By C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley University / University of Utah)
The following is a post I made to Social Epistemology Network, a Facebook group that has become the de facto online hub for social epistemologists. I started out just wanting to suggest a small change in the social norms of the group — to encourage people, especially less well-known people, to post more about their work. But it evolved into a discussion of the unfair social impact of various norms of humility in our discipline. Basically: who benefits from the norms of humility, and who loses out?
(This post was originally composed on my phone, with a toddler in my lap, while supervising him on a vaguely educational app. This circumstance that may have resulted in some extra warts in the writing, but also more honesty. Take it for what you will.)
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Hey all. I wanted to talk about the norms for using this group, to encourage better information dissemination.
Let me briefly claim some credibility first. I think this group exists because, at an APA a few years back, I met Sandy Goldberg and asked him if there was an mailing list or group for disseminating social epistemology Information, and he said, “You know, I don’t know if there is. That’s a great idea!” And a week later, this group was born.
This was super important to me because, at the time, I had zero connections into the social epistemology world. I had no ins to the conversation. I didn’t know what to read or what people thought was important. There was no place to find out about conferences. I would pick up random bits of information, but I was definitely not PLUGGED IN.
When this group started, I had a particular hope: that people would post all their new papers. That it would become a one-stop shop for finding out about new relevant publications. This seems particularly important for us, since social epistemology publications are scattered across all sorts of journals. And the group seemed to be headed that way for a while, but then the norms settled in a different direction. Most people now seem to be following some kind of norm against self-promotion.
Basically: I think this de facto norm is a bad one, and I’d like for us to talk about it. And I would like to throw my support towards a different norm. I will, as is appropriate, offer a quick social epistemology argument for this.
Here are two plausible norms:
The No Self Promotion Norm (NSP): you should not post about your new articles here, nor should you mention when you have a relevant article in another person’s query thread. This is bad self-promotion. The properly humble thing to do is let others mention your articles when relevant.
The Expected Publicity Norm: when you have a new article or potentially useful blog post, post about it once here. Also mention it when relevant on other people’s threads. No shame for basic self-promotion. (Perhaps there should be some shame for spamming many posts to the same article).
The Expected Publicity Norm seems standard in science networks on social media, and works very well, in my opinion. But philosophy tends toward the No Self Promotion Norm on social media.
But the NSP seems bad to me, because it preserves status quo social imbalances that are often arbitrary, unjust, or simply not useful. NSP best serves people that are already well known and well connected in the field. It makes it very difficult for people that aren’t already well-embedded in the community to make their work known, or to find out about new work.
Before social media, a lot of knowledge dispersal happened through whisper networks and informal social networks - like chatter at conferences. This is particularly good for people who are well-known, or who have ready access to various forms of casual professional contact. You have a major advantage here if you have good travel funding, or live in one of the metropolitan hubs for active philosophy, or already know tons of people in the field and chat all the time. But if you don’t have these advantages, you’re cut out of the information network. NSP is a norm that amplifies inequities — many of them arbitrary ones.
Groups like this one could help to even that out. They offer the hope of better and more equitable access to information and distribution for all. But when we adopt the NSP norm, we push things back towards the old imbalances. (Also: some people seem to have adopted a norm where they post about new work on their personal thread, but not here. But this also preserves imbalances in social connections. This group is nice because anybody can join and get access to the information.)
So: I think we should try to shift norms. It would be better if the norms were such that it was expected, normal, and almost obligatory to post your new articles, with brief description, so we can ALL keep track of all the posts. Creating better awareness of relevant articles inside our community is an epistemic good. (I think a lot about Karen Jones’ suggestion in “Trustworthiness”: that the fully trustworthy person works to predict other people’s epistemic needs and actively tries to fulfill them - especially when others aren’t yet aware that they have a need.)
And also: if you’re afraid that this would create too much traffic: if this ended up generating one or two posts a day with new articles, that’s a drop in the bucket. Do you seriously think that I’m going to be annoyed to see a daily new article SE article pop up between the zillion baby photos, COVID armchairing, and social media crap? I mean, this group is 100% voluntary and mutable and filled with people whose lives are devoted to this topic.
Posting your articles isn’t the noise; it’s the signal.
I work in philosophy of science, but recently I have started to submit papers in another subfield of philosophy. These are all journals with a good reputation. However, to my surprise, it seems that a pattern is being established: editors ask me to provide suggestions for possible reviewers. This never happened to me in philosophy of science. What's the best practice here? Naturally, I'd propose people I know (assuming they have not read the paper and they do not know I'm working on that specific topic), because I know that those people will take their job seriously. However, even if those people do not know that I'm writing that specific paper, they may recognize who I am. But this, I say, happens even in blind peer-reviewed, especially in highly specialized fields such as philosophy of science. Am I terribly wrong? - Posted by: Don't really know what to do
I have a question related to that of Don't really know what to do. Should a philosophy journal ask the author of a submission to suggest possible reviewers? What are the rationales for and again this? -Posted by: jack
Another reader answered:
This is a common practice in science journals, to ask for (i) possible referees, and (ii) sometimes a list of people who you do not want to review your paper. In science it is common place to have only single blind - so the reviewer sees who the author or authors are. I publish regularly in an empirical field (call it scientific), and the key journal will not send your paper out for review unless you have your name on it.
However, while this may be a common practice in science, I wonder how readers feel about it, and whether anyone has tips for 'best practices.'