How common is this?
You write a paper that seems like the best thing you've ever worked you. You're bringing the thunder in the manner of Jack Black before Dave Grohl got his gum-chewing hands on him. You're channelling the gods, matter become spirit, a rock and roll hurricane, and it feels GREAT. Then the paper gets accepted to one or more conferences and even in the cold, hard light of day it still rocks not only your socks, but a fair number of the conference participants who are specialists in whatever genre of philosophy your paper lives. Then, after rewriting the thing based on conference discussion, you start sending it to journals. Very shorthly thereafter, you stop feeling so blessed.
Journal after journal rejects the piece. While you might not think it's the very best thing you've written any more, it is still among the best because rather than just raising a problem for someone else's view, it makes a non-trivial point that carves out an interesting new piece of dialectical space. Nonetheless it just can't find a published home. After six or so tries the period between submitting it gets longer and longer until (after ten or so) it's just languishing there on the dead letter pile with the other two non-trivial articles you never managed to get published.
I have no idea how common that is (it's happened to me at least three times), but I have heard from a lot of other people at roughly my level of institutional affiliation* that the less trivial the idea, the harder it is to get something published. Many of us end up chasing book contracts precisely because of this dynamic. Books give you enough room to say something interesting next to the far away possible world counterexamples of more famous people's theories that are your journal articles' bread and butter.
If there is any general validity to my experience, the next question is why it is the case? Why are relativily trivial ideas so much easier to get published?
I'm sure there are lots of reasons, including (1) the fact that (all else being equal) there's only so much depth one can pack into six or seven thousand words, and (2) if twenty times the amount of people are submitting articles as there are slots, this is going to produce a culture of aiming at the largest parachute among referees, and non-trivial ideas are easier to rebut than trivial ideas.
But I don't think (2) could work at all if not for the reason articulated beautifully by Jason Stanley in THIS recent thread. Given how many issues were discussed in that thread, I think Jason's point bears repeating:
However, I do think that the referees made a mistake that I made early in my refereeing process - that of mistaking an excellent response that should have been in a journal for a negative referee report. I initially made that error too - as I remark in the Facebook thread, I regret my first ever refereeing task - I refereed a paper in 1996 by Henry Jackman that spelled out temporal externalism in such a way as to make it clear that it required an additional parameter in the circumstance of evaluation. In short, aside from maybe Belnap, it was the first clearly relativist paper. I spent weeks agonizing over my report, spelling out the formal relativist semantics, comparing it Kaplan's treatment, monsters, etc. I rejected it because it required what I think I then described as a "hitherto unknown form of truth-evaluation, which may even be relativist in nature". But really that was a reason for acceptance, not rejection.
This is almost certainly not fixable in general, because there is a lot of vagueness between, on the one hand, the pole of being worthy of publication and future articles criticizing it and, on the other hand, not worthy of publication because I the reviewer have produced a compelling criticism of it. When you add to this vagueness the a priori necessity of rejecting x percent of papers (depending entirely on space in journal and number of submissions) there is going to be lots of selective pressure in favor of the kind of triviality that many continental philosophers associate with analytic philosophy.**
[Notes:
*I'm assuming that this kind of thing is harder the lower your affiliation, and given that almost no philosophy journals use triple blind review and the research on this very issue, this seems plausible to me. Though this doesn't mean it's not a factor of some sort for faculty at Leiterific departments.
**We write books too, and you all write some awesome articles. So there.
General note: The reediness of Jack White's voice so dominates the above performance that it's kind of a drag. . . I wish this were intentional and it illustrated something about the post itself, but it's just kind of a drag. The songs themselves are pretty great though; one should appreciate that. . .]
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