
Since hiring and career advancement in philosophy depends a great deal on publication in journals, this incentivizes an emphasis on doing philosophy in the form of essays, and, in particular, the kinds of essays that journals want to publish. This encourages a shift away from every other medium for doing philosophy: discussion, debate, spoken philosophy, recording videos, and other forms of writing: diaries, self-reflections, notes, exchanges of letters, books, blogs, and so on. If it isn’t rewarded in the same way as publishing in top journals, people are simply going to do less of it, and the field as a whole will attract fewer people who have skill and talent for these other means of doing philosophy. By discouraging these other activities, this also discourages everyone from investing a great deal in and developing their ability to contribute in these ways, as well. So we two sources of reduction in the quantity and quality every other medium of philosophy:
Selection-based reduction: Fewer people with a comparative advantage in doing philosophy in every way other than publishing papers in top journals will be disincentivized and discouraged from contributing to academic philosophy
Skill-based reduction: Those who are committed to remaining in the discipline will have less incentive to produce content in these other mediums, and so they will develop less skill at doing so. As a result, the comparative quality of what we do see. People are also less likely to continue doing things they are not comparatively good at so this will lead to a reduction in output as well.
This probably has very bad consequences. Imagine if all chefs were primarily rewarded based on how well they baked bread. Those chefs with the most talent and interest in baking bread would rise to the top, while those with other interests or talents would be comparatively disadvantaged. This would lead chefs with other skills, talents, and interests to be less successful. Some would leave the culinary world altogether. Some would shift towards baking even if it wasn’t their comparative advantage, leading them to make less good food that isn’t bread. Since they dedicate most of their time to making bread, they’d have less practice and experience making things other than bread, so the quality of their non-bread dishes will be worse than if they were equally rewarded for making non-bread. Some would stick it out and insist on making things other than bread, but they would wallow in anonymity. Fewer people would eat their food, and it would be less prominent and have less of an influence on everyone. The net result is that we’d have a lot of very, very good bread, and much less other kinds of good food in general.
I think the same thing is going on in academic philosophy. Philosophers have defended the use of publication in journals as a tool for quickly assessing competence and potential. But what philosophers are failing to appreciate is that there is a two-way causal pathway between the methods we use to measure people’s output and reward them for it, and what people end up doing.
It’s not like philosophers are just going to do philosophy in whatever way they think is best, that journal publication is just some passive means of assessing them, and the ones who do well at this happen to rise to the top. Rather, insofar as philosophers and philosophy students are aware of how they are assessed, they will face extreme pressure to shift their priorities towards doing whatever it is that will make them successful. The net result is just like the bread scenario: people who’d be great lecturers or bloggers or debaters or orators or syllabi developers or conversationalists or mentors or whatever, but are at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to publishing in the most prestigious journals, will be pushed out of the field or suffer permanently worse job offers, chugging away as adjuncts or at less prestigious universities, where they will inevitably receive fewer accolades, their work will enjoy less attention, they will win fewer grants and awards, and their work will be regarded as less central to the field. Many will simply leave the field and stop contributing, leading to a literature biased in favor of those who write the sorts of things that get published in top journals.
This can lead to a snowball effect where emphasis on academic publishing is self-reinforcing: those who rise to the top of the field through publishing in “top journals” then become the editors and reviewers and department chairs and famous important people that everyone else listens to, and via self-selection and strong reasons to defend the status quo that got them where they were, can cement and defend the practices that put them in those positions, while retaining almost every position of power that a person could, in principle, use to change the situation. This will also result in almost all experts not merely have strong biases and a vested interest in retaining the status quo, but genuinely believing that the established methods are the best methods. Those who do or would think differently simply aren’t there to make their case. This gives the impression that there’s a consensus in favor of the status quo because there is a consensus in favor of the stupid quo. Only that consensus is due to selection effects, attrition, and biases as much or more than it’s due to the status quo actually being the best way to approach things.
This is an awful situation, and I have no idea how to fix it.
I agree with much of what is said here. Especially of potential importance (and not only in the discipline of Philosophy) is the shadow of the (as mentioned in this great substack)
- Selection-based reduction
and the
- Skill-building reduction
THAT SAID, coming from a country (let's say somewhere in the South of Europe) where job recruitment has been done for decades and still in many (most?) Departments based on how well you "get along" with the department senior members and not truly on merit, when metrics (scientometrics metrics mostly) started being taken a bit seriously 15 years ago that was a clear progress. So these days in this corner in the South of Europe you do have this debate raging... and it's actually quite interesting... merit-based recruitment based on sheer metrics being the exception, most people actually favor moving away from this system, or only tend to emphasize the excesses of the system (there have been many such excesses indeed in a few cases... As proof that you can have the worst of both worlds, these days the President of the oldest university in this corner in the south of Europe has apparently run a paper mill system where his citations were inflated for years... he has not stepped down in spite of the case having been amply covered in national media).
So I have seen a couple of cheap "online surveys" being distributed among philosophy professionals in this country where they were asked about how much they valued the current system of metrics and journal quartiles and so on, and whether alternative systems should be taken into account for recruitment and promotion (as if this system were currently the main system for recruitment and promotion, which it is not)... Guess what most people who completed the survey replied.
You do have a point that people who are good at the system will tend, ceteris paribus, to support it more than the average. But the opposite also applies, people who are bad at "playing the game" tend to be extremely critical of it... now please note that according to my immodest assessment of how things work in this corner of the developed world those (but note that in this part of the world most university professors have never worked professionally at a different university than the one they are currently employed) will tend to be on average but very clearly also those who tend to have less skills in other ways of serving the profession.
So the survey or study deserves to be done, but properly, because motivated bias runs both ways.
And Goodhart's law is a true concern, but in certain places of the university world Gresham's law is a concern as well.
Yup, pretty much. I have a ton of respect for people who are prolific article authors, but it’s a very specific skill and a lot goes in to being a good philosopher that is not captured by it — and some good philosophers are not great at publishing.