Ruth Millikan’s Dewey Lecture has been getting a lot of favorable attention in the blogosphere recently. Rightly so. But I want to challenge one part of it that most philosophers seem to like. I’ll quote almost all of the relevant two paragraphs, since when I try to trim I think I do a disservice to her argument.
Millikan writes:
Philosophy is not a field in which piles of small findings later help to secure
fundamental advances. Little philosophical puzzles do not usually need to be solved but rather dissolved by examining the wider framework within which they occur. This often involves determinedly seeking out and exposing deeply entrenched underlying
assumptions, working out what their diverse and far-ranging effects have been,
constructing and evaluating alternatives, trying to foresee distant implications. It often involves trying to view quite large areas in new ways, ways that may cut across usual distinctions both within philosophy and outside and that may require a broad knowledge across disciplines. Add that to acquire the flexibility of mind and the feel for the possibility of fundamental change in outlook that may be needed, a serious immersion for a considerable time in the history of philosophy is a near necessity. This kind of work takes a great deal of patience and it takes time. Nor can it be done in small pieces, first this little puzzle then that. Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason at age fifty-seven and the other critiques came later. Closer to our time, Wilfrid Sellars published his first paper at thirty-five, having lived and worked with philosophy all his life up to then. I have never tried to research the matter but I have no reason to think these cases unique…. Further, because a serious understanding of the historical tradition is both essential and quite difficult to acquire by oneself, helping to pass on this tradition with care and respect should always be the first obligation of a professional philosopher. Given all this, it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not
necessarily good.
In philosophy there are no hard data. And there are no proofs. Both in the writing and in the reviewing, deep intellectual honesty and integrity are the only checks on quality. This cannot be hurried. Authors who discover their errors must be free sometimes just to start over. They need time to be sure that their use of sources is accurate. Reviewers need time to digest and to check sources themselves when not already familiar with them, nor should they feel under pressure to pass on essays out of sympathy for the impossible position of young people seeking jobs or tenure. Unread journals should not be proliferating to accommodate, mainly, the perceived needs of administrators to keep their institutions competitive. What we philosophers are after is not something one needs to compete for, nor will more philosophical publications result in more jobs for philosophers. Necessarily, carrots and sticks produce cheapened philosophy (p. 10-11).
Related concerns about the “hyperprofessionalization” of philosophy were expressed by Rebecca Kukla in a recent blog post at Leiter Reports and endorsed in many of the comments on that post.
Much of what Millikan says resonates with philosophical readers for good reason. But I’m not sure that the discipline is harmed by expecting philosophy professors at research universities to publish at the rates typically required for tenure.
Imagine a first-year graduate student complaining that submitting papers for evaluation by her professors interferes with her ability to construct radical, paradigm-overturning ideas. I would respond that putting one’s words to the page for evaluation by others is philosophizing. And even if not all your ideas are ready for critical scrutiny, it’s a problem if none of them are. Philosophical ideas are generally developed by shaping them into words and arguments, either orally or in writing, and exposing those words to critique.
Of course assistant professors are not graduate students and journal referees are not professors grading seminar papers, but it’s not clear that to me that it harms philosophy to insist that research-oriented philosophy professors shape their ideas into articles or books that experts in their area judge to be of respectable quality. This seems to me no different from simply insisting that they do what their peers and elders judge to be good philosophy. (Maybe one could do purely oral philosophy? Or purely blogosphere philosophy? Sure, if it’s good enough! But keep a record of it.)
It would be bad to force people to publish at a rate that substantially impairs quality. But I don’t think that a good, substantial article or two per year, on average, is too much to ask of professors at universities with substantial research expectations and moderate teaching loads. It leaves sufficient time for creative thought, for delving into the history, for considering revolutionary new ideas that aren’t yet ready for print. Often, working on such articles is the very occasion for such thought and delving and potential revolutionizing, even if not all of that work is manifest in the article itself. And since we are human, it often helps to have carrots and sticks, as long as they are not abusively or narrow-mindedly employed.
(Caveat: I’m not arguing that these expectations should be combined with the up-or-out tenure system of most U.S. research universities, which is arguably inhumane. May I save that issue for another occasion?)
Is the field producing less “great” philosophy because people are publishing too early? That’s hard to judge without historical distance, but I don’t see why we should think so. For one thing, it’s not clear that we aren’t now producing great philosophy at rates so different from what would otherwise be expected. Even if we are producing less great philosophy now than we did in the latter half of the 20th century, possibly the latter half of the 20th century was a golden era for philosophy, in which case we ought to expect some deviation toward the historical mean. And even if we’re in more serious decline than that, I doubt the cause is that we expect philosophy professors to publish their work. Looking both historically into the past and cross-culturally to non-Anglophone countries, I suspect that advancement based on publication record tends to produce more great philosophy overall than do cozier arrangements of advancement based on… what? Whether you seem smart?
What I elided in the first quoted paragraph from Millikan was a parenthetical citation of two of my blog posts on the ages at which philosophers do their best work. In those posts I present evidence that philosophers do their best work at a broad range of ages (mostly late 20s through early 60s) — a broader range of ages, apparently, than do scientists. This partly supports Millikan’s point that philosophers often peak late; but it also partly undercuts her point. Berkeley, Ayer, Hume, Moore, Marx, Russell, and Ramsey all did their most-discussed work when they were in their 20s. Although Kant and Sellars were not highly unusual, they were also not typical. Great philosophy is done across the life span, and revolutionary ideas come from the newcomers and the young as often as they come from those steeped in decades of deep study.
Millikan raises good points. There’s much that I agree with in her reservations about the professionalization of our field. But let me add the thoughts above as a bit of a counterweight. I don’t think our field’s publication expections have begun to approach genocidal levels.
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