The Philosophers' Cocoon

Writing formal philosophy

This is a guest contribution by Richard Pettigrew, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol for our series How Philosophers Write:

Stephen Hawking speculated that every formula he included in A Brief History of Time would cut its readership in half. In the end, he included only one, E = mc2, and the book sold half a million copies every year for twenty years.

You often hear a similar complaint from those who work in the more formal parts of philosophy--Bayesian epistemology, philosophical logic, formal semantics, decision theory, voting theory, formal approaches in metaphysics and ethics, for instance. They lament that their work is not so often read, not so often discussed as work on nearby topics that do not use a formal framework.

Now, I don’t know whether the numbers support this gripe, but whether they do or not, there is certainly a lot of work in formal philosophy that is not easily accessible to people who aren’t fully immersed in the formal framework it uses. And while this is no doubt due in part to the difficulty of the mathematical techniques in play, it is also partly the result of the way in which some formal papers are written. And, indeed, mea culpa, I include a number of my own papers in this--I read them back sometimes and hate myself for not doing more to open them up to a wider readership. So I’m writing this not from the smug position of someone who claims to know all the secrets, but rather from the position of someone who’s trying to get better at making their formal work easier to read and digest. I’m not sure whether I’m succeeding, but here are some of the writing techniques I’ve been trying to use. I’d love to hear alternatives or supplements in the comments.

Should you write articles on marginal or moribund topics?

Should early career philosophers devote time and energy to writing journal articles on figures, topics, or debates that are moribund, marginal, or otherwise unlikely to gain interest among other philosophers? Obviously, this turns on complicated metaphilosophical and professional issues too large for a blog post, so let me offer an autobiographical perspective, following Thi Nguyen’s approach in an earlier post in this series.

I did my doctorate at Durham University, starting in September 2006, submitting exactly four years later. My topic was the neglected later writings of the still-controversial philosopher of science and self-styled ‘epistemological anarchist’, Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), author of Against Method. In terms of publishing articles on his later work, the prospects were mixed. On the one hand, Feyerabend was considered old hat. Genuinely important in his day, sure, but relative to ‘old-school’ concerns, no longer on the agenda of philosophy of science.

On starting papers, or: how I got over professional despair and learned to love philosophy again

This is the first instalment of our new series How Philosophers Write, a series aimed at demystifying the writing process of how we write publishable works. It is not meant to be universal advice, but rather meant as a series of very personal accounts. Through these accounts, we hope that readers (graduate students, but also more experienced philosophers) will learn something through the exemplars they see. As Confucius says (Analects 7:22), " When three men are walking together, there is one who can be my teacher. I pick out people's good and follow it. When I see their bad points, I correct them in myself."

We hope to discuss such topics as writer's block, finding new topics, publishing on topics that are not fashionable, overcoming the psychological obstacles of revise and resubmit, picking up a project again you left a long time ago. Please contact Helen De Cruz (hde-cruz@brookes.ac.uk) if you want to write a contribution.

Our first piece is written by Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. 

This is a very personal story about how I got over an extraordinary degree of academic writer’s block. None of the particulars may apply to you. If there’s a general lesson, maybe it’s that your writing process might turn out to be really weird, and really personal, and you may need to go on a long and painful voyage of self-examination and tailoring your process before you can write. (Or maybe not. Maybe this is all easy for you.)

I had a devastating, decade-long case of philosophical writer’s block, which I got over only fairly recently. To give you a sense of how big a change it was: during all of my graduate school years, I wrote one paper. During my first three years as an assistant professor, I wrote… one more paper. And then I figured out some stuff. And since then I’ve been happily writing about four papers a year. And I wrote a book, too. And most importantly of all: I actually like what I’m writing, now.The first things I wrote felt like ripping out my own teeth and bones, so that I could mash myself into a box labelled “Professional Philosopher”.

Writing on obscure topics in philosophy: A few tips for younger colleagues

If you write on Plato, you should start in medias res. If you write on Thomas Aquinas, you can do the same (unless you are writing for a journal specialising on something completely different, say, business ethics). If you write on a slightly less known author, I would suggest adding at least the dates of birth and death and perhaps a short description of their main work (say "the epistemologist XW (1200--1250)"). What about writing on a niche topic, say, South Asian philosophy? If you are writing for a non-specialist journal, you will need to explain a lot, since no one will know even the main authors, ideas and schools you will name. Nonetheless, this does not mean that each new piece on that niche topic should resemble a pale summary of scholarhip on it. Even if you need to tell, say, who Jayanta was and what nyāyā means, this does not mean that you cannot make an original contribution to the debate.

1. Just start with what you discovered. Did Jayanta think that justification is not needed in the case of the "ought" domain? Are you the first one who noticed this move? Be sure that this is your departing point.
2. You can then move to the background needed to appreciate the depth of your discovery. Do not just start with the background, otherwise your reader will think there is nothing new and close your article before reaching its core.
3. Be sure that theme and rheme are well distinguished in your article. The reader should not be confused about what is just a short summary of the background and what is your new and original contribution.
4. Please remember that an article is not a book. You can only convey one point. Don't try to overdo or you will not manage to convey anything at all.

What do other readers working on niche topics do? What do you recommend to your students?

Cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can read some interesting comments

Writing Strong Letters of Recommendation for Not-So-Strong Students

If you stick around in philosophy for long enough, you'll almost surely be asked to write a letter of recommendation for one of your students at some point. I did this a few times as a graduate student, but recently I've run into a problem with doing this.

When I wrote letters of recommendation as an ABD graduate student, the students who requested a letter provided me with a resume, personal statement, and a description of the programs they were applying to. They were among the very best students I had ever taught, and they discussed various aspects of their application with me in personal meetings prior to my writing their letter. These letters are easy to write and don't require any embellishment to be an asset to the student's application.

But I have recently learned the hard way that a lot of requests for letters of recommendation do not fit this description. In my current position, I have been asked to write letters of recommendation for students that I barely know, students who only did somewhat above average in my class, and students who provide me very little information about the programs to which they are applying and what they're saying in their personal statement.

Inclusive citations and editorial word count policy

As executive editor of the Journal of Analytic Theology, I've been working with the other editors on a document to spell out our editorial practices and procedures. Having such a document will, we hope, inspire confidence in authors who submit to our journal and in our referees, improve transparency of the review process, and hopefully provides a set of guidelines for us as editors as well.

One thing we've been trying to address is citation practices. In particular, we've now included the following policy: 

Papers should normally be under 9,000 words in length, the word count is not including references but including footnotes, appendices and other supplementary materials. Longer papers will be considered but note that they need to clear a higher bar, and need to have some justification for their length. We value economy of expression. We are not including the list of references in the word count so as to encourage authors to cite inclusively, i.e., to cite work that has meaningfully played a role in

the ideas of their paper, rather than only signalling their knowledge of the prestigious or most well-known works in the field. [emphasis added]

Let me briefly elaborate on this policy. Although analytic theology is not exclusively a philosophical field (it is interdisciplinary), we get a lot of analytic philosophy of religion and have noticed that there is a trend among authors to cite sparingly, as is the general practice in analytic philosophy. 

When you cite sparingly, as Eric Schliesser observed, citation are in danger of becoming a commodity, a favour to be bestowed, presumably in exchange for other goods. And as Marcus Arvan argued, by having sparing citations we end up using citations as a form of status signalling. That is why philosophers tend to cite prestigious papers from prestigious journals, so called "agenda-setters". That practice is riddled with implicit biases--all things being equal, we're less likely to cite women, people of colour, people from less prestigious institutions.   

While it is difficult to fix these issues right away, one thing editors can do is to explicitly encourage people to cite inclusively, asking them to cite work that has actually played a role in their thinking. For unlike Marcus I am not convinced people just read and cite top generalist journals. But they might still cite, all things being equal, work from such journals as it is deemed more influential and agenda-setting. When the word count becomes pressing, how often do we not cut down on citations? And it is likely that the cutting of citations is riddled with implicit biases, thus further exacerbating unbalanced citation practices. 

By taking the pressure off the word count for references (after all, Journal of Analytic Theology is an online open-access journal so we do not need to worry about print runs and page counts), and by explicitly encouraging our authors to cite inclusively, we hope to redress the imbalance somewhat. 

Sexual Assault and Citation Practices

By Peter Furlong

Another philosopher recently looked over a manuscript I had been working on for a book. He noted that in a footnote, I cited a comment from someone that has recently fallen from grace because of sexual assault issues. My friend, reading my manuscript, noted that readers might not respond positively to the inclusion of this footnote.

Before moving on to the issue of how we should treat these sorts of offenders, I want to say something about my specific case. The footnote was not really necessary. In the book, I was saying something about conflicting intuitions concerning an issue that people have been weighing in on for centuries. People have strong intuitions on both sides; this is well known. In a footnote, I quoted a particularly forceful endorsement of commitment to one side of this issue (one that was not even made in a piece of scholarship). The person I quoted does not even really work much in this area, just, apparently, has extremely strong views on this particular question. So I cited it to illustrate just how committed some are to particular answers. It was an illustrative citation, rather than one that recognizes prior contributions from others.

Writing service

Pendaran Roberts (Warwick) writes in:

I saw that one blog post about the student asking for help with their writing sample and another blog post about non-native English speakers. I was thinking that my skills and experience could be of service to people. Maybe you could share the below with your readers? I’d be a good resource and could provide a personalized experience. I was thinking of trying to do this kind of work part-time to help people. 

_____________________

I am offering a service where I help philosophers develop their writing samples and perfect their writing more generally. I have a PhD in Philosophy from a UK university but know both US and UK English. I have a dozen academic publications, many in top 20 journals (https://philpeople.org/profiles/pendaran-roberts). I can help you to achieve your academic writing goals to get into a PhD program or to get your ideas published. 

Please just email me at pendaran@mac.com. We can discuss what help exactly you need and agree on a fee. My help can range from merely proofreading your work to in-depth coaching to develop your academic writing ability.

If you are a non-native speaker, I am also happy to be of service. I am not an English teacher but can read through work, correct English mistakes, and help with the overall feel of your writing. 

Accountability Tools

While I was working on my dissertation proposal, I came across Robert Paul Wolff’s blog post “How to write a doctoral dissertation in philosophy.”  For the most part, I thought it was great. (I just reread it for the first time in years.  I still think most of it is great advice.)  I thought it was so great I emailed it to several of my classmates who were ABD.  Some of them hated it, and so we all took a break from the serious business of grad school to argue about it. I have no intention of returning to that argument here.

Instead, I want to talk about just one of the things that Wolff says.  Here it is:

On the first day, write one page and stop. The next day, write another page, and stop.... If you are able to, write two pages a day.... Also, do not write four or five pages on a really good day and then figure you can take a few days off. Those few days will stretch into eternity. You are a tortoise, not a hare. Slow and steady wins the race....

He also suggests the following for those who might need extra motivation, but I think it might be of use even to those who are fairly self-disciplined:

…cut a deal with a fellow dissertation writer. You will send her a page a day by email, and she will send you a page of her dissertation every day by email. You will read her page [it only takes a minute] and send back an encouraging word, and she will do the same for you.

Writing Groups

For my first few posts, I wanted to talk about writing.  In particular, I wanted to talk about practices—both individual and communal—related to writing.  I am interested in how the act of writing (and the act of avoiding writing, for that matter) is related to other behaviors.  I am also interested in how we might better integrate the act of writing into our lives, perhaps to make us more productive, or perhaps simply to make us happier.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 9: When It's Over

The final suggestion I offered in the previous post in this series was that graduate students should not expect to be overjoyed when their dissertation is finished, but I said nothing about what graduate students can expect after they’ve finished their dissertation. So what is post-dissertation life like?

In the short term, you’ll probably feel some sense of relief. From recent PhDs I have spoken to, this feeling is pretty common. It’s not just that you’re freed from the burden of dissertation work –  though that’s obviously part of the story – but rather that you’re freed from the burden of graduate school. Think for a moment about how many hoops you have to jump through to get a PhD: course requirements, teaching assignments, comprehensive examinations, a language requirement, the dissertation, and perhaps more. You have some flexibility with regard to how you meet some of these requirements, but it’s often fairly limited. As a teaching assistant, for instance, you are unlikely to have much input in assigned readings or methods of assessment that are used in the class; the professor will usually make those judgments without your input. As another example, you don’t have much (if any) say in what graduate courses are offered each term, and in smaller programs, course offerings could be fairly limited.

It’s a safe bet that some of these requirements won’t seem so burdensome, since you’re likely to enjoy fulfilling some of them, but after toiling away at them for the better part of a decade, you will be ready to be done with them. The first day you wake up and realize you have no graduate school requirements on the agenda can bring a sense of relaxation that hasn’t been felt in a long time.

That being said, do not expect the semester after your defense to be easy, assuming that you’re pursuing long-term academic employment. Most people end up in a temporary position for their first job, so there’s not a ton of time to relax before you’re back to polishing job applications and trying to add to your CV. Some experience a post-dissertation slump, often as a result of no longer having a grand project that demands their attention and provides structure to their priorities. Even if that doesn’t happen to you, it’s safe to say that your workload won’t significantly lighten after the dissertation concludes. In some respects (e.g., increased teaching responsibilities), your first position will likely require more work than what you were required to do as a graduate student.

Nevertheless, even without feeling overjoyed at the completion of your dissertation or being freed from the labors of academic life, completing the dissertation still provides a persistent source of gratification over time. Most of the good feelings associated with academic achievements do not come from immediate euphoria or the ongoing process of their completion. (This is true even in cases where portions of that process are enjoyable: I generally like writing, but this enjoyment is easily overwhelmed by tedium when addressing a revise-and-resubmit verdict or preparing a manuscript for submission to its third or fourth venue.) Instead, the satisfaction that comes from most academic achievements is a stable, gradually accumulating sense of accomplishment. The dissertation, so far as I can tell, is not an exception to this rule.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 8: Lessons Learned

I’ve spent prior posts in this series recapping various aspects of writing the dissertation that can make the process difficult. Since these have been scattered across posts over the past few months, it’s worth recapping them:

1. The dissertation is a different kind of project than most anything else one does in graduate school.
   • The dissertation lacks rigid structure and concrete deadlines.
   • The dissertation is a much larger project  than most others pursued in graduate school.
   • There is more riding on the completion of the dissertation than any other single project in graduate school.
   • Work on the dissertation cannot be easily postponed.
2. The need to pursue publication (to be competitive on the job market) can lead to an abundance of non-dissertation commitments late in graduate school.
3. You will most likely need to go on the job market at least once while your dissertation is still unfinished.
4. Your dissertation work may lead you to lose your enjoyment of  writing.
5. Your dissertation work can be impeded by personal crises (e.g., financial difficulties, health problems, mental illness, relationship struggles).

After all that, I briefly described how I actually got the dissertation done in the end. So what are the lessons that can be taken away from all this to help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and ultimately complete it? Here are a few suggestions.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 7: Getting It Done

I ended the last part of the series on a cliffhanger. Here’s an abbreviated recap: after a series of starts and stops on the dissertation, January arrived, and it still wasn’t done. In fact, there was still quite a bit of unwritten material. After returning from the APA Eastern meeting, I faced the fact that time was running out, and I really didn’t want to drag the project into the summer. So how did I finally get it done?

First, a little background is in order. During my very first semester of graduate school (all the way back in Fall 2010), after completing all my preliminary research and determining what I wanted to argue, I wrote and revised all 3 of my term papers in an intense 4-day writing binge. In total, I wrote around 15,000 words in this stretch. The routine during those 4 days went roughly as follows: get up, get a bowl of cereal, turn on the computer, bring up MS Word, write for 4-5 hours, 30-minute break for lunch, write for 5-6 hours, 1-hour break to make and eat dinner, write until tired, go to sleep, and repeat.

Now, let’s be clear: this is not a sustainable or desirable model for academic writing. It doesn’t come anywhere near the well-balanced academic life one might want, and it’s incompatible with significant teaching and service commitments. But for a short spell at the very end of the term (when I no longer had teaching commitments), it was effective.

Fast forward to January 2017. When the semester got rolling, I tried to emulate this schedule as much as possible. After allocating the necessary hours each week toward teaching and job applications, I put as many hours as possible toward dissertation writing. As many as I could without losing my mind.

For two months, I became a social hermit, worked out less, and refused to take on any additional projects beyond what I was already committed to. I was teaching a course that I had already taught several times, so my required teaching prep was relatively minimal. Grading did take longer than it normally would have, though, since it was not as high on my priority list. The grind wasn’t fun, but it was successful. I sent out the polished first half of my dissertation to committee members in early March and followed up with the revised second half two weeks later. The defense at the end of the month was uneventful.

The costs of the grind were severe. Once post-defense revisions were submitted in April, I set my research aside for almost two months, a longer break from my research than I had ever taken during graduate school. While I had succeeded in my two major goals for that semester – finding a job for the following fall and finishing the dissertation – these triumphs brought little joy. The mental and emotional toil wrapped up in the prior academic year had left me exhausted, and the only good feeling that could be savored was relief. It was time for a break.

And so the narrative portion of the series concludes. But there are still two parts to go. In the next segment, I’ll summarize the major lessons that can be drawn from prior posts and consider how those insights might help graduate students prepare for the dissertation stage and eventually finish their degree.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 6: When Other Things Seem More Important

As I said in the previous entry in this series, I believe there were two moments where I came close to not completing the dissertation. The first occurred in Summer 2016 when the tedium of dissertation work stifled my enjoyment of writing. As I noted in Part 5, I eventually snapped out of that spell and got back to making steady progress. In October, I had to disrupt my momentum to polish dossier materials and send out job applications, but that brief gap in progress did not affect me too much. I kept sending material to my advisor, and everything continued as planned. A defense at the end of January looked likely.

Unfortunately, things did not stay that way for long. Outside of my philosophical life, two things happened that fall that had a significant impact on me. The first was the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I had, for the most part, tried to ignore the political developments in the U.S. over the summer and focus on my work, but the all-encompassing election coverage on social media and the vitriolic nature of the campaigns made the events difficult to ignore. When the results were finally obtained on November 8th, the outcome was not what I had hoped for, and many of my peers spent the remainder of the night (and a chunk of the morning) in the close proximity to hard liquor.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 5: When You Start to Hate Writing

In the last few parts of this series, I have discussed several major factors that make the dissertation difficult to complete. Since it’s taken several weeks to get to this point, let’s recap what I’ve highlighted thus far:

1. The dissertation stage of graduate school lacks a rigid structure and concrete deadlines.
2. The dissertation is a much larger project than anything else in graduate school.
3. The dissertation has higher stakes than any other project in graduate school.
4. Unlike many other things in graduate school, dissertation work cannot be easily postponed.
5. Other commitments often hinder your ability to make consistent progress on the dissertation.
6. Dissertation progress (often) must be maintained even when navigating the academic job market for the first time.

That seems like an impressive list. It’s not hard to see why the dissertation would be tough to finish given this information. Here’s the catch: none of these factors explains why the dissertation was the hardest part of my graduate career. I actually think I was rather well-prepared for these things, insofar as that’s possible. The biggest reason that finishing the dissertation difficult was something I had not anticipated and something I was not ready for.

For a time, working on the dissertation actually made me hate writing.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 4: The First Job Market Run

Part 3 of this series focused on the problem of stacking commitments – the tendency for non-dissertation commitments to overwhelm one’s schedule in the final stages of graduate school as one tries to become a viable candidate on the job market. Now’s the time to consider the job market itself and how the initial run can impact your dissertation work.

First, let’s start with the ideal scenario. You manage to get a couple publications during graduate school, and the rest of your CV is pretty solid. You spend most of your summer finishing a full draft of your dissertation. Only revisions and the formal defense remain. You then devote the remainder of your summer and the first half of the fall toward job market preparation. You make sure all your statements are polished and that your writing samples have been thoroughly revised and edited according to feedback from your colleagues. You keep pace with the job market deadlines while making revisions to your dissertation manuscript and schedule a January defense, ensuring that your dissertation will be done long before you start your first job (if you're able to snag one).

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 3: Stacking Commitments

In my last post, I emphasized the ways in which the dissertation stage differs from other aspects of graduate school. One of the major differences is that the dissertation is a much longer project than anything else you will be required to complete. Given its length, it’s no surprise that you have to devote a lot of time to it over the last year or two of your graduate studies. In the abstract, that might not sound too terrible, since you aren’t saddled with coursework or preparing for comprehensive exams. If only it were so simple.

In this and the next part of the series, I consider two related features of the dissertation stage that both threaten to rob you of your writing time: commitments tied to side-projects and professional development and the job market push that will most likely occur during your final year of graduate school. We’ll start with the former – what I call the problem of stacking commitments.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 2: A Different Kind of Project

In the first post of this series, I highlighted four factors that made the dissertation stage of graduate school challenging for me. In this post, I focus on how the dissertation differs from other graduate work and why these differences tend to make writing the dissertation more difficult than the other stages of graduate school.

Difference #1: Lack of Rigid Structure and Concrete Deadlines

The first few years of graduate school are highly structured. You take courses with clear reading lists and concrete deadlines. You have conversations about the course material every week, and the professor will often give you insight into the kinds of topics that would make for good papers. Often, you’ll get some feedback on in-progress work (through peer review, presentations, etc.) during the course.

Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 1: Is It Really That Hard?

By Trevor Hedberg

In Spring 2017, I finally completed my doctoral dissertation. While the experience is still fresh in my mind, I thought it might help graduate students to offer a little perspective on what it’s like to write a dissertation and what makes it such a difficult part of graduate school. In the opening segment of this series, I want to consider a question that crossed my mind several times during my first four years of graduate school: is writing a dissertation really that difficult?

Philosophy through fiction story competition: Why you should write a story and submit it

I'm organizing a short story competition for philosophical fiction, funded by a grant from the American Philosophical Association's Berry Fund for Public philosophy. 

The aim of this competition is to encourage philosophers to use fiction to express their philosophical ideas. Some philosophical ideas as better expressed in a story than in a traditional essay. As works by Iris Murdoch and Jean Paul Sartre indicate, you could potentially also reach a big audience through stories. The competition is open to everyone, including students, making it an excellent opportunity to try your hand at a slightly different way of doing philosophy. Next to the cash prize of 500 USD and publication in Sci Phi Journal of the winning story, we are also publishing an edited volume of submitted stories that make an excellent contribution to philosophy. 

Read more about the competition, including the rules, dates, and how to submit here. A couple of points to keep in mind: 

• Word count is at least 1000 words, maximum 7500 words
• Genre needs to be speculative fiction (e.g., fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism)
• Story needs to be accompanied by a food for thought section, explaining the philosophical rationale of the work (max 500 words, not part of overall word count). This section will be part of the evaluation
• Story needs to be unpublished - this also means it should not be on your personal website, blog or similar (this is a common norm for fiction publishing)
• Deadline 1 February 2017, decision by 31 March 2017
• The review process has two stages: first, initial vetting by a team of experienced readers at Sci Phi Journal, second, evaluation by three judges: Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame), Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and Mark Silcox (University of Central Oklahoma). By entering the competition, you accept their decision is final. They will select the winning story, as well as a number of very good entries to be considered for an edited volume (you can opt out of the volume, but you need to do so explicitly upon entering the competition)

Read more about why fiction is a valuable philosophical tool here. 

Now you may ask, " Is this competition for me? I've dabbled somewhat in writing stories, but never anything serious." Or you may worry that writing for this competition might take away valuable research time. I hope you would consider submitting your story to us. As I explained in the interview: 

The professionalization of philosophy has led to some unfortunate consequences, some of which include a narrowing of what is deemed philosophically interesting. There is great pressure on graduate students and other untenured philosophers to write papers that would end up in “good journals”, that is, a limited number of general philosophy journals and some specialist ones. The problem is that these are highly restricted in their scope.

So, I hope that this competition will liberate us somewhat from the yoke of writing papers for good journals, and free up our minds to write in a different way, and maybe see philosophical ideas in a different light. This, in any case, was my aim in launching this story competition, as well as the workshop Fiction Writing for Philosophers, for which the call will go out later this year. 

If you are new to writing fiction, you can read some tips by Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, or those for a bit more advanced writers by Ursula Le Guin. 

A Dissertation Retrospective

Hey ya'll. Sorry for the radio silence. I've been rushing to finish my dissertation so I can start a new gig in the Fall, and its been all consuming. I'll be designing some new courses from scratch later this summer, at which point I plan to continue the syllabus design series. But in the meantime, since all I'm thinking about lately is my dissertation, I thought I'd share my impressions of the process. So join me after the break for a look back...

Happily ever after? Career advice for mid-career academics

The Cocoon is foremost a forum for early-career philosophers, but I have decided to put together some advice for mid-career academics. This is partly because I am in this situation (I am now senior lecturer, which is the equivalent of an associate professor), after a long period of temporary positions. It is also partly because I have seen that many associate professors are faced with challenges that do not get much attention, because people assume - mistakenly that associate professors have figured it all out by now.  I hereby pool some advice I heard from other academics as well as my ideas on issues facing mid-career academics.

For a graduate student, postdoc or any other academic who is not in a tenured or tenure track position, it seems that happy ever after starts once one obtains a tenure-track position (or equivalent), a bit like the female protagonist finding a suitable partner in a Jane Austen novel. People outside of the tenure track look on in disbelief as their tenured and tenure-track colleagues grumble about committee work, heavy teaching loads, the lack of accommodation for their spouses, decreasing pension and healthcare benefits, and the decline of wages in real terms. The thought presents itself that if only I had such a job I wouldn’t complain. When I was a postdoc, I entertained such thoughts.

Now I know that obtaining a tenure-track position is only the beginning. It definitely beats being off the tenure track, but it is not happy ever after. You need to be savvy about your career in all stages—all the way from searching for a tenure track job to being a full professor. In Jane Austen’s novels, it makes sense that the match is the end of the novel. After all, women in Jane Austen’s time had few prospects, and the main way to have economic and social goods was to marry, and that was the one and crucial decision to make. 

With the erosion of tenure and an increasing mobility of academics, finding your tenure track job no longer resembles a Jane Austen novel, where you find yourself with your dream job (Mr Darcy) or a job you deem suboptimal (but, hey, your PhD is getting stale and you need something permanent, Mr Collins).

According to several surveys, associate professors are less happy and experience less career satisfaction compared to people of other tenure-line ranks. The job uncertainty is finally gone but new doubts creep in: Is this it? Here follow some points of advice.

Working together: There must be a way

I am a passionate fan of co-working, since

1. I believe that working with other people (especially if one works with always new people and not always with the same group) helps one becoming aware of one's implicit presuppositions
2. working with other people allows me to achieve more ambitious goals (in my case, an example are the volumes on the Reuse of texts in Classical Indian philosophy I edited for the Journal of Indian Philosophy---I would not have been able to achieve that target alone, since I lack the relevant expertise in many fields of Indian philoosophy)
3. working with other people is more fun, and fun motivates one whenever one is stuck in a difficult situation

This being said, however, working with other people is also difficult ---so much that serious workers often end up thinking that "it would have been easier to do all on my own!" (if you have been working with other people and this thought never occurred to you, you are either a saint, or an excellent co-worker with excellent co-workers… or you are the one everyone is complaining about:-)). In this post, I want to explore the possibility of working with other people with mutual satisfaction. There must be a way, if we do not want only saints to co-work.

1. Speak openly about your expectations
In my case, in one case I discovered half-way that my co-editors did not think it necessary to read, correct, send to the authors, re-read, re-correct, re-send to the authors… all the articles of a volume we were editing together. For me, the opposite was so obvious that I did not even deem it necessary to say it explicitly ---now I do.
2. Speak openly about your editorial choices
You will not anticipate how much time you will save if you decide to spend some time arguing about whether to use the Chicago or the Oxford Manual of Style before starting to write or edit articles. Also, decide whether you expect the book/article/… to have sections, numberings and the like.
3. Speak openly about what you want to do yourself
I am a big fan of delegation since I want to focus on more substantial issues than the position of footnotes. Thus, it makes sense for me to discuss well in advance about how much money we can invest in outsourcing proof-reading or the like.
4. Speak openly about the time (and money, about which see above) you want to invest in the project
5. Speak openly about realistic deadlines
6. Speak openly about your rules
For instance: Will any contribution to your edited volume be discussed by all co-editors? Will any comment to the author be previously read by all co-editors? If so, will all co-editors have the time to respond swiftly?

Do you have further suggestions? What works for you? For a fuller discussion of some of these issues, see this post.

Why I blog

By Helen De Cruz

Thank you to Marcus Arvan for raising the question why not more early-career philosophers blog. In fact, across the board most philosophers do not blog, and I'm not sure whether early-career philosophers are underrepresented. Still, the question remains why so few philosophers are bloggers. As some of the readers might know, I like to blog, and I think it can be part of an effective way to engage with philosophers outside of the normal routes. 

The importance of proofreading

"The academic monograph is dead! The days of small university presses are numbered!" This is a common refrain among analysts of academic publishing in the digital age -- sometimes proclaimed with glee (especially by those technology enthusiasts who would like to see websites and digital databases take the place of the academic monograph), but more often in the form of a lament over the decline of publishing. And yet, monographs still play an important role -- not only for individual career paths (especially in disciplines where "having a monograph" is seen as essential for promotion to more senior positions), but also as major contributions to scholarship.

I count myself among those who think that monographs are of singular importance to philosophy and cannot easily be replaced by journal articles. Not every important philosophical idea needs to be turned into a monograph, obviously, and though I don't mind it if monographs include published material, I do feel cheated when a "monograph" I've bought turns out to consist solely of superficially rewritten journal articles (just call it a collection of published essays, then!). Which brings me to another confession: I regularly buy (and read) monographs, sometimes (gasp!) even the pricey hardcover editions.

However, on more than one occasion, I've been disappointed by the books I've bought -- including some of those I've been most looking forward to, written by colleagues whom I respect and even admire. I don't mean the philosophical content of the books in question -- which, on occasion, has been groundbreaking -- but by the simple fact that these books were riddled with typos, missing footnotes, incomplete references etc. -- Whether it is because of rushed deadlines (which I've discussed here) or because of misplaced trust that the publisher would take care of it, I don't know -- what I do know is that no one could possibly have proofread the galleys without spotting at least the more glaring typos.

Which is why I am imploring authors -- established scholars and those planning their first book -- to make sure to proofread their manuscripts/galleys before they get sent to the printers. Don't rely solely on the publisher to do this -- many of them have outsourced typesetting (which sometimes introduces typos, as I'll discuss in a future post).

For my recent book A Critical Introduction to Testimony (which, if I'm permitted to plug the book a little, is the first comprehensive survey of the epistemology of testimony since Coady's 1992 book; for a longish essay review click here), I was lucky enough to have research funds that allowed me to hire two fantastic student assistants who helped with the proofreading and indexing. Even so, I went through three rounds of proofreading myself -- and asked the publisher to prepare an additional set of proofs, just to make sure all the corrections had made it into the final product.

Even in the final round of proofreading, I still found a sentence that said "testimony" where it should have said "evidence" (thereby rendering the sentence tautological), and, in spite of my best efforts, I imagine there are still some typos hidden somewhere in the 264 pages... (If you, or one of your students -- yes, the book is eminently suitable as a class text, thanks to study questions etc. ... ok, enough already -- spot any typos, do let me know as the publisher informs me the book is selling reasonably well, so there may be a second edition.)

In a recent post, Marcus discusses the process of writing a book proposal and pitching it to different publishers. As he notes, writing a book is a massive commitment of time and resources, and few authors would be comfortable with publishing a book that no one reads. However, in this day and age, buying and reading an academic monograph also constitutes a non-negligible commitment of time and resources on the part of the reader (just look at the average price of a Routledge or OUP hardcover!), and no author should be comfortable with publishing a book that is riddled with typos, missing references, a useless index, or which unnecessarily tests the reader's patience in other ways.

So, when you write a book -- whether it's your first, or your twentieth -- do make sure to proofread it properly.

So, you want to edit a book? Or to participate in an edited collection? Read here first!

I have discussed here and here my analysis of authors as belonging to a continuum of which the two extremes are the category of "artists" (they want to impress with a great narrative, and see their writings as works of art) and that of "communicators" (they want to engage in discussion, and see their writings as open to modifications).

Now, I would like to add a few new insights derived from my recent work as editor (I am constantly editing or co-editing books ---currently I have four co-editorships going on):

• While reading the drafts sent to me, I invariably add post-its or the like with questions such as "What do you mean by that?" or "Do you mean to say that x?" More often than one would expect, I get an answer from the author in the same post-it and directed to me alone. However, as an author I think you should focus on the fact that hardly anyone will read your article as carefully as the book editor. Thus, if she or he does not understand something, this means that you have not been clear enough and that you have to clarify.




• Since I am a communicator much more than an artist, and a syntetic much more than an analytic person, I am not particularly annoyed by typos, imprecise bibliographies and the like. Nonetheless, after I have commented upon the first draft and told the author about such problems, I expect them to take care of these flaws. They can decide to either spend time (e.g., by looking carefully through their article, checking grammars and dictionaries and the like) or money (e.g., by paying an English native speaker and/or a proofreader) on their articles, but I think it would be unfair from them to expect me to do it (in case you are wondering: I regularly have my articles checked by an English proofreader).

Last, a warning (in case you want to work with engaged editors like me):

• I find collections with no specific purpose useless and slightly annoying (because one never knows what one will find in them) and I take my job as editor extremely seriously. Thus, I expect the authors and co-editors working with me to work on shared enterprise (and not just to deliver their article as if it was a parcel). If you are not ready to re-think your article along with your editor, send it to a journal and not to an edited collection. But, let me add that almost all the authors who have worked with me in the past have hated me (like any other editor, I suppose) during the process and thanked me a lot afterwards, since articles are incredibly improved while going through this process.

What are your insights as editor and author?

If you are editing a book, you might also be interested in this post (on what one can delegate while editing a book or article, sorry for some Indian-specific items).
Cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog.

A non-funded project on deontic logic ---And some general notes on peer-reviewing projects

I have already written about the importance of writing project applications for European scholars. For people who do not have a tenure (i.e., the very vast majority of scholars and the almost-totality of scholars under 40), projects are the only way to get their research financed, since it is very difficult or almost impossible to survive out of teaching alone. Recently, a personal experience made me reflect on the ethics of peer-reviewing research projects. At least in part, my reflections harmonise with the ones Marcus, Moti and others have spelt out, on this and other platforms, concerning peer-reviewing articles on journals. Nonetheless, I would be glad to read your opinion on this specific issue (if you think that it lies far away from you, consider the fact that you might be asked to be a peer-reviewer earlier than you think).

Some months ago, departing from Decemeber 2013, I started working on a fascinating project, the formalisation of the deontic logic of some Mīmāṃsā authors (Kumārila, Prabhākara and Maṇḍana). Given that I am not an expert on formal logic, the project has been conceived together with some colleagues working on formal logic and on the IT tools for automating it. After some preliminary work, we submitted a project within the "Mathematics and…" call of the WWTF. The other principal investigator was Agata Ciabattoni and the other collaborators were Björn Lellmann and Ekaterina Lebedeva. Agata and Björn would have been working with me on selecting the logical rules from the relevant Sanskrit texts, translating them in formal logical language and developing automated deduction methods to reason about them.
Ekaterina, as a linguist and an expert of the intersection of language and logic, would have taken care of the fact that our translations of Sanskrit passages into logical rules did not entail logical ambiguities.

Unfortunately, however, the project has not been funded. I read the four reports, and they all sound positive, so that it is difficult to imagine what we could do better in order to improve our chances by the time of a resubmission. This is a pity and made me consider various other failed projects of colleagues and friends. It seems that there are two types of failures:

1. justified failure: The peer-reviewers give pertinent reasons for which the project is not worthy of being funded.


2. unjustified failure: The reports are entirely positive, or at most contain suggestions for further improvement. Nonetheless, the jury of the funds decides not to fund it.

Strangely enough, it seems that 2) is much more common than 1). In my case, I received a motivated refusal only once, and even then, the refusal was not motivated through scientific reasons, but rather through the fact that I was asking for more money than the university could have wanted to invest (it was a FIRB project in Italy, about the critical edition and study of Nyāyamañjarī 5). In another case (again a FIRB in Italy), the project has not been funded and this was the general comment:

By investigating the work of Jayanta Bhatta from a linguistic point of view, the research project aims to make Indian philosophy available to Western scholars. Topic and methodology are very well thought through. The scientific profile of the research group is outstanding.

The following is an extract of the comments received by a friend on a project which has also not been funded. I have omitted names and titles and further identification marks, but nothing else:

The stand-alone project entitled [om.] submitted by Dr. [om.] appears sound and promising. The applicant proposes to prepare a critical edition with an English translation of the Commentary [om.]. Dr. [om.]'s critical edition of [om.] together with an English transaltion will definitely fill up a long-standing gap in the Indological studies and in philosophy of language, It will be a powerful resource for future research. [om.] The applicant has spelt out the goals and subgoals of his research very clearly. The time line that he has given is pragmatic and the project executable within the proposed time-frame. He has chosen a very competent researcher as his project assistant [om.]. National and international collaborators in the project are all very eminent scholars, in fact stalwarts in the area. I am very hopeful that the project as outlined will make significant contributions to the field. The proposed project lies in the interface area of Indology, Sanskrit Grammar, Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics and has an inter-disciplinary flavour to it.

However, on the last page, under the heading "Suggestions" ---suggested by the jury and not added by the peer-reviewer---, the same peer-reviewer writes:

As the applicant needs to collect material from libraries in India too, he should also try and interact with the established [om.] scholars in India.

This sounds like a genuine suggestion, but has become the reason for rejecting the project.

In the case of deontic logic, the motivation for the refusal was that the project was "very appealing but also very ambitious". The four reports, as I said, are in fact positive or vey positive, although one of them contains indeed the adjective "ambitious" as an answer to the heading "What are the strenghts and weaknesses of the project?" ---the heading is part of the jury's document and had not added by the peer-reviewer:

Strenghts: Even if partly succesful, the project will make a strong contribution to mathematical logic, computational logic and Indology. Truly interdisciplinary, strong feedback between mathematical technology and the application.
Weaknesses: Perhaps a bit too ambitious.

I do not want this to be a rant, but a general reflection. It seems that, given the general economic difficulties, juries are only looking for excuses for letting down projects. Thus, I wonder:
It seems to me that if you care about the project you are peer-reviewing to be funded, then you should just avoid all suggestions. This sounds paradoxical and sad, since one indeed wants to help a project by adding insightful comments. I, as one, cannot remain silent on anything and surely not on something I care for. Nonetheless, it seems that adding comments or suggestions is easily read as a reservation and this is consequently used as the best excuse to let down at least one further project ---given that there are anyway too many good projects to fund them all.

What are your experiences? Which judgements did you receive or write?
Cross-posted, with some changes, on my personal blog

Ought one not respond to bad papers?

In my second year of grad school, I audited a course on Davidson. In reading one recent paper on Davidson’s triangulation argument, the entire class agreed that this individual had CLEARLY misinterpreted Davidson, and that this paper was an all-around bad. I asked the prof if she would write a reply, since she was (and is) working on Davidson’s triangulation argument. She replied that a paper’s being mistaken and one’s having good objections is not sufficient motivation for writing a reply to a paper. Her reasoning was something like this: I only have a limited amount of time and energy to put together papers, and if I reply to bad papers, I won’t have time to focus on the papers that are good. It’s better to focus on quality papers than crappy papers. So, in general, one ought not spend time replying to crappy papers. Furthermore, replying to a paper indicates that it is worth the energy of a reply.

What do you all think? If this is right, what do you do with these papers? Do you just ignore them? When it is appropriate to ignore a paper? Ought we also not cite such papers?

 

Dissertations that became books

I recently picked up Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's Moral Dilemmas (Blackwell, 1988), which developed from his doctoral dissertation. Having written a serviceable but undistinguished dissertation myself—one that would be wholly unsuitable for publication as a book—I'm always impressed by people whose dissertations are good enough to publish.

It occurred to me that it might be a useful exercise for graduate students, in thinking about their dissertation topic, to look at some books that were based on the author's dissertation. Even better would be to compare those books to the literature on that same topic from the five to ten years prior to the book's publication. The point is not necssarily to learn how to write a book-worthy dissertation, but to see how to write a dissertation that makes a really good contribution to the literature. (Since the book will probably differ from the dissertation, it might be worth getting the dissertation from ProQuest if you're really interested.)

One obvious problem in doing this is finding books that are based on dissertations. Sinnott-Armstrong's Moral Dilemmas is one. Peter van Inwagen's Essay on Free Will is another, though fourteen years elapsed between his finishing his PhD and the publication of the book. What other books were based on the author's dissertation?

Reflecting on the MA Thesis: Some Interesting Data

Last semester, I defended my Master's Thesis. While writing it, I tallied the daily hours I put toward the project in a Google Document. I'll get to the data analysis momentarily, but first, a little background is in order.

I began serious work on the MA Thesis in Spring 2013 (though I had toyed around with ideas in the latter half of 2012). Initially, I approached the project in the way that seems most common: I tried to work on the thesis for a short amount of time nearly every day. This approach to getting things done has been discussed here before, although my familiarity with that strategy originates with  Stephen King's endorsement of that strategy in his On Writing. This strategy did not work well for me; I found it very hard to make meaningful progress in short intervals and was frequently discouraged by my inability to meet daily goals. I tried setting goals based on word count (1000 words per day), page count (3 pages per day), and even just time (2 hours per day), but these changes didn't make a detectable change to my output or my ability to meet the specified goals. While I made some progress on the thesis that spring, it was neither the quantity nor quality that I had hoped for: much of it got scrapped over the summer.

When I resumed work on the thesis in August, I adopted a new strategy: a weekly hour count with no daily requirements and no specific page- or word-related goals. Though I adjusted my weekly target on a few occassions (e.g., when the thesis was under review by my committee), I generally aimed for 12 hours per week. I saw a drastic improvement in results compared to the previous semester. My thesis turned out to be about 35,000 words (including footnotes and references); almost 30,000 of them were written in an 11-week stretch. (It may also be worth noting that I was taking two graduate seminars during this timeframe: writing a thesis in my PhD program is optional, and I did not want to slow down my time to degree.) While there are probably several factors that explain why the writing process went better in the Fall than the Spring, these details suggest that one of them was the change in how I approached the writing process. 

But the hour tally reveals more than just this general observation. You can view the tally at this link. Here are some of the details that stood out to me:

1. I routinely fell short of my weekly target and fell 22.5 hours short of my total target. I took a few weeks off from thesis work during the semester, but there were 13 weeks with definitive targets. I only met those targets 6 times. What's interesting is that I still got the project done in the desired timeframe. Perhaps 12 hours per week was an unnecessarily ambitious target.
2. Of the 114 days that I charted, there were 65 days where I did NO work on the thesis. That's right: a 0 shows up on the grid 65 times. When you crunch the numbers, that means that on average, I only worked on the thesis 3 days a week during this stretch. I suspect this is the most important piece of data because it suggests that I do not work best by trying to chip away at a project on a daily basis. Rather, it seems I needed large blocks of time (evidently of 3-7 hours) during which I could fully engage with the thesis.
3. I did very little thesis work on Mondays and Tuesdays but worked a ton on weekends. I only worked on the thesis for 15.75 hours (12.5% of total hours) on Mondays and Tuesdays, but I worked on it for 62.75 hours (50% of total hours) on weekends. My suspicion is that this is partly explained by point #2, since large blocks of uninterrupted time are more likely to crop up on weekends. But here's the interesting part: my schedule on Mondays and Tuesdays was actually much lighter than it was on the other three weekdays. I held office hours during the middle of the week, Thursday featured a 3-hour night seminar, and Fridays are the usual day that the department hosts guest speakers or holds other events. So why were my Mondays and Tuesdays so unproductive? There are a number of possible explanations, but my suspicion is that  these days functioned as recovery days. After working on the thesis for 7-10 hours on the weekend (which happened several times), perhaps I just needed a couple days away from it.

I was deeply surprised at these results, since I've been told so often that working daily in small increments is the recipe for writing success. But it's hard to ignore the data.

After I defended the thesis, I shared these observations with two of my committee members. One of them expressed a need to follow a similar approach when writing his own original work; he found that the daily, bit-by-bit approach worked well for him only when the work he was doing did not involve a lot of his own original input (e.g.,  when he was editing an anthology). Another committee member said that he had to chip away at his writing on a daily basis -- no matter what the particular project was -- and that his attempts at trying other approaches in the past had all failed.

What's the moral of this story? It's hard to infer a ton from one person's examination of a single project, but I suspect there may not be any general one-size-fits-all approach to writing philosophy. Perhaps the only way for us to learn what writing strategy works best for us is to experiment and monitor our progress. I'll certainly be recording my progress again when I get to the dissertation, and I encourage others to give it a try. What you learn about your work habits might surprise you.

The Kelleher Method for getting feedback on your papers

Ethicist Paul Kelleher explains a nice method for getting feedback on your papers: 

1. Write draft. 2. Convert to a 30 min talk. 3. Get some philosophy pals to hear talk via Google hangout. 4. 30 min q&a. 5. Better paper!

— Paul Kelleher (@kelleher_) December 5, 2013

Not only does this strike me as a nice idea—provided you can get several philosopher friends to be in the same virtual place at the same time—but it also strikes me as the best use I've seen of Google hangouts. Now if only you could somehow buy everyone pizza and beer for their participation....

Self-citation, self-promotion?

Via Feminist Philosophers and The Economist, I just learned of a recent study on gender and citations in political science. In political science, the study finds, women's papers tend to be cited less often than men's papers are, even "after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation." The average paper in the study garnered 35 citations, but papers authored by men averaged five more citations than those authored by women. The study's authors suggest that this "is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR [international relations] scholars) tend to cite men more than women."

One of the study's authors—and the only woman of the three—reports some anecdotal evidence to The Economist that "women see self-citation as a form of self-promotion, and thus look down on it. Men see it the same way, but draw different conclusions."

I've cited myself in a few papers, and I have felt a little bit weird about it. Self-promotion (even in a purely descriptive, non-pejorative sense) does make me somewhat uncomfortable, though I think it is sometimes valuable to me and to others. But in the end, I chose to cite my previous work because it was relevant. The papers in which I cite my earlier work tend to be extensions on that earlier work. I don't want to repeat everything I said earlier—a form of self-plagiarism, in a sense—so I simply point the reader to my other papers.

Do you (or would you) cite yourself? Is it a form of self-promotion? If so, (when) is it an objectionable form of self-promotion?

A Positive Testimonial

I recently shared some research strategies of mine, which were also discussed over at the Smoker (where many people were, not surprisingly, quite skeptical of some of them). Anyway, one of of our readers, "Derek", recently posted in a comment here about his experience trying out some of the strategies I suggested. Here is what he wrote:

I actually did pick up the idea to write in the morning from here. Although, I have picked up quite a few things from this blog I found the posts titled "Research Strategies" and "More Research Strategies" *exorbitantly* helpful. Here are some of the more beneficial things that have happened since I have been writing every morning.

1.) Increased productivity -- Perhaps this one goes without saying, but the sheer increase has been mind-blowing. In the last couple of months I have pounded out five new papers, an outline for my book/dissertation (three of the papers will most likely be incorporated into the book, though I wrote them first) and a rather inordinate amount of outlines/notes of readings. The mind blowing part for me is that I struggled to even write one paper -- outside of class at least -- last year and I was not especially happy with the ones that I wrote for class. 

2.) I can see my ideas build on each other each day in a way that they never did before. I have always struggled with the thought that I have nothing to write and so have ended up just reading and reading and reading in hopes that an idea will strike me, fully formed and that I will then be able to just spit it out on the page. Of course, that never happens. The habit of writing everday has quelled this tendency and I have learned that If I just start writing I have plenty to say. Further, I have all afternoon to read and so I am able to read just as much as I was before. 

3.) I no longer "force" myself to write on one specific topic. Instead, I often work on several projects at once. Using this method I find that my ideas are able to breath a little, so to speak. For example, I often think of ideas for one project while working on another and, since I don't feel so much pressure to get a paper done as quickly as possible, the ideas in my paper seem to grow more organically and end up being better for it.

4.) I feel more productive and so I don't feel so much pressure to work nights and weekends. This allows me to spend more time with friends and family. Ironically, even though I work less now I feel that I get more done. I suspect that a large part of this is because I feel better emotionally and hence am always motivated to pick up where I left off the morning before. Research has also become enjoyable again and less like I'm running on a hamster wheel haha.

5.) Lastly, and this is a tip I picked up from Stephen Mumford -- check out the handout posted on his website "The Mumford Method" -- I write detailed outlines first and then, after I have done all of the creative/philosophical work, I write a draft. In my experience, this has a number of benefits. For one, I am not focused on trying to "follow the argument" while also trying to present the argument in a clear and focused manner -- which always seems to end up in a jumbled mess. Instead, once I commit to writing a draft I can focus solely on presenting my ideas in a clear and engaging manner. Another perk is that I am able to get feedback on my outlines quickly, as people are much more willing to comment on a three page outline than they are on a thirty page draft! I have just begun revising my papers using the "reverse outline" method, so I will let you know how that works out. This is where I picked it up --
http://getalifephd.blogspot.com/2011/08/easy-way-to-complete-major-revision.html

I don't know if the strategies work for everyone, but the most striking thing about Derek's experience is how it matched my own almost exactly.  And Kris McDaniel and Chris Stephens report similar experiences here (though they report having some of these strategies antecedently).

Anyway, although I wouldn't dare hold that the research strategies I've presented are "proven" by the experiences of a handful of people, I thought it might be relating these stories for a couple of reasons: first, to make the case for them a bit stronger to those who haven't given them a serious try, but also, second, to ask whether there have been any people who have seriously tried the strategies (not just halfway, but really tried them) for whom they didn't work.

Just to be clear: I'm not out to "prove my point" about the research strategies.  I didn't relate them in the first place for my own edification.  I've related them because I'd sincerely like to help people who are struggling as much as I once did, as I could have used the research strategies long before I stumbled across them as a result of dumb brute luck! So, with that said, I open up discussion: for all who have seriously tried some of the research strategies I've related,

1. Are there any other people out there that some of them have worked for?
2. Are there any people out there that some of them have not worked for?

Please do not chime in merely because you have your own research strategies that you think work for you.  For all I know, there may be other research strategies that work for people.  I would like for the discussion here to be one among people who have seriously changed their way of doing things to at least give some of the strategies I've mentioned a serious try (and not just for a couple of days, but at least several weeks, to give them a fair shot). I'd like to see whether people who have tried them have found that they worked (and, if not, then all well and good!).

Throw up, then clean up

I've written before a couple of times on research strategies, but my research the past couple of weeks since I began writing my book has made something crystal clear me: there is one research strategy I learned several years ago (in my final two years in graduate school) that "changed my life." Because it was such an unexpected but enormous change in strategy, one that has made the drafting of my new book go very well so far, I'd like to share it with all of, in the hope that perhaps it will make a similar difference in someone else's life.

One of the things I've mentioned before (which took some people aback) is just how fast I work. I tend to write up paper drafts in a matter of days, if not weeks. It wasn't always like this. For almost my entire philosophical career up until my last couple of years in grad school, I was very much the "slow burn" kind of worker. I would spend many, many months on end hammering out drafts, rewriting them, etc. It was hard, but I figured it was "the way" to do things.

I've made no secret that I endured some struggles as a grad student. It took me forever to come up with a good dissertation topic, but once I did, I finished the dissertation in about 8 months. How did it happen? Simple: I got a lucky break. I received an unsolicited book in my department mailbox on "how to write a dissertation." I'm usually not into self-help books, but I actually sat down and read this one. And what I read made so much sense that I had to try it. The first piece of advice, which I've recounted before, is to force oneself to write some small number of pages (say 3-5 pages) -- completely unedited -- every day you sit down to write. Although this might sound strange, every person I've passed the advice along to that has tried it has reported very positive results. I literally saw two other people I passed the book along to go from having nothing done on their dissertations to finishing in less than 9 months.

The key to this piece of advice -- as the book made clear -- is its psychological impact. One simply "feels good" when one has gotten 3-5 pages written on any given day. Once you've met that goal (if it, say, takes a couple of hours), you are then "free" to do whatever else you want that day: go back and edit, read journal articles, whatever. The point is that it gives you the feeling of moving forward every day. That feeling in turn increases your enthusiasm. You can't wait to wake up the next day to move forward more. This is exactly the opposite, in my experience, of what most grad students face (and why they often get stuck at ABD). Trying the "slow grind" style on big projects -- getting "everything right" -- leads to a negative mood feedback loop. You go home oftentimes frustrated that you didn't get much done, and it makes it that much harder to get up and do good work tomorrow. The 3-5 page a day thing creates a kind of snowball effect where you feel better and better every day, and work harder, edit better (after you finish), etc.

But I've said all of this before. What I haven't said much about is the general process it gives rise to in terms of writing: a process which (if I recall) the book I read called "Throw up, then clean up." I just can't begin to tell you how effective I think this process is.  During the past week-and-a-half, I have been writing 2,000-3,000 words on my book per day. Is it all good stuff? No! But, amongst the crap, I've gotten so much good stuff out of my head and onto paper that I can tell it's going to be pretty easy to cut out the bad stuff. And that's the thing: once you get your thoughts out there and onto paper, going back and cutting out all of the crap is *so* much easier than trying to get it all correct the first time around. Furthermore, the quicker you get it out onto paper, I find, the easier it is to discern the good and bad. I've found this way that a lot ideas I thought were good were not -- and I probably would have spend weeks or more thinking about them, whereas now I see which ideas aren't any good in a day or two. It works wonders.

So, I propose, try it out if you're having trouble getting things done. Throw up, then clean up!

What's your process?

Now that summer is just about upon us (hurrah!), I'm absolutely chomping at the bit to do some research. I have a few paper projects laid out, as well a book I just started. But I'd also like to branch out a bit and try some new things. So, I was thinking I might ask you all to share your research process. How do you all go about coming up with paper ideas? Do you just read a ton of journal articles and books until you happen upon an idea? Do you discuss your ideas with a lot of other people before you pursue them in depth, or only after you've worked out an argument in depth?

I guess I'll begin by sharing my process. Strangely enough, I think getting a VAP in a tiny (3 person) department at the University of Tampa -- instead of, say, a tenure-track position in a large department -- is one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. Here are a few reasons why.

A few of my published and unpublished papers -- mostly, older ones -- emerged from what I take to be the common process: reading, reading, and more reading. But most of those papers were things I had done research on prior to coming to Tampa. Since getting here, my research process has changed dramatically.

Most of my recent papers -- for example, my papers on free will, human rights, and Kantian ethics -- have emerged from undergraduate teaching.  One of the things I like most about teaching undergraduate courses is that they always "take you back to the beginning." Instead of worrying about the secondary literature, teaching undergraduate courses takes you back to primary sources and the very foundations of philosophical problems (e.g. the problem of free will). Undergraduate courses also push you to try to get things as simple, clear and intuitive as you can because, well, if you don't make things simple and intuitive, undergrads will look at you like you're speaking in a foreign language and write terrible, awful, horrific term-papers papers like they're writing in a foreign language.

Teaching undergrad courses, in other words, has been something of a godsend. I try out ideas in class, and see if I can make them clear, intuitive and persuasive to ordinary undergraduates. If I can't make things clear, intuitive and persuasive to them, I go back to the drawing board.

There are a couple of other great things about working ideas through in a classroom full of undergrads: (A) they're not "in the grip of a theory" in the same way as professional philosophers or grad students, and (B) they don't "shut you down" when you mess around with zany ideas. Undergrads will argue with you, of course, but they won't pull the, "Kripke showed X" in Naming and Necessity or "Kant clearly meant Y" out of their hat. They're willing to listen to really alternative ways of looking at things -- ways that would most likely garner the proverbial "incredulous stare" if you tried them out on a grad student or fellow professional.

Anyway, that's sort of been my process as of late: making things as simple, clear, and intuitive as I can to undergraduates. I can't help but chuckle sometimes when I hear people complain about undergraduate teaching -- because in my case, at least, it's made philosophy fun again; it's made me work to get clearer on things, relying less on jargon and technical terms, taking me "back to the basics."

Anyone else have this experience? Alternatively, what research processes have you found helpful?

Book-Writing Tips?

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I've started writing a book and hope to get a decent draft done this summer. I hammered out a draft of the introduction last Friday and have started a draft of the first chapter. Although I think things are going pretty well so far, in that I'm getting a lot to paper and feel like I have a lot of the book mapped out clearly in my head (though everything so far is very first-draft-y), as I write it I can't help but be struck about how difficult of a project this is going to be.

Although I've written a "book" before (namely, my dissertation), it not only wasn't of publishable quality (few dissertations are); it was also much more narrow than the book I'm currently embarking on. One of the difficulties I've had so far in writing the first chapter of the book I've just started is that I have to do a lot of summarizing to clear the ground for the book's main argument. Specifically, I have to survey how a ton of other people have approached the problem I'm addressing, not only recently but throughout philosophical history.

This is difficult because, frankly, I'm not an expert on a lot of the views I'm summarizing. I don't think I have to be in order to write the book because, frankly, (1) what I know of the views in question is enough to distinguish my view from them, and (2) my aim in the book isn't to disprove those views but instead offer an alternative that I think avoids or resolves many of the major problems commonly attributed to existing alternatives. Be that as it may, I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm going to need a lot of help for my summaries on these things (things, again, I'm not an expert on) not to look like the summaries of a dilettante. 

I've had a couple of third-personal experiences which suggest to me that this problems are not usual when writing books, and that a book's author often ends up relying quite a bit on others to help them fill in gaps in their knowledge. First, I was at Arizona when John Tomasi came to discuss a draft of his book Free Market Fairness. I recall quite a few of my fellow graduate students being somewhat taken off-guard by how unfinished the book seemed. Quite a bit of stuff seemed not all that well thought-through. But, as I'm starting to write my book, I sort of "get it" now. It would take me an insane amount of time to become "expert enough" at a lot of the ideas I'm summarizing. Offhand, it would seem much more efficient to me to summarize the things as I understand them (I'm not a total dilettante on them!), and then appeal to others for help to fill in the gaps of my knowledge (for instance, through asking others to read chapter drafts). Is this the normal way to go about things? Judging from the acknowledgement sections of published books, it seems clear to me that a lot of people contribute substantially to the writing of good books -- that authors typically have a lot of people read chapter drafs for feedback, in part because it's so hard for any one individual to have expertise on everything relevant to the book.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. I'd like to ask those of you who have written books: do you have any general tips for how to go about it? For instance, at what point, exactly, you begin sharing chapter drafts with people? How far "done" must they be? And who do you seek out feedback from? And how? Any tips, on these questions or any others relating to book writing, would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance to anyone and everyone who chimes in!

The difference a different environment can make

I took something of a break from research this semester. I'd written a ton of papers the past couple of years, and while I'd read some articles this term, nothing sparked any ideas. So, I decided to take a bit of a break and just focus on teaching. It was a good idea. A couple of weeks ago a big idea that had been percolating in the back of my mind crystallized very clearly, and I decided to write a book on it this summer.

I wrote a first, and not at all good, draft of the book's introduction and half of its first chapter last week, but got sidelined this week by my last week of classes. Which brings me to yesterday. Because Thursday was my last day of classes, I spent most of yesterday in my office during an extended batch of office-hours trying to start my book introduction over again. It was a disaster. I was there from 10 in the morning to 3pm, hardly got a lick done, and what I did get done was terrible. I began doubting whether writing this book is a good idea, and went home pretty deflated.

When I got home, I learned that my wife was heading out to happy hour with the members of her academic department, and decided to take my dog out to the dog park. As I've mentioned before, that's where I do most of my work. I spend almost all day there writing on days I'm not teaching, and it's where I've written almost every paper I've published. I wasn't going to take my laptop with me -- my wife said it's been a long semester, that I should be good to myself, and that I have all summer to write -- but I couldn't help myself. Off to the dog park with my laptop I was.

As soon as I got there, it was like a lightbulb switched on in my brain. I was focused -- in a way that I just hadn't been able to achieve at my office. I banged out a full draft of my book introduction in less than a couple of hours. And it was good. A first draft for sure, but one I'm satisfied with, at least for now.

It struck me on the way home that getting a dog is probably one of the best things that ever happened for my career. I'd never published anything as a grad student, and I frittered away my year as a VAP at UBC in the way I frittered away yesterday in my office: having trouble focusing, spending days, weeks, even months on end mucking around on paper drafts that never seemed to get done. Then, just before coming to Tampa, my wife and I got a dog. And I started doing work at the dog park. And everything changed. Complete paper drafts -- drafts that were better than drafts I used to spend months on -- would flow out of my brain in a mere matter of days.

I have to confess that I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe it's just being outside. All I know is that I've stumbled upon something very lucky. For me, at least, the environment in which do my work makes an incredible difference. I can't get stuff done in my office, or at a coffee shop, or at home. Somehow, just being out with my dog makes things "click." Strange.