Against squeezing too much orange juice from few oranges

I'm reading an enthralling book on the Somerville Quartet of female Oxford philosophers, Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhail and Rachael Wiseman. It led me to look again at the work of GEM Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley. Prior to this book, I only knew Midgley's work reasonably well, because of her influence in the literature on science and religion (see here for a brief interview with me on her work in El Pais, and here for a recent scholarly paper that engages her thinking.)

I did know Anscombe's paper "Modern moral philosophy" (1958). It is 20 pages long and was published in Philosophy. I assigned the paper long ago on an intro to philosophy course (in 2015) in large part because I was looking for gender diversity.  Though my motives were external to the paper's merits, something happened that often happens when you try to diversify. I got utterly struck by how remarkable and rich and prescient this paper is. I've often come to think that one of the greatest things we gain from diversity is a gain of quality. My appreciation for this paper has only grown over the years as I've learned more about the history of philosophy in the 19-20th century, and the views Anscombe was pushing back against. 

One thing that struck me in re-reading it is how it would be hard to publish a paper with this scope today. What GEM Anscombe accomplishes in one paper, and a mere 20 pages at that, is to set out an ambitious agenda for what moral philosophy should be at the time she was writing.

Nowadays, to satisfy productivity requirements to get tenure, or even a job, a philosopher would write three papers at least, or a book. The opening paragraph gives you a flavor of the scope: 

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that it should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the well- known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.

The paper has an overall aim, that is, to think about the moral ought in a naturalistic, godless world. But it does much more besides, talking about the importance of psychology for moral philosophy and urging a better understanding by philosophers of moral psychology, agenda points that are still live today.

Today, we are meant to make our papers focused and efficient, to make a paper with three ideas into three papers. For instance, take this recent anonymous request for advice that was discussed on the Cocoon: 

I am becoming less efficient in writing as time goes on. When I read productivity advice for academics, the bottom line is usually, "spend more hours of your day writing." But what is "writing" mean? My real problem is not so much about finding hours for research, or about writing itself, it is about the process of translating great ideas into a single (limited) paper. When writing for a conference, I always see so many angles of exploring a theme and I struggle to choose between them. This bogs down my process as I explore all of them simultaneously, and often ends up complicating my writing to the point I publish one dense piece that really would have been better as three separate papers. 

I want to push back. There's already too much to read. If the author needs more publications for tenure or finding a job, then yes, there are pragmatic considerations. But there are no intrinsic reasons for why salami-publishing would be better, or as a Portuguese-speaking philosopher I recently spoke to called it "Squeezing too much orange juice from too few oranges" (I don't know if this is an expression in Portuguese?) 

What the author of the Cocoon advice column calls "one dense piece" you might equally call one rich complex, piece. Isn't it a delight to read papers like this? 

Why should we expect philosophical prose always to be easily digestible and neatly pre-cut and pre-chewed? Of course, clear writing is important (and Anscombe was a clear writer) but clear writing can coexist with complexity of thought. Think of the most interesting philosophers you have engaged with (from any period of time) and you'll see their work almost always cannot be easily sliced and diced like this, it's what explains their enduring allure. 

Though papers like Anscombe's are very rare, I sometimes still see papers where the author makes a really cool interesting side point. For instance, I recently read the paper "Disagreement from the religious margins" (2018) by Katherine Dormandy on how a religious majority has epistemic as well as moral duties to listen to its dissenters and heretics. The paper makes a beautiful point on epistemic meekness. Dormandy juxtaposes the epistemic meek to Medina's epistemic heroes: 

One need not be an epistemic hero, or even have a confident-alternative perspective, in order for one’s marginalization to yield religious insight, both for oneself and for the religious community; we may call marginalized people who are timid or who lack robust alternative versions of the belief system “epistemically meek”

Intrigued by this concept of epistemic meekness, I went to look at Google Scholar for other people who may have since discussed this topic, but the only mention I could find was in Dormandy's paper. And the interesting thing is that while epistemic meekness is such a cool concept it would deserve its own paper (I blogged a bit about it here), there is no such paper at present.  

I love the generosity of papers that help you to think like this by offering the careful, slow and complex distillation of multiple lines of thought in the author's philosophical views.

We should not lose sight of that and try to optimize our writing to efficiently squeeze out the maximal number of papers from a limited set of ideas. We should equally not spurn papers that resist the tendency toward homogeneity in our current profession and be open, as reviewers and authors, we should not reject out of hand papers that make ambitious and multi-faceted points. Part of the issue with rich papers finding homes in journals is I think that we are under a lot more pressure, a pressure that has steadily grown and that makes it hard to create the mental space to think along with a dense, complex piece. Maybe this is why rich, complex and ambitious papers fall prey to reviewers not appreciating them (for more thoughts and alternative ideas see Richard Yetter Chappell's substack post here). But, it's always great to see if one managed to grip reviewers' frayed attention span and makes it into print. 

 

 

 

Comments

[Peter Finocchiaro]

A rich post, Helen, and I think I agree with most of what you say. But I'm having a hard time grasping some parts of your argument. As I see it, a journal article has a telos and that telos isn't something like "be rich and a delight to read". So I still look at papers that say they have multiple theses as defective qua journal articles even if they are not defective qua intellectual stimulus. I take all of this to be compatible with your resistance to salami publishing, which I share.

So is the disagreement about the telos of a journal article? I don't quite understand why you want a *journal article* to play the role that you articulate here. How about instead de-emphasizing the journal article as the main form of philosophical output and instead promoting other forms of philosophy whose telos is more in line with providing a rich but less efficient presentation of philosophical ideas -- or, in the other direction, make more "bite-sized" pieces of philosophy that don't require as much labor as a typical journal article?

[Jordan]

Re: Peter

I guess I don't see why we should have such a strong, restrictive view of what journal articles are for. And we DO have strong reasons, at least for the time being, to do what we can with the journal article, since sociologically speaking it plays such a crucial role in the profession. Better to experiment with how far the journal article can be pushed than to face the uphill climb of getting colleagues to respect your "other forms." What COULD "Modern Moral Philosophy" have been, for example, but a journal article? And articles like it in ambition (if not always so successfully realized, of course) were not so uncommon before.

I don't think anyone would say that the primary purpose of a journal article is to "be rich and a delight to read," but right now it's having those features seems to be a mark against it. The journal article should aspire to be a relatively rigorous contribution to human knowledge/wisdom, I think. Single-thesis focused articles can of course do that, but they aren't the only things that can.

[Mark van Roojen]

I'm generally sympathetic, in that I miss the kind of ambitious papers that many of us read when we were first doing philosophy, even while I understand why we don't get many of those any more.

You could blame referees, but I don't think that is the primary driver of the phenomenon. I have refereed a lot and also edited some, and not all that many papers of that sort have crossed my desk. I think it has more to do with the incentives now present in academic philosophy. There is every reason for especially untenured people (but also for those wanting to move) to run with their first publishable idea, even if it could be combined with another idea for a richer and better paper. We have adopted norms that require more papers for tenure and promotion. As a field we don't value a second paper presenting an idea from a slightly different but not wholly different angle as much as it seems to me we used to. You can get scooped if you wait. Journals have lowered the number off words they want in a paper so that there are fewer venues for longer work. And there is so much to read that time pressure makes one less likely to read a longer piece of work.

Unfortunately, I don't think that we as a profession have as much control over this as we should. Tenure standards at most places come from above and are enforced by college and university P&T committees with no experience of comparable research. The commercial aspect of journal publishing has more and more influence on how journals are run. The pressures of the job market are not getting better, and are largely a function of the economics and politics of higher education.

Still I think it is worth pointing out that we've lost something along the way, and for trying to foster whatever vestiges are left.

[T]

> One thing that struck me in re-reading it is how it would be hard to publish a paper with this scope today.

I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but I'd be okay with an unblinded journal that published articles only by figures so established they have nothing to gain. I think papers like this would get published if the authors were known. This is perhaps why the original Philosophy and Public Affairs articles, before the journal was blinded, are so very exceptional.

[academic migrant]

Just mentioning, Ergo has publications and a blog. I think it is a decent model.

https://ergoblog.org