Brian Weatherson rightly takes aim At JPhil; yet I feel embarrassed

In a very interesting, recent post, Brian Weatherson points out that "the tradition of formal philosophy of language" is systematically ignored in Journal of Philosophy, one of the H4 journals.  While I have never been excited about this tradition, I agree with Brian that this is really "unfortunate." For, the tradition is a fundamental aspect of the development of analytical philosophy not in the least in the Low Countries. I offer two observations about Brian's approach, one friendly and one very critical. First, Brian's analysis of the exclusion of the tradition cannot be explained away by the phenomenon of H4-citation-delay (recall here, here, and here).  The classic papers that are not being cited in Jphil were all published more than a decade ago (two of which outside H4). So, we're dealing here with a situation of editorial bias (tacit or explicit, possibly self-reinforcing, etc.) against a certain approach. This means that if you would peruse JPhil monthly (as I used to do religiously in graduate school), you would really miss an important trend in contemporary analytical philosophy.

Second, what annoys me about Brian's analysis is that rather than helping us re-think what's systematically wrong with our discipline that we (i) all collectively claim that H4 are the best/most prestigious journals yet (ii) happily allow that these journals are individually and collectively captured by communities that systematically exclude thriving alternative approaches within even analytical philosophy. Rather, here we have an instance of a high status philosopher,  Weatherson, calling on a top journal to make room for his intellectual friends within days of noticing that he has utterly been blind to other developments in the field (say, in philosophy of scientific practice). Fair enough, what else are friends for? Yet, I find the utter lack of embarrassment among our professional leaders over our collective parochialism (i.e., that our top journals systematically exclude some of  the most important fields in the discipline, ignore very important professional philosophers whose works are also barely discussed in their journals, etc.), well, embarrassing.