Of argument and ethics

How are argument and ethics linked? I’ve already touched on this question previously in the blog, exploring the relations between moral philosophy and actual ethical conduct. It’s clearly a question a lot of people like to think about: more people read that post than any other on this website!

Here, I want to consider a different way philosophy and ethics might intertwine, namely in the common ground between norms of argument and norms of ethics. The thought is this: Arguing well, in the philosophical sense, involves taking seriously what people say. Taking seriously what people say is one way of treating them with respect. As such, teaching people to argue well, and to do so naturally and instinctively, helps them act morally.

I first started to really consider this issue when I found myself mired in the Comments section of an online website. In my case, it was the academic-journalist website, The Conversation, but I think what I say will resonate with anyone who has waded into the to-and-fro of dialogue on just about any online discussion-board or comments section, or even on Facebook or Twitter, at least when the debate touches on moral and political views. If anything, we might suspect discussion on websites like The Conversation to be of a relatively high standard. Not only are the articles there written by academics, and so usually well-informed and bolstered with evidence, moderators patrol the comments section, and (to stymie anonymous trolling) everyone must use their real names.

Yet even with such measures in place, the standard of argument leaves much to be desired. I’m not speaking here of ‘trolls’, who just leave nasty comments to upset their victims, but rather about many ordinary people who (it seems to me) genuinely want to contribute to a discussion but succeed only in destroying it.

In my experience, once responders ascertain that a contribution (either the original article, or an earlier comment) maintains a position that differs from their own moral or political view, they will typically engage one or more of the following four modes of response (let’s call the contribution they are responding to ‘X’). Responders will tend to:

1.       Interpret X in the most extreme and unqualified way possible.

2.       Demand that implementing X would inevitably wind up creating a morally catastrophic situation, and that the author of X either endorses this outcome or recklessly fails to acknowledge its inevitability.

3.       Demand that the assertion of X must be driven by the most extreme and unpalatable moral principle imaginable.

4.       Demand that someone could only hold that moral principle if they were utterly evil, irrational, ignorant or ideologically duped.

Sometimes, opening with innocent-seeming phrases like ‘So basically you’re saying that…’, a single response can manage to work its way through all four modes of response. Such tactics, moreover, are not limited to one side or another of the political divide. Both progressive and conservative, left and right, employ them lavishly. The prevalence of these modes of response helps explain the oft-invoked Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Response 1 can do this by implying X resembles some position or policy employed by the Nazis. Response 2 says implementing X would lead to Nazism; Response 3 says X’s underlying principle accords with Nazism, while Response 4 says that the reasons for accepting X’s underlying principle would be endorsed by Nazis.

Some readers will have immediately recognized various sorts of informal logic fallacies (slippery slope, ad hominem) in the modes of response listed above, but I think the root cause of them all is the ‘straw-person’ fallacy; namely, caricaturing an opponent’s position by interpreting what they have said, and their reasons for saying it, in the most uncharitable way possible. The straw-person fallacy works by entirely avoiding the actual argument that has been presented, and in its place erecting a quite new argument (the ‘straw-person’ or ‘straw-man’) that is much easier to defeat. Constructing a straw-person represents an improper maneuver according to the standards of philosophical argument because it is a non sequitur—it ‘does not follow’ from what the opponent has said. Rather than responding to the argument at hand, the straw-man comment responds to some other argument entirely. On a logical level, the straw-person-response at best proves irrelevant to the issue at hand. More usually however, it serves to distract attention away from the actual position someone has proposed, and makes it appear that the defeat of the caricatured argument represents a defeat of the proposed position itself.

So much establishes, I hope, that these four modes of response fail logically and philosophically. But are they also a moral failing? And even if they are, does this sort of moral failure really matter? Is it worth us worrying about?

I think the prevalence of such responses does matter: they fail to respect others with opposing views and they contribute to an unhealthy political environment.

First, these responses inflict an immediate harm. The original author who has been dealt with in this way normally either flees the discussion or retaliates angrily. Even if they respond constructively, trying to clarify their position, a second wave of the same straw-person-ing responses typically drives them into frustration. The four responses demean their victim, precluding the possibility that the author is a reasonable and reflective person who could make a contribution to the dialogue. Instead, the author retreats, wounded and insulted.

Such responses also (and this is the second worry) undermine the potential of these domains to play a genuine role in the participatory side of democracy—in people being exposed to and engaging with other citizens who hold opposing views. As well as sundering this potentially promising mode of democratic participation, straw-person responses can impact upon people’s overall judgments about political legitimacy. In a democracy, legitimacy hinges on accepting that we have reason to comply with democratically chosen policies and laws (except in extreme cases), even if we morally oppose them, voted against them and plan to vote against them in the future. The more we view our fellow citizens as reasonable people holding morally defensible views, the more we will apprehend democratic processes and legislation as legitimate, even if we remain personally opposed to any given result. However, the more we conceive all citizens who oppose us as rapacious ideologues, immune to constructive discussion, the less likely we are to endorse a democratic process where they hold a majority. And, naturally, by foreclosing all their attempts to engage in rational discussion with us, we enhance the possibility that they will see us in precisely this way: as ideologically-driven dogmatists incapable of rational thought.

(Of course, I can’t deny that sometimes one’s political opponents will really prove to be morally beyond the pale. It may turn out that their reasons for advancing some policy actually are intolerant, racist or totalitarian. But this judgment can only happen at the end of the discussion, not the beginning.)

If rampant straw-person-ing yields these morally worrisome impacts, then why do so many responders engage in it? And when the responders do it, why are their tactics so often endorsed by those who share their political allegiance? Do the responders think they actually have a chance of changing the original author’s mind by using these tactics? Surely not. If one wants to persuade someone of the errors of their view, then the necessary first step must be to engage with the author’s actual views, and not some other views. Scorning another person is probably the worst imaginable manner of changing that person's mind about something.

Indeed, I doubt these responses even have much to be said for them from a strategic viewpoint—that is, from the position of working out what will best promote the power and importance of one’s own faction’s agenda. In democracies, the best way of getting contested policy enacted is almost always to convince the center to change their mind—to bring over onto your side those precious swing voters in the middle. Taking seriously the views of those who oppose you is the crucial first step towards teasing out whether they possess extreme views on the topic, or hold a perspective not so different from your own. In contrast, using the above responses to treat moderate and centrist voters as if they hold extreme views simply pushes them from the center to the opposing extreme—exactly the last thing you would want to do if you really want to see some positive change made in the world.

I confess I do not know why the practice riddles online commentary. I could darkly speculate that the responders draw on these tactics unconsciously in order to cement a pleasing worldview where their opponents are obviously wrong and immoral. This makes for a neat world where they can wallow in self-righteous outrage at anyone who opposes them. But this is mere speculation on my part (and probably involves my own collapse into Response 4 above).

One other possibility, though, is that responders comment in these ways because they have never learned any other way. After all, we are not born knowing the norms of philosophical argument. It takes effort, patience, concentration and empathy to understand what a person is really saying, as distinct from what we presume they are likely to say. Such virtues can be difficult to muster when a person opposes our views, and the instinctual reaction is to defend ourselves.

If that is right, it underscores why teaching philosophy (especially in ‘critical reasoning’ and ‘informal logic’ courses and elements of courses) possesses real ethical value. In teaching the norms of argument in schools and universities, we provide learners with tools and instincts that allow them to do something that proves notoriously difficult to do: to genuinely listen to what people from other perspectives say, and to understand their reasons for saying it. True, giving people the tools to act rightly does not guarantee they will be motivated to do so, but it does at least open the possibility of their doing so. And often being empowered to act in a particular way, to live up to a particular standard (in this case of philosophical excellence), actually does count as a reason for behaving in that way.

And as Gibbs noted in his 2010 Moral Development and Reality, the capacity and practice of trying to see things from another person’s perspective, especially in the course of argument, yields impressive results in terms of moral development. Philosophy itself, done properly, makes us better people.

[This blogpost was originally published as an article in Australian Ethics, May 2014.]

"I knew it!" Confirmation Bias and Explanation

Source of all evil or defender of all freedom? How the same
event can seemingly justify directly opposing beliefs.

“Confirmation bias” refers to the well-known human foible of favouring their existing beliefs and commitments, even in the face of conflicting evidence. For instance, if you believe that some person – Annie, say – is a shifty person, you will have a tendency to hold to that belief over time, and even come to believe it more strongly. Psychology experiments suggest that confirmation bias works in a variety of ways – including biasing the search for evidence (we search for data that supports our belief, rather than data refuting it), the interpretation of evidence (we look for weaknesses and ambiguities in evidence that questions our belief) and the memory of prior evidence one has been exposed to (we have faster and more thorough recall of confirming rather than dis-confirming evidence). Through these three methods, human beings show a decided tendency to cement their initial beliefs rather than revising them. In some cases confirmation bias can be very powerful. If people are exposed to evidence that Annie is shifty, say, and then shown beyond all dispute that this initial evidence was fabricated, they will still tend to harbour suspicions about Annie’s character that arose on the basis of that evidence, even though they will explicitly acknowledge and believe that the evidence was false!

Of course, confirmation bias is not insurmountable. People can and do decide they were wrong about something; and can recognize and choose to use tests and lines of enquiry that will expose their mistaken beliefs.

Confirmation bias and philosophy

Does confirmation bias affect philosophers too? There are good reasons to believe it does – consider the old saying that “being a philosopher means never having to admit you’re wrong”. The worry expressed here is that philosophers will use the sizable intellectual tools at their disposal to critique and interrogate opposing theories and evidence, and search out subtle cases of confirming evidence. In so doing they will corroborate their initial position, rather than using those intellectual tools to honestly enquire into it. And certainly wholesale changes of philosophical theory by established philosophers tend to be pretty rare. To be sure, philosophers develop their positions over time, revising and responding to new evidence and argument, but direct moves into the opposing camp don’t happen a lot, in my experience at least. (And I have no particularly special virtues in this regard either, of course.)

And it is probably fair to say such biases arise in the emotionally charged milieu of political philosophy even more stridently. Those who think that capitalism is a pretty good idea sometimes seem to be able to find confirming evidence for this belief every day and in every way. And the same is true for those who think capitalism is the fundamental source of every misery in the world. No possible horror can beset humanity without an explanation leading back to capitalism.

Explanations of confirmation bias

So why do we all do it? Well, there are lots of different reasons that have been put forward for this human tendency to cement our beliefs over time. For instance, having to reject a belief is cognitive hard work. The type of thinking that would reject the belief can require effort. Furthermore, the type of thinking that follows from revising the belief takes still more effort – do other beliefs now have to shift because that first one has been rejected? And since human beings are largely prone to avoiding effort, we are motivated to avoid these situations of mental heavy-lifting. Easier to stick with what we know.

Also, the more we understand our world, the better we are doing, and the more secure we feel. Beliefs underwrite our actions and our projects in the world. If our beliefs can be relied upon, then that enhances our ability to predict future events and attain our goals. Finding out a prized belief is wrong threatens that happy security.

And there is a social factor. The more we change our mind and revise what we have said, the less others can feel confident in relying on us as a valuable source of information and insight. Since most of us like our views to be taken seriously, a habit of admitting defeat carries social costs.

There’s a lot to be said for these sorts of explanations of confirmation bias – and the countless others out there in the psychology literature. In all likelihood, confirmation bias is over-determined – there are lots of reasons we do it.

However, I want to reflect on the possibility that confirmation bias arises from largely rational, sensible ways of thinking – in particular the search for explanations for events.

Confirmation bias and seeking explanations

Imagine something strange happens in the world – something you can’t explain. But it is (just suppose) important for you to be able to understand it. So you seek an explanation for it.

What does that involve?

Well, one of the main things it will involve will be aligning this new event with your current beliefs. If you can work out how this new thing happened, given what you already believe, then you will have explained that event. If you can work out how the facts as you currently understand them would have caused (or at least allowed the possibility of) this new event, then you will have explained it. That, pretty much, is just what it means to have an explanation.

So when you start searching for information to explain the event, you search for what we might call linking facts; facts that would allow you to move from your beliefs as they stand to the occurrence of the event.

Current beliefs + Linking facts = Explanation of event (or phenomena)

This, I hope, is pretty straightforward. If we want to understand something, there’s no point aligning it with other people’s beliefs (how would that help?), and no point trying to explain it from first principles all the way up (couple of years to spare?). The new phenomena is understood and explained only when it makes sense, given what we already accept. This doesn’t mean that the linking facts can’t replace or force revision of existing beliefs, but it does mean the existing beliefs fundamentally frame what counts as an explanation.

In fact, this search for linking facts has at least two results.

First, the type of linking facts you are looking for will vary depending on what your current beliefs are. If you believe that the United States is ultimately the root of all international problems, for example, then you will search out the type of linking facts that will explain the current phenomena – the situation in Syria in 2012, say – with the US. You will look for the involvement of the CIA, the pressure the US exerts on the global media, its historical influence on and action in the Middle East, its current oil interests in that region, and so on and on. On the other hand, if you believe that most of the world’s problems arise from extreme ideologies and fundamentalist religious beliefs, then you will search for very different sorts of linking facts.

Second, the search for linking facts will determine when your investigation stops. Once you have located the required linking facts, then the event is understood and explained. You can stop searching. So once you have found – to return to the example – that the US has CIA agents at work on Syria’s border with Turkey, that it has a history of animosity with the Syrian regime, and that Syria is an ally of Russia, then you have explained the Syrian crisis and the way it is presented in the mainstream media.

Job done. Move on.

And, of course, if you had started out with concerns about religious extremism, then in all likelihood a different set of linking facts would have been discovered, and the search stopped at that point. In other words, you will not continue to search in such a way that you might, (a) find subsequent facts that disprove the existence of your linking facts or impact on their capacity to explain the event, or (b) find subsequent facts that would better account for the event, using an entirely different explanation.

Now this search for explanation is not in any sense irrational. But it can clearly contribute to confirmation bias. As well as constraining the nature and end-point of the search, it cements the initial belief even further.

Why?

Because now that initial belief (about the role of the US in world affairs, say) helps explain this new event. The fact that it can explain this means you now have one more reason for believing it. If someone else later challenges this belief of yours, you are entitled to think: “But wait, clearly the US is playing this role, because I found evidence of its presence in the Syrian crisis.” You did not set out to test this belief, but you nevertheless ultimately collected evidence that helped justify your continued belief in it. In this way consideration of the same event by two people with different starting beliefs, even with access to the same information, will contribute for each of them to their justification of their initial beliefs.

And that’s a problem, because it means that confirmation bias arises from what are otherwise quite sensible and effective methods for understanding and explaining events.

“Since you’re a philosopher you must know…” (#4 on the list of top ten things not to say to a philosopher)

So this is basically a gripe.

Read Pufendorf? Wtf? I haven't even read the contents of my own bookshelf!

There are a lot of things I like about being a philosopher. One of the things I like is that when people ask what I do I can tell them I’m a philosopher. Because of the type of places I like to hang out, this often results in them asking me what a philosopher is, which usually means we wind up talking about philosophy. This, for me, is a pretty happy result.

But sometimes it doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes, the person does know what philosophy is. In fact, they have read some, or heard of some somewhere. And finally, they have met a real, live philosopher to talk to about it.

Which is great!

Except when they say:

“Since you’re a philosopher, you must know and have read such-and-such…”

And then, when you tell them you haven’t read it, and maybe don’t even know much about it, their face falls in disappointment. How can you – a professional philosopher – not have read the one piece of philosophy that they have read? It’s like meeting a scientist who says no, she’s never actually encountered the third law of thermodynamics before, but she’s really interested in hearing about it from you. Wtf?

Often, it isn’t even laypeople who do this. In its most prevalent form, it comes from other academics and intellectuals. You stumble into a law seminar and they figure you’ve spent years studying Marx, or at least Macpherson on Locke. You visit the social sciences and they’re pleased they have someone to explain Foucault to them. You flee to the hard sciences, where it is inconceivable you haven’t read Popper and Kuhn.

The basic problem, I take it, is that non-philosophers simply have no idea how vast philosophy really is.

Let me give an example. A few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching on one of my favourite subjects; the nature of moral values, relayed through its history since the Greeks. I agonized over what to put in and what to leave out, and wound up picking a selection of the usual suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus and the Stoics, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and G. E. Moore. No real surprises there.

But let’s canvas (as we did briefly in the first lecture) who’s not featuring. The dramatis personae of those who didn’t make the cut is arresting. Most of the major political philosophers have been ignored, including those who had an enormous amount to say about moral values. The inclusions don’t even make space for the philosopher who often heads polls of the public’s view of the greatest and most influential philosopher of all time: Karl Marx. Nor does it include his immensely influential predecessor Hegel. The philosophers who most shaped the political landscape around us are missing: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The philosopher who perhaps alongside Nietzsche gave us the single most sophisticated study of the moral psychology doesn’t get a mention: Adam Smith (yes, he actually did write another book as well as the “Wealth of Nations”). With the exception of Mill there are no card-carrying feminists – worse still there are no women at all (unless Harriet Taylor really wrote as much of “On Liberty” as Mill said she did); no Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,  Irigaray… There is no-one at all from the Germany or France in the last century, despite the litany of famous authors from there – Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault… No environmental philosophers – Naess, Leopold.

And we are hardly getting started. Thomas Aquinas is the only exemplary religious philosopher included, despite the wealth of input from the Christian, Jewish and Islamic scholars on the Western tradition of ethics. Where’s St Augustine, at least? Which is another way of observing that the list of inclusions only portrays the most facile patina of historical coverage. After all, there is almost a fifteen-hundred year gap in the middle of the list (did you spot it? Between the Stoics and Aquinas). Are we really to believe that nothing worth inclusion happened throughout that vast span of time, as empires rose and fell, religious traditions clashed and laws developed and dissolved? And don’t even get started on the anglo-centricity problem. Surely the Confucian tradition, at least, warrants mention. And what about the input of non-philosophers? Ever heard of that Charles Darwin fellow? He had a bit to say on the nature of morals. And the sociologists – Weber, Durkheim? And the psychologists and psychoanalysts – Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan? Not worth a mention?

One could go on.

And on.

The point is this: the history and content of moral philosophy – itself just one section of philosophy– is enormous. It is possible to reasonably demand a justification for the exclusion of every given one of these philosophers named above. But that’s just the point. Every one of those philosophers, and many more, warranted coverage in a course of this sort. But, it hardly needs to be said, the course only had so many lecture-slots, and harsh decisions had to be made.

Hegel? Cut.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith? Cut.

Anyone French? Cut.

Anyone writing in the last hundred years? Cut.

The rest of you name-brand guys are in.

Oh, except you Marx. You’re cut. No, I don’t care what that bloody poll said.

And just as there are only so many lectures in a course, so too there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many books that can be read. Most decent philosophers take months if not years of study to understand, and philosophers, like everyone else, need to specialize. So the chances are ultimately pretty high that if a layperson or an academic from another field has just bumped into a particular philosopher’s book, or just knows the philosophy that relates to their own domain, that I simply haven’t read it. Sometimes I won’t even have heard of it. And I doubt the problem is confined to me; most philosophers would encounter this (though maybe they don’t worry about it as much as I do).

What’s the cause of this problem? Is it simply that those who bump into some philosophy just assume that – if they as a non-philosopher have encountered it – then surely it must be a central text within philosophy itself? Is it a type of optimism they have that what they read actually mattered, and that the time spent wading through that forty pages of ethical argument at the end of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was worth it? (Gracious – I didn’t even mention non-academic philosophers above!)

Or is the problem with we philosophers? Is it a function of the fact that philosophy never wholly dispenses with its past? Philosophy snowballs through history, gathering accretions but only rarely shedding them, to the point now where a person conversant with the works of every name mentioned above appears more like a polymath than a recognizable philosopher. Granted, there are occasionally efforts to excise vast parts of that history, and so to make philosophy more manageable. Analytic philosophy in the early 20^th Century – under the spell of logical positivism – tried something like this with all those “unscientific” forebears. So too postmodern theory is all-too-easy to be taken as an excuse for not bothering with all those superseded dead, white males from modernist days of yore. I wonder what a tremendous intellectual relief it must be to have some excuse for ignoring all these thousands of years of philosophical thought. But – in the end – we keep going back for more. One generation casts aside Kant, and the next resurrects him. The struggle between Plato and Aristotle begins anew. And the snowball ever grows.

Perhaps the problem is with the way we philosophers write our books. When a layperson or non-philosophy-academic picks up one of our books, it’s unlikely they’ll be bearing in mind that this is just the latest offering on a question millennia old, on which countless theorists have written and are still writing. On which countless wrong turns have been taken and dead-ends found. The reader has happened across just one tiny drop in the ocean of thought, just one skittering pebble in the vast avalanche that is philosophy. Hopefully, of course, the drop might turn out to be an important one, the skittering pebble might be one that ramifies into a new avalanche – but such questions might not be settled for decades or even centuries after publication. In all likelihood, the drop will remain a drop, the pebble just a pebble.

Try putting that as the cover blurb on your new book.

Goodness knows I haven’t. So perhaps ultimately the fault is – at least in part – one of my own making. Perhaps philosophers have a tendency to present to their readers a view of philosophy as so much smaller than it actually is, so as to make our own works comparatively so much larger – and therefore worth reading and thinking about.

So – even though it didn’t make it onto the back cover of my upcoming book – this humble blogpost can be my attempt to communicate to the wider world the point that philosophy is big. Really big. And that the chances are pretty high that I have never heard of that dusty old tome you happened across in that delightful used bookstore.

But I’m happy to hear about it anyway.

Publishing, rejection and peer review in philosophy

“Peer review is the worst form of appraising academic work, except all the others that have been tried from time to time.”

Today I want to offer just a couple of reflections on peer review and publication, in the context of philosophy and the humanities. Hopeful they will be of some help or comfort to those just setting out on the tumultuous journey that is academic publication, or – like myself – still wrestling with its slings and arrows.

The first thing to keep in mind – as my bastardization on Churchill’s line on democracy above is meant to capture – is that peer review is by no means a perfect system. To be sure, it has substantial merits. What better way to judge academic work than to send it to experts in the field? Stripped of the name of its author, the experts judge it only by the cogency of its argument, the originality of the thinking, and the plausibility of its premises. The experts make their determination – hopefully offering thoughts for improvement – and the good papers are published and the poor ones passed over (usually to be reworked and submitted elsewhere). For the most part, the system works and is resilient enough to the occasional less-than-ideal behaviour on the part of individuals within it.

Indeed, one can feel a real dignity and virtue in the system when it works well. Reviewers and editors routinely decide to publish papers with whose conclusions they profoundly disagree; but they nevertheless accept the significance and the cogency of the argument and decide it is worth publishing on that basis. So too, the anonymity of the process really can create an equal playing field. Papers written by professors from Ivy League universities are passed over, and articles penned by PhD students from some backwater are selected. I may not have been to Cambridge, but I can (and have) published in its journal of ethics.

So that’s the good news. Of course it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, journal editors will reject papers immediately, before sending them out for review. And in such cases usually they will know the name(s) of the author, meaning the process is no longer blinded (processes can be put in place to fix this, of course). I hazard in such cases editors are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to well-known professors than unknown students. There is no reason to believe editors are more judicious than reviewers in this respect, so it's hard to see why they shouldn't be blinded.

So too, reviewers can be biased. They can evaluate the argument on the basis of whether they approve of its conclusions, or not. Now I think this is often not as large a problem as it might seem, as there are institutional factors that press against it. Effectively, philosophers like (need!) to argue with each other, and to do that requires finding intelligent people who disagree with them. So a good argument against their favourite theory is not something they want to suppress – but rather to publish and then respond to. But bias can rear its head at certain points – both the Sokal hoax and the ‘climategate’ scandal carried the charge that reviewers in those cases focused on whether they agreed with the conclusion, rather than the cogency of the evidence and argument itself.

But the major problem with peer-review is simply this: journal referees are often time-poor, and there are few institutional reward-mechanisms to ensure they carry out their task diligently and judiciously. If a referee makes a laughably wrong decision in rejecting a paper (and the world is littered with stories of what-came-to-be landmark (even Nobel-prize winning) articles that were passed over with brusque rejections) then there is usually no professional fallout from their doing so. Indeed, the institution that employs them will almost never know what happened. This means that every time a referee gives a fair and careful appraisal of a manuscript it is almost always an act of virtue. They did it because they themselves wanted to do the task well, not because there was a system of accountability by which they might be judged and found wanting.

Even if there are no issues of bias or brusqueness, it still remains a grim fact that top journals have (and must have in order to function) very high rejection rates – often well above 90%. This means that reviewers need to be pretty critical; it’s not enough for them to think the manuscript is okay. To be successful the manuscript has to convince two separate referees (and often the editor as well) that this paper simply cannot be passed over; it is brilliant and a perfect fit for the journal. Unless you are a scintillating genius, this means that if you are submitting manuscripts to top journals, you will get rejections.

If you are anything like me, you will get a lot of rejections.

So how to survive, in this world?

The first thing is, of course, not to take rejections too seriously. If you’re in this game, you will get rejections. You will get lots of them. The mere fact that you have had a long series of rejections on a particular manuscript does not mean that the paper is not worthwhile. I have met colleagues who are surprised when I tell them one of my manuscripts has been rejected seven times and I am still revising it and sending it out. (This is not merely my own personal stubbornness; one of the smartest and most well-published early-career philosophers I know told me just the other day that she had hit seven rejections with a manuscript and was still sending it out.) To be sure, in some cases it may be that the paper just isn’t good enough – if all the reviewers tend to be saying the same thing, then changes are in order, at least. But you can just be unlucky. If you believe in the paper and its significance, then you need to stick with it. All of my best publications were rejected at least once by some journal or other. My favourite paper, and the one I feel to be my best contribution to political theory – Two Concepts of Property (The Philosophical Forum, 2011) – had no less than six rejections at various venues before it was accepted. (Though, to be fair to the reviewers that had rejected it, it was heavily revised as it went along, especially in the light of some sympathetic but trenchant critiques put forward by two excellent referees from Social Theory and Practice.)

The point is more general. Just as rejections can make you doubt a paper, they can make you doubt yourself. I think it is fair to say that I have a pretty robust self-belief about my capacities as a philosopher. But when you are hit, again and again, with rejections from multiple sources, about multiple papers, it is easy to start thinking you are getting things wrong in some deep way. But the fact is that if the journals you are submitting to only publish about one in twenty submissions they receive, then even if you are producing high-quality work, multiple rejections will be the order of the day.

With this in mind, it is important to keep in mind that – in publishing like in so many other pursuits – when you are doing well you will tend to chalk it up to your merits, and when you are doing poorly you will put it down to luck. We attribute successes to things in our control, and failures to things outside our control. This is just a part of how human beings think, but it can be a persistent bias. If you (or one of your peers) gets a string of acceptances, then you/they are probably doing a lot right. But you/they are probably also lucky. Around 2009, during my PhD, I received three journal acceptances in a short period of time. Frankly, at that point I thought journal publication was the easiest thing in the world, and that referees were clearly able to recognize manifest genius (i.e. me) when they saw it. Sometime in 2011, I began to realise how wrong I had been. The manuscripts had been good, yes, but I had been lucky as well. And having that lucky start didn’t stand me in good stead when I began to receive rejection after rejection for my next set of manuscripts. Over time it all evens out, but that can mean long periods of rejection after rejection (people are often surprised at how many times a fair coin can turn up heads, if you toss it long enough). That can be pretty tough to handle, especially if you are early in your career, when each publication really counts, and you need them now - not later.

My next point is that there is never a comment from a referee that is not worth thinking seriously about. I mean that. Never ever. So what if they just skimmed your argument? So what if they clearly don’t know the literature as well as you do? So what if they hold to a shoddy interpretation of Hume or Foucault or whoever? It still matters what they thought. When your manuscript finally does get published, it will be read by people who just skim it, who don’t know the literature, and have dubious understandings of Hume and Foucault. You need to consider those readers as well – are there some small changes you can make so as to make your main point sensible to these readers? Could you make the abstract clearer – so that even the laziest scholar will not misunderstand what you are aiming to do in the paper? The point here isn’t to try and please everyone – that’s impossible. The point, rather, is never to write off a reviewer’s comments merely because you are sure they are an idiot. Often, they will still have said something that is worth thinking about seriously. It usually will cost you between two and six months to get those few comments; value them accordingly.

(The point about the abstract is worth emphasis too. I often fall into the trap of getting the paper itself very well-polished, and then realise I need the abstract only when I am about to submit, and just whip something up quickly. This is a mistake. The abstract is crucial. Every word in it matters. It will be the first thing editors and reviewers read – and the first thing scholars generally read when your article is published. You have to get it exactly right.)

Next point: always take the revise-and-resubmit process really seriously. A ‘revise and resubmit’ result should be what you are aiming for when you submit a manuscript. Most good journals will almost never give a straightforward acceptance. And a ‘revise and resubmit’ is usually an opportunity to really improve your paper. The comments you have been given are provided by someone who is clearly sympathetic to what you are doing (otherwise it would have been rejected). This is often the single best source of constructive criticism a scholar can access. Referees and editors will usually not require that you have made every change requested. What they will require, at absolute minimum, is that you have thought very carefully and sympathetically about their comments, and how they might benefit the paper. You don’t need just to do this – you need to demonstrate unequivocally to them that you have done it. (I’ll often provide a document detailing all the changes and my reasons, even if this is not requested.)

One final point: always always always be polite when dealing with journals, even if you feel you have been hard done by. There is nothing to be gained by telling the editor how incompetent one of her referees is, or that she should at least have sent it out for review, or whatever. Editing a journal is hard and often thankless work. The editor cannot second-guess her referees, or her own judgment, or her task becomes impossible. Moreover, venting your frustrations on the editor is a waste of emotional energy that would be better channelled into thinking seriously about whether and how to rework the manuscript. 

Take the criticism to your typewriter, as the old writing adage goes.