Hey! I’ve started reading more and more philosophy of science in the lead-up to my new postdoc in September.
Today I wanna discuss a brief but really interesting discussion by Thomas Kuhn on the difference between disciplines that publish books and disciplines that churn out articles:
When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writer of textbooks.
There’s no need to re-derive quantum mechanics in every new science publication. We’re all quantum scientists here! And now that we share an established paradigm, we can skip past the preliminaries and get to the heart of our findings and our disagreements much faster.
But this means we quantum scientists are gonna start writing more and more for each other:
No longer will his researches usually be embodied in books addressed, like Franklin’s Experiments…on Electricity or Darwin’s Origin of Species, to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the field. Instead they will usually appear as brief articles addressed only to professional colleagues, the men whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the papers addressed to them.
Kuhn notes that writing books often hurts the professional reputations of scientists! Think about it—who would write a book? Either someone Popularizing science in a Barnes & Noble bestseller, or someone Catechizing the established basics in a new textbook for the next generation of students. Nothing new to see here!
After all, there’s not much reason to write a book when a short, to-the-point article could sum up the results of your research and demonstrate your lab’s contribution to the Literature much more efficiently (it would be shorter) and, given your audience, accessibly (it would be in the standardized format that other experts seeking out cutting-edge research expect).
These days, articles in the sciences tend to have a remarkably standardized structure:
Abstract (hey! see if you wanna read this)
Introduction (here’s the problem and broader conversation we’re contributing to)
Methodology (here’s what we did)
Results (here’s what happened)
Discussion/Conclusions (here’s our interpretation of what this shows and thoughts for what’s next)
This format is so rigid that you can actually see scientists using ChatGPT to write the boring parts (like their Introduction) based on the sudden explosion of some of ChatGPT’s favorite words in the scientific literature:
It turns out that if you outsource the horribly traumatic work of AI safety to Kenyan laborers making less than $2 an hour, your model will learn to speak…more like an educated Kenyan! Weird.
Anyway, papers in philosophy are a little less formulaic than this, but by the time you’ve proved to your referees that yes, you are aware of the existing literature, and you’ve explained why you’re using the word ‘control’ or ‘reason’ in this particular way, you’re already running out of time! You still have to
put together your argument
motivate your key premises
try to respond to a few obvious objections
and by the end, leave the reader feeling like you’ve made some sort of progress.
But articles have become increasingly important in philosophy, for a zillion convergent reasons. Here’s one: As a discipline, analytic philosophy is desperately looking for clean, ‘objective’ metrics like number of articles published to drive more evidence-based, less structurally racist and sexist decision-making in enrollment, hiring, and promotion.
(Whoops, there are still tons of biases that drive who gets to publish more and how ‘prestigious’ their publications are? Well, maybe this new bad system is still better than the old one where we did job interviews in hotel rooms and bars at the big superconferences?)
Also, publishing tons of tiny articles is a big part of what Science is doing, and it seems to be working really well for them. So maybe it could work for us, too?
Quick storytime.
At IU, there’s a policy that every PhD program requires 90 hours of coursework for you to graduate. This allows the University to (1) make money selling credit hours, and (2) make everything Fair.
There’s just one problem: to get a Philosophy PhD you only need around a third of that. Most of getting a philosophy PhD is not about taking coursework, and unlike the sciences, we record zero hours working in a lab.
So, most of the courses I ended up ‘taking’ were fake.
As in, no one ever met for these class.
The university knew this.
And I had to pay thousands of dollars in fees for the privilege to ‘take’ fake classes that only existed on paper.
(I accidentally took too many fake classes and then the university got Worried that I wasn’t making adequate progress towards my degree. Thanks, I’m doing just fine but why can’t I get my money back?!)
Maybe every discipline shouldn’t have to go through the same standardized ringer for no reason?
Writing articles works so well for science because of what science is like.
In science, once we share a paradigm, I just have to tell you how my latest experiment went, and bam, I’ve advanced the conversation. Here’s Kuhn again:
one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions…One of the reasons why normal sciences seem to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving.
Philosophy isn’t really like this. There’s way less agreement on background paradigms in philosophy. Quite the contrary! So much of philosophy is really about trying to put different paradigms into productive conversation with one another and have them battle it out:
Is reason or the senses more fundamental for knowledge?
What are the physical and mental and how do they relate?
Can there be statements that are both true and false?
How you are gonna incrementally add to our philosophical understanding of these questions when the meaning of basically every term within them is so deeply philosophically contentious?
If questions like these were clean enough to tackle with the methods of science, there would already be sciences doing that! That’s how fields like psychology and statistics finally spun off into their own independent disciplines (astonishingly recently, I might add).
But when our questions aren’t that clean—when they’re too interdisciplinary or ambiguous or overwhelming to be carved off into their own independent disciplines—they stick around as philosophical questions, creating the illusion that philosophy makes zero progress.
Compare that with Kuhn’s summary of how most scientists spend most of their time puzzling out the implications and trying to extend the reach of the current paradigm:
Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science. Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.
In philosophy, we’re much freer to go, hmm if there’s a problem here, maybe we need to adjust our background paradigm. Maybe we need more conceptual adjustment rather than extra cleverness to make the phenomena fit our preconceived categories.
(Yes of course scientists do this too, including when they’re reassessing which paradigm to accept! And when they do—God forbid—they’re doing a lil bit of philosophy. It’s gonna be okay everyone!)
But trying to copy the methods of other disciplines will not necessarily lead to more progress in philosophy. So much of what we’re trying to do is just articulate how one way of appreciating the world can make sense of our experiences.
But that’s hard to do well in the compressed format of a research article that assumes we share a background paradigm and limits us to several thousand words. It’s worth noting that most of the Great Articles we read in grad school founded literatures and cited shockingly little earlier work. It’s much harder to make a genuine incremental addition to our philosophical understanding by simply extending an existing literature with another paper on barn epistemology. (There’s a reason philosophers finally stopped doing this!)
I have always preferred philosophy books to philosophy articles.
I’d much rather read someone’s book where they get enough time to try to explain what they’re doing, and to pursue that line of thinking long enough to see where it leads, rather than going, okay here are my three ‘established’ camps of competitors: nominalists, relativists, and skeptics, and now it’s time for me to hit each of them on the head cleanly in two paragraphs apiece.
There’s another, quite sad result of philosophy’s obsession with the research article. The more we prioritize publishing paywalled articles for other philosophers, the more we end up locking out amateur (lover) philosophers (wisdom-lovers) from the conversation:
And only in those fields that still retain the book, with or without the article, as a vehicle for research communication are the lines of professionalization still so loosely drawn that the layman may hope to follow progress by reading the practitioners’ original reports.
Under the watchful eye of academic book publishers, even this is no longer really true for philosophy. Some books are relatively accessible, but many aren’t. Take a look for yourself at the latest releases in Bioethics from Oxford University Press. (And while you’re there, peep some of those prices!)
I don’t have a clean bow to put on the end of this. So let me try to summarize my core argument the way I’d be forced to in a research article:
Research articles are most effective when practitioners (a) share substantial background agreement within a common paradigm, and (b) can express their novel results succinctly
In philosophy, (a) and (b) are much more questionable than they are in, say, astrophysics
So even if the research article format is highly effective in astrophysics, its value is much more dubious in philosophy
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