Guest post: When ‘scholarship’ seems to be defined by counting citations
Originally a comment by Ian on The broad, well-established, interdisciplinary scholarly fields.
All this mouthing off about ‘scholarship’ comes over to me as unbearably pretentious, especially when ‘scholarship’ seems at best to be defined by counting citations. I’ve read the article and it seems like something that, in the Journals I used to read, would have been in the Notes and Comments section. It is however clearly and unambiguously written, which in some academic fields I know will count against it.
Even if we take the claims of the writers of the open letter at face value, that they were concerned about the failure of the editors to maintain scholarly standards and it was not a personal attack on the author, they still demonstrate a breathtaking arrogance. If there are defects in ‘scholarship’ it isn’t enough to simply make the claim. It requires a counter-argument, with evidence that is more than just argument from authority.
I’m not in academia, but I spent 40+ years in a profession where I was expected to make arguments for policy decisions, often in legal or quasi-legal contexts. Had I attempted to make a case such as is presented in the open letter, I would have been almost literally laughed out of court.
I think many of them would do well to read Andreski’s ‘Social Sciences as Sorcery’ – it doesn’t look as if things have improved much since the 70s, when it was published. A quote:
So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.
It’s also disingenuous: if every paper or treatise were to include this necessary list of approved citations, would that silence the critics? Of course not. It would then become necessary for every paper to argue the same positions as those found in the approved citations.
Andreski’s book is now on my To Read list.
Isn’t it ironic how people who purport to be about challenging authority and sticking up for the marginalized are using pretention and appeals to authority to do it? Of course they’d be the last ones to notice, irony-blind as they are.
Turns out The Master has lots of tools, and some of them work better than others at bringing down the house. Pro-tip, Samudzi et al.: you’re using the wrong tools.
My PhD is in math, where nothing else matters much if you have a proof for your theorem. The proverb is that the shorter the thesis, the better the thesis. I took flack for writing 70 pages (which took me almost 4 years to complete). Even in my field, however, you’d be swimming up a waterfall trying to get published if your paper didn’t contextualize itself properly. At minimum:
* You need to demonstrate that you know whether your theorem is original. Mine was a minor original theorem, but its immediate application was to give a simpler proof of a special case of a well-known theorem that was already proven. If I had seemed to believe that result was original, it would have invited much more intense scrutiny and a high likelihood of rejection.
* You need to demonstrate that you’re aware of other related work in general. My thesis contained a landmine on purpose: oftentimes well-placed Soviet mathematicians would have access to Western publications denied others, and would exploit it to republish others’ work as their own in the Russian literature. In my case, a crucial theorem was originally proven by Soviet mathematicians, but is usually credited to Western mathematicians who stole the result. I gave primary credit to the Russian authors, with a footnote mentioning the Western authors. Anyone who chased my references would have realized I was opening a can of worms — but nobody on my committee called me on it. Anyway, unfamiliarity with the existing literature would also probably get my thesis rejected.
* Most importantly, you need to know the foundations of your specialty. If I had redefined standard terms in some idiosyncratic way, or introduced new terms for already-familiar concepts, it would not only make my paper less comprehensible, but also expose my ignorance of the basic stuff already known by others in my specialty. (I exploited this in reverse in my oral exams: I prepared alternatives to key definitions that I expected to be asked for, baiting the examiners into challenging me — whereupon I could prove that my definition was actually equivalent to the usual one. In this way they wasted time they might have spent asking me harder questions. Done right, they won’t realize they were distracted, because they were entertained by the novelty. It worked in two exams, and backfired in a third.)
Sorry for the verbosity. All this to say that although the reaction to this paper clearly went way over the top — gunning for a person’s job is not OK, even if the paper were very bad scholarship indeed — the impression I got is that references to citations was meant as a proxy for demonstration that Tuvel appeared ignorant of relevant scholarship. Although philosophy isn’t (trans)gender studies per se, if you’re going to write about the philosophy of gender or race, you need some sort of framework for referring to them; at minimum, one needs to have a definition of things like “race.” Without it, the philosopher is left chasing their tail in effect asking, “What is race, anyway?” One can change citizenship, profession, religion, or even family affiliations — in what way is race the same or different? Ditto gender? That question is fundamental to Tuvel’s paper, and should not be asked or answered in a vacuum. It’s reasonable to expect basic familiarity with some generally accepted definition of race.
That objection passes the smell test for me. That’s the most I can say, because I don’t actually know even the fundamentals of philosophy of race or gender. I don’t know what it means to be “black,” except in the colloquial sense as a white person in the United States.
Note: I do know that black people can’t claim to be trans-white — and I knew a wonderful black woman, before she died in her late 90’s, who put pancake makeup on her face and hands. I never knew why, since I didn’t know how to even begin asking her such a question. Everyone who knew her pretended not to notice. Did she think she was passing for white? Did she simply love pancake makeup? Our best guess was that somewhere in her past she internalized the standard that whiter=better, and if that’s true we felt bad for her. So I don’t know whether a white person can get away with “slumming” in spray-tan blackface, but I’ve actually known people who went about in whiteface, and if their intent was assimilation it didn’t work. I’m suspicious of trans-Xism that only works for high-status individuals claiming membership in the low-status group.
Just launching off of the remarks in #3 above, I think it has got to be possible to believe all of these things at once:
1. The article is wrong in obvious ways;
2. Nevertheless, that article was a relatively well-written article;
3. And yet, it contained relatively defective scholarship;
4. However, the defectiveness of that scholarship is consistent with prevailing (defective) citation practices in philosophy, as apparently evidenced by its success in passing peer review;
5. And still, these citation practices are outdated (at best) and unworthy of approbation;
6. But not so worthy of disapprobation as to merit hate mail, public shaming, and calls for the dismissal of the author.
FWIW, it seems to me that it’s up to the epistemic community surrounding Hypatia — i.e., editors, fellow writers, subscribers, and people who are generally invested in it as a going concern — to decide whether or not the upshot of (1-6) is that the article merits retraction.
Well, in all my time at university and in research organisations, I’ve never seen a paper retracted for simply being demonstrated to (partly) wrong or to have quoted/not quoted certain citations. Rejected or sent back for revision for sure, but retracted no. What happens to papers which are found to be wanting is simply that either someone else writes a paper demonstrating why the first was a waste of space, or it simply sinks to obscurity.
The idea that a paper should be retracted for anything short of falsification (how would you do that in Philosophy?), plagiarism or gross misrepresentation of facts/citations (which really should be caught by peer review) is both extraordinary and deeply unhealthy in my view.
Radical feminists have been analysing and writing about gender for decades before all the ‘trans umbrella’ and ‘cis’ and ‘a woman is a person who identifies themselves as a woman’ stuff. Trans and Queen theory rarely bothers to cite or understand older established and still relevant feminist research and theory on gender and sex.
I don’t take any position on whether or not Tuvel’s paper is wrong (although it seems to me that “wrong” is not a particularly straightforward idea when dealing with speculative philosophy), but I will note that simply being wrong is not grounds for editorial retraction in any field that I know of.
For an example of how the scientific community responded to a high profile paper that was widely considered to be deeply flawed, but not guilty of any ethical violations, you can look at the arsenic/DNA fiasco of several years ago. There were many blog posts, letters to the editor of the journal (Science, in this case) and follow up papers refuting the original report. But there was no storm on social media defaming/harassing the authors and no petitions calling for retraction (and in fact the article, although now an embarrassment to the authors, was never retracted).
I don’t believe that biochemists are any more mature as a group than philosophers, so it’s unclear to me why the biochemistry community was able to respond to that situation without having a collective meltdown, while the philosophy community hasn’t been able to manage the same thing in this case.
Before making a sharp virage scientifique as a graduate student, I spent a couple of years in philosophy, gravitating quickly from phenomenology and other varieties of continental philosophy to logical positivism, then philosophy of mind, finally linguistic, analytical and common sense philosophy. In those days I would have regarded the whole “trans” kerfuffle as a tempest in a metaphysical teapot. The difference between biochemistry and philosophy is the simple (ok, not always so simple) set of empirical tools popularly known as scientific method. The “trans” issue is complicated by personal testimony and a subset of the consciousness problem, whether “hard” or not. So biochemists may not be more mature than philosophers, but for want of an accepted “method” to adjudicate debate, certain branches (weeds?) of feminist philosophy seem to have opted for Trumpian high dudgeon and mob-fuelled petition-mongering.
Someone recommended this book to me: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10800.html Has anyone read it?
Also pertinent in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/transgender-rights-bill-female-born-spaces-1.4110634
Masked Avenger #3
If Tuvel’s piece had been a Doctoral thesis, I would agree that all the critical terms would need to be defined. It isn’t though, hence my comment about it being something for ‘Notes and Comments’. It is only 4-5 pages and essentially says “If this is true, then so is this.” It’s not much more than a long form blog post or a letter, a thinking aloud. Adding in every possible relevant citation would not make it better – just longer.
“It’s not much more than a long form blog post or a letter, a thinking aloud” – or, more respectably, an essay or a think piece or a column. (Not saying that’s what it is, just saying the genre includes better descriptors.)
I write regular columns for two publications myself, and here’s one thing about that: there are such things as word limits. Pretty much all the attacks on Tuvel’s piece that I saw took it for granted that she could have gone on as long as she wanted, but what reason is there to think that’s true? Limits are limits; if you have to included a lot of references then you have less room for your own words. What if what you want to do is write up your own argument on the subject, all in your own words, without clutter? It appears that doing that is acceptable at Hypatia, or they wouldn’t have accepted it; it appears to be ok with peers or it wouldn’t have passed peer review.
All, there are interesting questions here, e.g., what it should take to retract a paper in philosophy. It’s definitely worth raising and discussing, irrespective of the current case.
I don’t myself believe that mere wrongness is sufficient grounds for retraction — that would introduce an incredible chill into professional philosophy, a discipline that is already frigid cold. I can, however, think of some good candidates for papers that needed to be retracted: e.g., the Infamous Paper in Synthese. As it turns out, that happens to have been a case where the ordinary peer review process was suspended. But even if that had not been the case, I think there are sufficient reasons to retract it based on content alone, since it’s a gonzo ad hominem catastrophe.
O (#10), I don’t believe that bibliographic information is usually counted into word limits, so I don’t think it’ll really factor in much.
#3
Quote: “I’m suspicious of trans-Xism that only works for high-status individuals claiming membership in the low-status group.”
There are some case of it working the other way. Here in Lebanon we have some people who reason that they are not Arabs but are in fact Phoenicians, and Phoenicians are “White.” (Not going to delve into the veracity of these claims). So they refrain from speaking Arabic, give their kids French or Anglo names and support White nationalism. They have even gained some traction with white nationalists in Europe, for instance one of the leading “Phoenicians” is a buddy of Nigel Farage.
Ben @ 11 – but the objection wasn’t just a demand for a bibliography surely? Weren’t they shouting that Tuvel should have discussed other scholars’ arguments?
E. Sharp @ 11 – wow, that’s interesting.
O, I can’t speak for the letter writers or co-signers, since I’m not one of them. Still, as #3 pointed out above, mere references (or “counting citations”, in this thread) does count for something.
That said, Hypatia puts a word limit at 8K for submissions — *including* footnotes and references. So, you’re right, that might have made elaboration in the main text much more difficult. But as far as I can tell that’s a rule that 8K rule only applies to the initial draft, since the actual published article looks like it clocks in around 8.5K (including footnotes, abstract, references, etc).
E. Sharp @ 12,
“Phoenicians”, ha. My mother is from Lebanon, so I ran into a few in Montreal. But they’re generally Maronite, so they may have a (tenuous) case. http://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2013.46
My mother’s own roots were unlikely to have come from the coast but (we suspect) from the north, from the Caucasus, and were (probably forcibly) “reverted” to (Sunni) Muslim upon arrival many centuries ago. Is she less “indigenous” for it?
Anyone know if this book is worth reading?
“Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker”
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10800.html
I know someone recommended it in a comment a day or two ago.
O @11
In science journals, ‘Letters’ are a fairly standard way of presenting research findings. For example for Nature they are described as ‘short reports of original research focused on an outstanding finding whose importance means that it will be of interest to scientists in other fields.’
And to be honest I don’t see anything wrong, per se, with a long form blog post, despite the lack of peer review.
Well as a blogger I see much merit in that view!
But still – “essay” is a good word with a long and respectable history. Montaigne would have loved blogging, but I like to keep the word “essay” in circulation still.
Opelia @ 17,
Here he is in the NY Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/the-uproar-over-transracialism.html
Reasonable. Which means it won’t satisfy the baying mob.