New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Consumer Risk, Producer Risk, and the politics of commercialized science

I thought I would make my inaugural post on NewAPPS a follow-up to Roberta's post about the retraction of the article in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  I don't want to continue the debate about whether the retraction was justified; that debate can continue in the original thread.   Here, I want to discuss one of the reasons why we should be paying vigilant attention to events such as these, and why their importance transcends the narrow confines of the particular scientific hypotheses being considered in the articles in question.  What I worry most about is the extent to which pressures can be applied by commercial interests such as to shift the balance of “inductive risks” from producers to consumers by establishing conventional methodological standards in commercialized scientific research. 

Inductive risk occurs whenever we have to accept or reject a hypothesis in the absence of certainty-conferring evidence.  Suppose, for example, we have some inconclusive evidence for a hypothesis, H.  Should we accept or reject H?   Whether or not we should depends on our balance of inductive risks—on the importance we attach, in the ethical sense, of being right or wrong about H.   In simple terms, if the risk of accepting H and being wrong outweighs the risk of rejecting H and being wrong, then we should reject H.  But these risk are a function not only of the degree of belief we have in H, but also of negative utility we attach to each of those possibilities.   In the appraisal of hypotheses about the safety of drugs, foods, and other consumables, these are sometimes called “consumer risk” (the risk of saying the item is safe and being wrong) and “producer risk” (the risk of saying the item is not safe and being wrong.)

"Now the Sith have returned to wage a new war against good in the university."

My six year old Thomas is reading Star Wars books designed for six year olds. He's actually very good at it, but he does consistently misread the word "universe" as "university." Since it occurs quite a lot in these books, he's constantly telling me things like the following:

My name is Qui-Gon Jinn.

I am a Jedi.

The Jedi are a very special group of beings.

For many thousands of years, we have worked to promote peace and justice in the university.

This explains quite a bit (cf. Eric's post of earlier today).

advise to graduate students #3,765

Try to make as short as possible the temporal distance between announcing a new idea publicly (whether via conference presentation or even just via participating Q&As at conferences) and submitting a paper with that idea to a journal.

If you wait too long, you will likely find yourself being asked by reviewers to cite someone else's paper with the same or astonishingly similar idea published in the interregnum (between your making public the idea and submitting the paper), or will be informed by a reviewer the claim you are making is not very substantive because everyone already knows that.  

There is no way to tell whether either of these responses is because you yourself put the idea out there and it's been digested by the relevant community. Surely this happens sometimes, but sometimes ideas just happen to be in the air, and it doesn't matter anyhow because there is nothing you can do. There is never anything to be gained by bringing it up to the journal editor who simply cannot be put into a "he said, she said" type of situation with respect to you and her reviewers. The main point is that if you had submitted the paper earlier, the reviewers would not have been able to respond that way. That is, if the idea was good enough to get accepted to a conference, or if noted scholars in the field encourage you to publish it after you share it, then you should submit it to a journal as soon as possible.

On philosophical echo-chambers

I am optimistic about the potential of the powers-based approach, but I see its major barrier to success to be bridging the gap between itself and other systems, or at least, clearly situating itself with respect to the dominant dialectic. Many advocates of more traditional approaches see the powers-based system as operating within its own philosophical universe and making little contact with the existing framework. This hurts both sides: powers-based theories are only taken seriously by those antecedently friendly to them, and prevailing approaches do not benefit from the theoretical resources of the powers approach. At the same time, using the tools of the more dominant strategies would benefit powers-based theories, as some of their key concepts (properties and substances, to name a few) remain underdeveloped. Clearly connecting powers-based theories to the traditional Humean framework will open up greater theoretical resources for both sides.--Sara Bernstein reviewing at NDPR. [Letters added to facilitate discussion.]

This quoted passage is the closing paragraph of Bernstein's very informative and stimulating review. (What follows is in no sense criticism of Bernstein.) I read Bernstein as identifying the "traditional Humean framework" (i.e., Lewisian metaphysics) as the more "dominant" approach to metaphysics at present. I read her as describing the "powers-based" (i.e., a neo-Lockean or, more accurately, neo-Aristotelian) approach as the weaker party. Let's stipulate that Bernstein's judgment on the relative strength of both parties in analytical metaphysics is accurate (see also Troy Cross's recent reviews, here and here). Even so, her review raises some uncomfortable questions about the state of the discipline. Here I focus on three features: (i) the existence of sub-disciplinary echo-chambers; (ii) who gets to decide who should respond to who; (iii) the benefits, if any, of philosophical engagement. 

Library purchasing

One librarian just says "no" to an academic publisher's “inflationary uptick” and “fee for the upgrade” and “holdings top-up”. (See also this follow up). [HT Stefan Heßbrüggen]

On Reviewing and Publishing Senior figures

McKenzie's review of McGinn's book raises three distinct, larger 'issues:'

(1) How much incivility in reviewing is still acceptable?

(2) Do Oxford UP and other prestigious academic presses apply different 'rules' for 'senior' figures?

(3) McGinn.

Let's ignore (3), really. When I mention him in what follows, it is only to discuss (1-2).

In my opinion (2) is the more important issue because it gets at the political economy of our profession. For, let's be clear; McGinn and OUP are not isolated cases. Here are some other examples: today I read a polite, albeit devastating review of a book by Strevens (Harvard UP) that recounts a whole host of problems, including "failure to reference properly the remarkably rich research tradition." All the reviews of McGinn's 'triple' (see the links in discussion) make clear that he was permitted to allow himself to systematically ignore ongoing discussions in pertinent areas of scholarship. Whatever one might think of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, however enjoyable and provocative, one cannot accuse it of generous engagement with informed, alternative views.

McGinn, when in glass houses...

Colin McGinn is a famously polemical reviewer. Yet, when he gets administered a taste of his own medicine (recall), he resorts to name-calling: "absolutely hysterical, ad hominem, and completely devoid of any sense of critical decency."[HT Wayne Myrvold] I leave it to readers to judge this "hysterical."

In his rage he seems to have misread McKenzie's review.  He falsely claims (without evidence) that "She pours scorn on my contention that physics is epistemologically limited in important ways—that physicists (and everyone else) are deeply ignorant of the intrinsic nature of the material world. She contrives to make it sound as if this view is an eccentricity dreamt up by me alone." If true, this claim would be astounding because McKenzie is a product of Leeds philosophy--one of the strongholds for views that (in some of their guises) deny knowledge of intrinsic nature of the world (see here). Of course, McKenzie does no such thing. Rather, McKenzie claims that (a) McGinn does not engage with folk who anticipate versions of such views and (b) that he misrepresents the existing discussion; moreover, she reveals that (c) his sole citation to contemporary work in the area is mangled. 

Obviously, one can debate the merits of extremely polemic, uncivil reviews. But when in glass houses...

On leaving academia, interdisciplinarity, co-authorship, and other things

Zachary Ernst, we're sorry to see you go.  But you've left us with some important issues to mull over, here.

These even includes some issues that are under faculty control, like the following:

Furthermore, my department also considers single-authored work to be more significant than co-authored work. Frankly, I find this policy totally absurd, but it's not that uncommon. Because a lot of interdisciplinary work will appear in unfamiliar (to one's colleagues) venues, and be co-authored, that work is downgraded, not once but twice. The effect is that when it comes time to decide on salary raises, a faculty member with broad, interdisciplinary research interests is at a severe disadvantage. To put the point bluntly, interdisciplinary researchers get paid less.

Is philosophy really so insular that we can't respect interdisciplinary work?  That we can't recognize the extra effort (not less effort) that it takes to collaborate?  I am afraid that I know the answers.

More on the Science 'sting'

Earlier this week I had a post on the 'sting' that was the topic of an article published in Science, purporting to show that many (most?) pay-to-publish open-access journals are not sufficiently selective on what they publish because they have an obvious motivation to accept as many papers for publication as they can. The presupposition seemed to be that this is not the case of subscription-only journals, which have good reasons to be selective, and thus presumably to publish higher quality articles.

Well, today I came across a blog post contesting exactly this presupposition. It's a great post, which you should read in its entirety, but the main point is that the key desideratum for subcription-only journals is to publish 'sexy' research, of the kind that generates a lot of citations, so as to increase the impact factor of the journal (and thus to increase subscription revenue). The author of the post, Michael Eisen (a biologist at Berkeley) even offers the example of a ludicrous paper published in -- yes, you guessed it right -- Science, which should have never passed any decent quality control process.

Below the fold you can read extracts from the post, which describes subscription publishers as "seasoned grifters playing a long con", among other spot-on observations. The general conclusion is again that peer-review is a flawed system, and even if for the moment there doesn't seem to be any real alternative to it, it is important to keep in mind that it is a deeply problematic system. (The author is refering in particular to his field of research, but as I've argued before, there are reasons to think that the problem is equally acute for philosophy.)

The ‘sting’ article in Science on open-access ‘predatory’ journals

Earlier this week, Science published a much-discussed article entitled ‘Who’s afraid of peer review?’ The article, however, focuses specifically on peer-review in open-access journals that charge publication fees, as it reports on a little ‘experiment’ conducted by the author of the article: submitting multiple versions of the same spoof paper to a wide range of these open-access journals to see what would happen (sort of a Sokal hoax but then multiplied by 300). The hypothesis was that, given the multiplication of open-access journals following the ‘pay-to-publish’ model, the tendency is for the 'predatory journals' among those to accept pretty much anything that comes their way, and then charge authors exorbitant amounts of money as publication fees. And indeed, “by the time Science went to press, 157 of the journals had accepted the paper and 98 had rejected it.”

The article sparked a cascade of negative reactions, in particular by proponents of the open-access model who saw it as a vicious attack on the model by one of the flagship subscription journals (see here). Some have pointed out that, if the ‘study’ intended to be methodologically sound, it should have sent an equal number of spoof submissions to non-open-access journals in order to ascertain whether there really is a significant difference between the two models when it comes to letting bad papers go through the sieve of peer-reviewing. Ultimately, what the experiment seems to indicate is above all a failure of the peer-review model, not of the open-access model. As well put by Curt Rice (who often has incisive analyses of the politics of higher education, e.g. on gender issues):

Scientific metrics may allow for huge efficiency gains

Before long the metrics are so accurate, nobody needs to read any scientific papers. Nature has the story. [HT Andreas Ortmann on FB.]

On the Philosopher's Annual

Meena Krishnamurthy has a blog post about the relative absence of political philosophy in the The Philosopher’s Annual since 2002. This surprised me a bit because it seems to me a field that has been very fertile over the last decade. From afar it looks as if the grip of Rawls on the field has been loosened, and there is a lot of important and urgent work on legitimacy, international (and inter-generational) justice, democratic theory, and, of course, the role of religion today. (Of course, a lot of this is pursued in critical discussion with Rawlsian ideals.) Not to mention that the period has seen Libertarian ideals articulated and renewed with remarkable philosophical ability, and ongoing formal work in social choice theory. Anyway, go read her post.

UPDATE: Ryan Muldoon points out that formal work in political theory by Peter Vanderschraaf has been recognized!

Below the fold some further reflections by me.

Marc Hauser's Second Chance

One annoying feature of re-reading other people's scholarship, is the possibility of discovering that one's  treasured ideas may well be anticipated by others. Memory and self-deception can be funny like that. So, it's probably not uncommon that folk really fail to attribute to others what is due to them without realizing they are in the wrong. Even when the mistakes are honest, they still involve injustices, and these may be quite large given that they may, say, reinforce gender related unfairness,  too. Such injustices are not easy to excuse or forgive when one feels that one's work or presence has been silenced or unfairly ignored. Even so, we try to cope with this kind of injustice. Yet, faking data or copying (and pasting) texts without attribution is legitimately an unpardonable sin in the Academy, especially if it is part of a pattern of such (plagiarism/faking) cases. One might be willing to give a student a second chance, but recoil from letting a confirmed fraudulent senior scholar back into the fold. Paradoxically many of us treat such cases as worse sin than many crimes on the 'outside.' (Coetzee's Disgrace reflects on this.)

It is, thus, understandable that the good folk at Retractionwatch react with dismay that prominent scholars, including philosophy's very own Philip Pettit, are willing to endorse Marc Hauser's forthcoming book, Evilicious. What really rankles Retractionwatch is that Hauser has not  owned up to his record of misconduct and "only acknowledged “mistakes.”" (As they write: "But we do prefer when those given a second chance acknowledge that they did something wrong. That might start with noting a retraction, instead of continuing to list the retracted paper among your publications.")

Why is it easier to get crap published? The Stanley Hypothesis

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?

Elsevier, do we have a problem? Or, a real hoax in the sciences

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), a journal that proudly lists that it is "the fastest submission-to-print journal! Number 1 journal in the Thomson's JCR ranking for Biophysics in terms of Total Cites, Number of Articles and Eigen Factor ™ score." It is a "5-Year Impact Factor: 2.500." Apparently, sometimes speed does not pay because the journal has been victim of a spectacular hoax (recall). Nature reports:

Ghost writing is taking on an altogether different meaning in a mysterious case of alleged scientific fraud. The authors of a paper published in July (A. Vezyraki et al. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. http://doi.org/nxb; 2013), which reported significant findings in obesity research, seem to be phantoms. They are not only unknown at the institution listed on the paper, but no trace of them as researchers can be found. [HT Stefan Heßbrüggen]

Oddly enough, so far there is no evidence that the hoax was perpetrated to expose the vulnerability of scientific refereeing practices. In fact, Nature quotes a scientists (the one who alerted the editors to the hoax), who "believes that the paper was intended to hurt him and his lab."

Referee-report sharing

[This post was inspired and encouraged by Sebastian Lutz; he should not be held responsible for the informal presentation of these matters.--ES]

Refereeing is a crucial professional obligation, especially now that most philosophers depend on (multiple) publication(s) for appointments and advancement. It also plays a non-trivial role in improving the quality of what is published. Yet, (a) refereeing is rarely taught. Even (b) experienced referees almost never get feedback on the quality of refereeing, so it is difficult to learn to calibrate one’s judgment. Moreover, (c) the relationship between the referee report and editorial decision-making is often opaque: (i)  few journals tell referees of the decision; (ii) sometimes the referee report and the decision seem not well connected; (iii) sometimes the referee report and the final publication seem not well connected. This last feature also makes refereeing unsatisfying (and may well be connected with the difficulty finding referees reported by Brogaard). I continue to referee, perhaps out of a sense of duty, but primarily because it forces me to read, engage with and reflect on recent work beyond my circle of intellectual friends before publication.

Now, recently I refereed a paper for a journal that asked me to also referee the revised paper (after resubmission). I was amazed to discover a whole package that included the original paper, all the original referee reports (including my own), and the revised paper. I found it fascinating to read the two other original referee reports. (It was also amusing because one of them suggested that the author should engage with Schliesser!)  It turned out that the three of us all saw what mattered about the paper, while also raising interesting (I think) objections that were subtly different. I was really impressed by the professionalism and thorough refereeing of the other two referees.  But this got me thinking, Why can’t referees see each other’s anonymous (!) reports after submitting their reports?* I write 'after' because the reports ought to be independent. It’s seems feasible with manuscript-central software. Can anybody offer an argument against this proposal?

Speaking of Hoaxes

This is funny. [HT Steffen Ducheyne on FB]

A footnote to the Sokal Hoax

Let's stipulate that there is genuine bullshit (see Frankfurt 1986). Let's also stipulate there is bullshit in the Humanities, even in philosophy.

A lot of people I know in philosophy are pretty confident that much of what passes in Literary Theory and the philosophies that influence(d) it is bullshit. I have seen testimony people that ardently defend this view who have studied quite a bit of, say, Continental philosophy and reached this conclusion. (Of course, in reality, a lot more folk are dismissive on the basis of extremely slender personal, intellectual investment.)  When pressed for evidence, the Sokal Hoax is trotted out as exhibit A. It made a great splash inside the academy and the popular media that covers it. Rather than interpreting the case as an instance of bad refereeing, editorial misjudgment, whole areas of thought got written off by quite a few people.

I just learned that a paper was retracted from Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics--a very fine physics journal published by a reputable institute. It frankly reports, "The Editorial Board has investigated this and found that the XPS spectra shown in figure 3 all exhibit an identical noise pattern that is unphysical." [HT Retractionwatch] In other words, the journal published artfully presented bullshit. (It recently announced that it "is now using ScholarOne Manuscripts for submission and peer-review management.") Undoubtedly, this incident is unpleasant for all the parties involved, but nobody in their right mind will draw any inferences about physics from it.

The moral: very good journals can publish bullshit, and the refereeing institutions of all disciplines need constant maintenance.

On Refereeing a book ms.

[Rachel McKinnon solicited this post from me. She should be blamed for any insights.--ES]

Refereeing a book manuscript for a university press can be a daunting enterprise. If you don't watch out, it can be very time-consuming (some of us should be kept off the streets--you know who you are). Crucially, the norms that apply are not entirely clear. For example, if you find an invalid argument on p. 275, it might, after all, be worth repairing given all the other riches. But what if you find lots of problems (lack of citations, garden path arguments, etc), yet judge that the book will make a major contribution? Now, book-refereeing is rarely masked--referees nearly always know the identity of the author. Is there something to be gained to see the -- let's stipulate, dead-wrong -- views of, say, an influential PhD supervisor in print, rather than propogated in the works of the students?

More subtly, the interests of presses and the discipline do not coincide. Here's a concrete example: whatever you think of the substance of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, it is undeniable that it could have benefitted from more exacting refereeing. Leaving aside his engagement with the (philosophy of) sciences, it is undeniable that  if Nagel had engaged with more recent analytic metaphysics he could have given a far better and more favorable account of the nature of the problem-space.  But, of course, if it had been seriously revised in light of serious refereeing it would have been almost certainly less readable and, perhaps, less controversial; it might also not have read anymore as Nagel's last will to the profession.

Here follow some de-feasible considerations that might inform book refereeing:

1. [A] Your main job as a referee is to help an editor -- almost never a professional philosopher -- figure out the significance of the book and anticipate how people in the field might respond to it. [Bl Your duty to the profession is to uphold scholarly standards (quality, citation practices, etc.).

"I'm a professor." "Oh, you mean you're a content provider to the knowledge industry."

We know that when we publish with commercial presses (and we should include most university presses here, IMO) we are content providers in the knowledge industry. Let's follow the trail with a simple example. 

1) Routledge prices their Philosophy of Race collection at $1185. 
2) Routledge is part of Taylor & Francis. 
3) Taylor & Francis is owned by Informa, "one of the world’s leading knowledge providers. We create and deliver highly specialised information through publishing, events, training, market intelligence and expertise, providing valuable knowledge to individuals, businesses and organisations around the world." BTW, should you wish to invest in Informa, here's their current stock price.

All that by way of saying I really need to read this book.

Another ranking of journals

With interesting results. (It will give cheer to the logicians.) It's based on the so-called SJR indicator. [HT: Jean-Yves Beziau, who is the Editor-in-Chief at Logica Universalis]

Free Stuff: Amherst College says yes to open access and no to MOOCs

--- A guest post by John Drabinski (Amherst)

Should professors make their teaching and research openly – even massively – accessible? Last year, we discussed the ramifications of free access rather intensely in the Amherst College faculty. The content of our discussions can provide food for thought for faculty members at places facing similar decisions.

The three decisions: 1) we approved a web-available College repository for College faculty members' article publications; and 2) we approved making Amherst College Press an open-access press; but 3) we refused to accept MOOC proposals from the Big Three: Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Let me explain why we made those decisions.

Not Forwarding Referee Comments

Recently, one of my papers got rejected at a very good journal that I admire very much and that I have been happy to referee for. The editor accompanied the the rejection with the claim that "our policy is not to send referee's reports or comments on papers that have not been accepted or recommended for revision." I hastened to the journal website and -- indeed! -- the policy is clearly announced in the author's guidelines. So, I have no standing to complain.  Note to self: do read these more carefully in the future.

But...such a policy does come with a foreseeable cost: I am far less inclined to referee for this journal again now that I know there is a good chance my (often elaborate) comments are not forwarded to the author. And even if I were to referee again, it would be with less care and scruples. While a referee report is primarily intended for an editor to make an informed judgment, I always hope that the (refereed) author's work is thereby improved. I do not want to be accused of idealism, but as scholars we really are in this together.

"Junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects"

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.--Xenophanes

"Not all ethical issues are equally important. Many ethicists spend their professional lives performing in sideshows.

However entertaining the sideshow, sideshow performers do not deserve the same recognition or remuneration as those performing on our philosophical Broadways.

What really matters now is not the nuance of our approach to mitochondrial manipulation for glycogen storage diseases, or yet another set of footnotes to footnotes to footnotes in the debate about the naturalistic fallacy. It is: (a) Whether or not we should be allowed to destroy our planet (and if not, how to stop it happening); and (b) Whether or not it is fine to allow 20,000 children in the developing world to die daily of hunger and entirely avoidable disease  (and if not, how to stop it happening). My concern in this post is mainly with (a). A habitable planet is a prerequisite for all the rest of our ethical cogitation. If we can’t live here at all, it’s pointless trying to draft the small print of living....

So:  University philosophy departments should be restructured. The junior members should cut their teeth on lesser subjects such as the mind-body problem. As their experience, status and salary rises, they should increasingly specialise in problems (a) and (b). By the time they have reached the top of the tree, that’s all they should be doing. Anyone who wants to spend their lives paddling around in the philosophical shallows, along with Kant and Wittgenstein, should of course be free to do so, but should realise that it will condemn them to a life of penury and obscurity."--Charles Foster. [HT Ingrid Robeyns.]

Foster relies on the -- welcome to me (now that I am balding and greying) -- premise that philosophy has a very long apprenticeship. Let's grant this for the sake of argument and learn to ignore the purported boy-wonders in our midst (there might be other good benefits that flow from not focusing on them). Sadly, Foster does not suggests that ethical reflection requires considerable schooling in life--a point I have long been more partial to. Foster unabashedly endorses [A] a practical conception of philosophy; in fact, in the post he relies on [A] as a tacit premise because while at first he only speaks of "ethical issues," "ethicists," and "ethical cogitation," his conclusions involve the organization of philosophy an sich. This is why Foster's really important ethicist reminds me of Xenophanes' cattle and horses and lions. Foster's post (and the  subsequent discussion) is primarily useful for posting what is often said sotte vocce, especially in contexts where philosophers need to prove their usefulness. Blessed are those who work in an environment -- primarily rich private institutions -- where their philosophical lack of utility is status-enhancing!

UC Berkeley exonerates Terrence Deacon

This is old news, but still interesting:

"Failure to cite an earlier work with the same subject matter, even an important one, is not by itself research misconduct.".. it can certainly be argued that it would have been an improvement for Deacon to find and cite Juarrero's Dynamics in Action, or for Juarrero and Rubino to find and cite Brian McLaughlin, or for Lissack to find and cite Deacon.  But that is a discussion about academic style and comprehensiveness, not plagiarism or academic misconduct.

The Investigation Committee has exonerated Terrence Deacon by finding that each of the allegations of plagiarism made against him are either without foundation in logic or evidence, or are demonstrably false. As a result, it is the responsibility of the University to make a concerted effort to repair the damage done to a wrongly accused member of our faculty.  In the Internet age, when unsupported and demonstrably false charges can be leveled against an individual and distributed directly to hundreds of people via email and many thousands more through websites, as has been the case with respect to Deacon, repairing reputational damage is an extraordinarily difficult challenge.  For that reason, the University has taken the unusual step of writing this narrative and creating a website where the investigation report is posted and its findings are available to any interested individual.

Comment on gender and race imbalance in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks

At the end of a laudatory* review of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology the reviewer makes the following point about gender and race imbalance** in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks:

Second, OHCP contains twenty-eight essays, but only three of them are authored by women. Unfortunately, the low percentage of women contributors (or co-contributors) isn't a peculiarity of this particular volume. After glancing at the table of contents of forty-five Oxford Handbooks in philosophy, I found that fewer than 20% of contributions are either authored or co-authored by women.

Networked individualism (and what it means for professional philosophy as work)

Jeremy Gilbert (see also Monday's post) writes on the relation of social media networks and individualism; below the fold some reflections on his essay for the philosophy profession.

On the one hand we have  a social logic which tends towards the promotion of egalitarian collective creativity. On the other, we have an ideology which demands that we remain commited to the liberal individualist obsession with our private, interior lives and our separability from all other beings. It insists that the outputs of all such creativity - and even the condition of possibility for those outputs - manifest themselves only as forms of private property: from the ‘transferrable skill sets’ which we ‘sell’ in the labour market [*] to the carefully-defined pieces of intellectual property that are the substance of the ‘knowledge economy’.... [**]  

in praise of lost causes

I worry that in the discussion of Eric's last post that people assumed that a necessary condition for being a lost cause in philosophy is that nobody much is defending the view and that there is very little prospects for a revival. Let's call this notion LC_S.

But LC_S is not even materially co-extensive with "lost cause." Not only should it be (in some sense) possible for something to be a lost cause even if most people aren't aware of the fact that it is, but also, in our hearts of hearts we all view certain currently popular views as being lost causes. When one regards a position as a lost cause  (just LC, or LC_C if one must)*  one regards it as genuinely hopeless, such that it will not pan out in any recognizable permutation. 

Here's the thing though; out of basic politeness and humility most of us don't go around parading our list of lost-causes. And I think that this is why people settled into LC_S in the previous discussion. If something really is LC_S then nobody will be offended if you point out that it is. This is not in general true with respect to LC_C.

I do want to give some examples though. Out of politeness, I'll restrict myself to nominating views which are such that they clearly sustain a big caveat:

1. any form of non-cognitivism that involves refusal to grant truth-value to those statements one is a non-cognitivist about, 
2. any form of innateness hypothesis that logically entails anything Fodor and Chomsky have meant whenever they have defended something they refer to as an "innateness hypothesis."

I think there are two interesting further points here. First, the caveat. Assume that both of my examples are correct. I think this shows that it is not a waste of time to work on lost causes. One cannot ignore what was learned while people prosecuted the non-cognitivist program (this should be clear from Schroeder's fantastic discussion), and even the most ardent foes of innateness motivated transformational epicycles will admit that the innateness beliefs were productive at least through 1972 (the year of Aspects, right before the pox-on-both-houses "linguistics wars" commenced).

A better model for refereeing?

In comments Roberta Millstein calls attention to this referee process:

Biology Direct operates on an open peer-review system, so each of the reviewers' comments accompanied by their name will be reproduced alongside the article, if published. The journal aims to publish all manuscripts that have attracted sufficient interest of Editorial Board members to result in 3 reviews. The reviews may be highly critical of the work or even outright negative, which in itself does not preclude publication should the authors decide to proceed. However, the reviewer also has the option to recommend rejection of manuscripts that have no scientific substance, or do not meet the standards of a scientific work.--Biology Direct.

I have long advocated this approach and I hope a philosophy journal emulates Biology Direct so we can judge how it works before long!

On the life of a Referee

Refereeing is lonely work. When you have done your time-consuming job, you often never find out what the impact of your effort has been on the people principally involved (the author and editor); it is not uncommon that editors do not tell you of their decision. Sometimes you learn what happened to a refereed manuscript because you come across it in the course of your future research. (To be clear, refereeing is a significant part of my work: leaving aside conference-abstract-refereeing, I referee about twenty-five items a year--primarily journal articles, although, of course, book manuscripts and tenure and promotion dossiers are far more time-consuming.) This is why I always ask editors to thank diligent referees (including the ones that recommend reject) on my behalf.

Of course, in practice within 'active' research areas one often develops a decent sense who wrote a piece of research and what happened with it. I find it very disorienting to see work appear in print substantially unrevised that has what I take to be, say, serious argumentative flaws and/or scholarly lacunae. In such cases, I have to really resist the urge to write the editor, "What were you thinking?" I then also wonder, "has the other referee screwed up?" (Sometimes one learns the identity of the other referee!) One reason why I advocate the publication of referee reports with accepted/published work, is that it makes more transparent editorial decisions and guidance--not a trivial matter in context of discussions about citation-networks, patterns of exclusion, and plagiarism. (Recall the proposal here.) I would welcome having my referee reports being visible with my name attached to them, but I realize junior people do have legitimate fears about retaliation. I believe journals should experiment with this.