think their work is good. Philosophers' citation standards, in other words, invite bias--which is precisely why good disciplines have better standards: standards which require people to be recognized for their work regardless of "whether you think it's good" and regardless of "whether it influenced you." Indeed, if anything could explain (in my view) the appalling facts of the Healy data (the data showing that "hardly anyone is getting cited", even people who publish in top journals!), this is it. People aren't cited because--whether we recognize it or not--we tend to think someone's work is good when it is work by a Famous Person from an Awesome Department: something which leads only Famous People from Awesome Departments ever getting cited.
So, I think we must insist on better citation practices. But I think there is something else we could do too. One thing that has always puzzled me about philosophy is that, by and large, journals do not permit mere "replies" to people's work in other journals. Although most journals permit short replies to work in their own pages, very few journals allow you to publish a "reply" to a piece in another journal. There are, it seems to me, two problems with this. First, it disincentivizes writing reply pieces. If you know that you can only send a reply piece to one journal (the journal that published the original piece), why in the world would you waste your time writing one? If your reply gets rejected, you are out of luck! Although I published a couple of replies to start out my career, I have to say: this is why I don't write replies anymore. It's just not a very good "bet" or way to spend one's time. Second, by restricting replies to articles that appear in their own pages, our discipline dramatically restricts the total number of replies that are likely to appear in the literature (since, if a reply gets rejected by the journal in which the article first appeared, the reply can never come out anywhere).
This is terrible. It means that even if someone wants to engage with the work of another person, actually replying to their work, (1) they are unlikely to do so (they are disincentivized from doing it), and (2) even if they do it, the chances of their reply ever ending up published are slim (since there is only one journal that will ever consider the piece). What does this mean? It means, I think, something that many of us already feel (and, I would say, know): that philosophy often appears more like a series of monologues rather than a true "conversation." Instead of engaging with other people's work, article after article engages primarily with either (A) the work of Famous People, or else (B) nothing more than whatever interests the author themselves (something which, I think, is responsible for the plague of self-citations in philosophy. When I do searches on Google scholar, the only person who often cites a person's work is...the person themself). This is no good. Philosophy should not be a series of monologues. It should be a genuine, open, inclusive, and engaged conversation. And, for that reason, I want to propose, journals should stop only allowing "replies" to their own articles. Science journals don't do this, and neither should we. Journals should allow replies to articles in other journals. While this might not solve the problems I've mentioned above, it would plausibly help significantly.
I think you raise an excellent point. Perhaps philosophy needs a metajournal: a journal that only publishes smallish pieces that comment on other pieces, offers counterexamples, etc. Maybe something online that would have a diverse editorial staff that can handle replies from a spectrum of journals, perhaps assigning an editor for each journal? If the metajournal also made a policy of working with the authors of the original papers that could probably generate some good philosophy. Anyone out there enterprising enough for this?
Posted by: Mark Z | 06/07/2015 at 08:39 PM
Thanks, Mark. I've given some thought to trying to start such a journal myself. Who knows... :)
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 06/08/2015 at 08:10 PM
"They think citations exist to recognize 'good work' or 'work that influenced them'."
This is a pervasive problem, and it would be great if more people would adopt more inclusive citation practices.
However, one reason they don't is that it's might put them at a disadvantage. In my area, not only does citing the "right" people increase the chance that you'll be taken seriously, avoiding citing the wrong people is a way of aligning yourself with certain cliques.
As a result, citing "up" (only the right cliques) means your paper can be published anywhere (the lesser journals will still publish it), while citing "down" will limit the number of (and reputation of) journals that will consider it.
Posted by: Anon | 06/09/2015 at 11:20 AM
Marcus, interesting. I'm not sure I understand your stance on citations. Does publishing an article incur an obligation to cite all relevant articles written on the same topic? That sounds impossible for any paper not written about a small and narrow topic.... Does your stance on citations imply that authoring a paper brings with it an obligation to read all papers written about the same topic. Don't at least some philosophers publish good work without reading all the articles previously published on the topic.
If instead there is no obligation to read an article before citing it, then why is it important to cite it, as long as some authors in a field cite all the others then doesn't that suffice. Why should there be an obligation to repeat the string cite in every article?
Also, under your preferred citation practice, how (or why) is an author supposed to cite a work they think is bad, misleading, or not worth reading? If they cite it with no further explanation except that it is a work on the same topic, then they in effect endorse it as much of the others. If they cite it and then explain why they think it is bad, then they've had to significantly change their article to meet a citation preference, which seems like the tail wagging the dog.
Posted by: Mert | 06/09/2015 at 11:53 AM
Anon: Thanks for your comment. That is a very disturbing point you make--and I suspect it is true. I suppose the most we can do is "try to be the change we want to see in the world." If my papers can only get into mid-level journals by me citing people appropriately, so be it. I have no desire to play into cliquishness. But, after reading your comment, I appreciate that there may be strong incentives to do just that.
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 06/09/2015 at 12:15 PM
Mert: I do not think there is any formal rule one can use to determine how many articles in a given literature to cite. As you note, it is impossible to cite them all. What we have, I think, is a *choice*: a choice between (A) erring on the high side (citing too many articles), and (B) erring on the low side (not citing enough). In my experience, people in many other fields pursue (A), whereas philosophers tend to pursue (B). For instance, my wife works in psychology. Although psychologists cannot cite *everything*, they sure as heck cite a lot, erring on over-citing over under-citing. We should follow them...and one way to do this is to get straight on the fact that one has no *right* to not cite things one simply thinks are "bad" (psychologists don't do this, nor do physicists).
Which brings me to your other question: how should we handle citations of work we think is bad? I answer: by briefly mentioning in the footnote the citation is included in why we think it is bad.
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 06/09/2015 at 12:19 PM
Mert: That's the common response, but it seems grossly uncharitable to me. Citation serves a number of purposes, among them giving credit where it is due (and avoiding plagiarism), supporting one's claims, creating a paper trail for one's claims (i.e. verifiability), as well as situating one's work within the literature and giving the reader a glance into one's research on the topic. None of these aims requires that one read or cite all work on a topic.
My thinking on when to cite goes like this. One cites when one quotes. One cites when one paraphrases. One cites when one attributes a position to someone, and one gives some general citations (of the 'for x, see y') type when one is setting the stage and giving an overview of available views. And I think that one ought to cite when one is aware of published work that presents significant disagreement.
To answer your other question, I don't think that one need to discuss all disagreement at length. That would be silly. But I do think one has an obligation to note disagreement when one is aware of it. If it's not serious enough (or relevant enough) to warrant inclusion in the body, then it can easily be dealt with through a one-sentence footnote. That way, you're being perfectly transparent, and helping to guide your readers through the subject. If they want to write on it too, then they can (and should!) chase down those other positions, and check to make sure that you got them right and are right to dismiss them.
My worry is that we don't read enough before writing on a topic. I get the impression, from philosophers' internetual descriptions of their research habits, that a great many of us just keep up with work in top journals (top generalist and top subfield). So I worry that when researching a particular topic, we too often restrict ourselves to work by people we know or in some personal list of pre-approved journals, and ignore the rest.
I also worry that there might be a tacit concern at work, something to the effect that geniuses do work so groundbreaking that they *can't* cite, and that the more one cites, the less important one's ideas are (or the less of an exceptional philosopher one is). Certainly, as we saw a few months ago, philosophy is still entirely in thrall to the myth of the genius.
That's not to say that we should be reading or citing everything, just that we should be reading and citing *more*. I'd be pretty interested to see how we score on those citation-practices tests most universities host for their students.
Posted by: Michel X. | 06/10/2015 at 11:40 AM
Hi all,
I believe this video is worth watching, as it is related to the same topics of your nice blog: https://vimeo.com/128539582
An introduction to transdisciplinarity. It has been greatly appreciated all over the world from International institutions of social/anthropology/transdisciplinarity scholars.
Feel free to embed it in your posts.
Fabio
Posted by: Fabio | 06/12/2015 at 08:13 AM