I was at a conference the other week, and had an interesting conversation with a really famous senior philosopher. I can't really remember how it came up, but we were talking about the sociology of the discipline, and he said something to the effect of how one's institution may affect one's publishing prospects. He specifically mentioned Rawls being at Harvard in this respect, but I can't quite recall exactly what he said. I think it was something to the effect of that Rawls' original 1957 paper "Justice as Fairness" probably wouldn't have been published in The Journal of Philosophy if Rawls hadn't been at Cornell and Harvard. I found this interesting at least in part because I've long been a bit puzzled by that very paper. In it Rawls, does not give much of an argument. In it, Rawls basically states his two principles of justice (pp. 653-5), why he thinks the original position is a good way to think about how they might be justified (pp. 655-6), claims (without any real argument) that it is "natural" to think that the parties to the original position would agree to his two principles (p. 656), admitting shortly thereafter that he hasn't offered any proof that the two principles really are the ones the parties would agree upon (p. 657). In the rest of the paper, Rawls talks about how justice as fairness embodies the notion of "fair play" (pp. 658-660) and how the theory is an alternative to utilitarianism (pp. 660-661).
Now, I love Rawls. I'm a Rawls scholar! But I have to admit I've always found the initial paper (and the longer version later published in Phil Review) puzzling, and precisely because Rawls seems to offer so little in the way of argument in it. Apparently, I'm not the only one puzzled. Rawls' paper was followed by a critical review, "Justice as Fairness: A Modernized Version of the Social Contract", whose author, Everett Hall, really takes Rawls to task for it! A few choice snippets:
I must be brief to the point of appearing harsh…So now we ask, "What is our author up to?"…He appears to be giving us a little model of a society under narrowly specified conditions; if so, we can strip it of its appeal to the imagination and set it up as a small deductive system. Suppose, he says, such-and-such and such-and-such; then, logically, we would be justified in concluding a social agreement on certain principles of justice which he characterizes as principles of fairness in settling competing claims…
By so modernizing the [social contract] theory Mr. Rawls seems to have transformed one traditional objection into an anachronism. 'That objection was that, certainly for the most part, societies have not arisen from a social contract and hence that any justice applicable to them cannot be founded on it. But let us not be too hasty. In this crude form, as implying an actual gathering of the populace and an affixing of signatures, and so on, Mr. Rawls' social contract escapes censure, for clearly it has no such implication. But is it thereby freed from empirical assumptions which may as a fact be false and in any case have not been verified?
That Mr. Rawls does not suppose he has given us a little social geometry is suggested by the language in which he draws his conclusion: "Given all these conditions as described, itwould be natural if the persons were to accept the principle of justice previously discussed." And reading on we find sueh expresions as "each might consider it reasonable, . . ," "these remarks are not . . . offered as a proof. . .-." Now the use of such phrases may indicate no more than that he considers his conclusion compatible with his premises (i.e., that supposing parties in a society were to get together under the conditions and motivations stated, there would be no contradiction involved were one to go on to suppose that they would accept Mr. Rawls' principles of justice). But this would constitute a weak authentication indeed…
A time-worn objection to the social contract theory thus still appears relevant. Social institutions do not seem to have arisen in the way that theory states nor to review their practices in a fashion consonant with it.
Contemporary readers will recognize literally all of the criticisms Hall is raising: (1) that Rawls' model is question-begging (he basically helps himself to the idea that we should treat people fairly, and the original position is little more than a teasing out of that supposition), (2) Rawls is focusing on ideal theory ("a model society" satisfying very narrow conditions) to the complete exclusion of very important and relevant nonideal facts, (3) Rawls appeals a number of empirical assumptions without substantiation, (4) Rawls' argument for his two principles of justice seems flimsy, etc.
This is not to say that all of these criticisms are sound — although it is worth noting that many people think he never really came to terms with any of them (criticisms that Hall raised to Rawls' very first article on justice!). But regardless, it is striking to me (and apparently to Hall, and to my fellow conversant the other week) that Rawls got away with all this. We are accustomed, of course, to the idea that "great philosophy" is really rigorous…but Rawls' initial paper seems to fall far short of any plausible standard of rigor. Rawls doesn't provide an argument so much as he just outlines a new way of thinking about justice. And, as interesting as that theory ultimately turned out to be, Hall raising a lot of obvious and serious problems for the nascent theory, and Rawls addresses none of them. And yet…"Justice as Fairnes" nevertheless landed in the Journal of Philosophy.
Anyway, why am I going on about this? Well, because, again, my famous senior conversant was suggesting — not implausibly, in my view — that the system of peer-review isn't exactly fair (pardon the pun!); that there are all kinds of sociological phenomena at play in the publishing game. Such as? What are some examples of phenomena that might affect the outcome of "anonymous peer-review"? Some of these have been noted before on this blog: so-called "Google reviewing" is one issue (referees looking up paper-titles on Google). I know that this has happened to me several times. I have analytic software on my homepage and academia.edu page, and I've gone months without anyone Googling a given paper title and then getting several google hits on the paper title a day or two after submitting that paper for review. This is just one issue. Here's another: people getting invited to give colloquia or presenting at multiple conferences. I know some people, for instance, who got really plum jobs right out of grad school. Before they had published anything, I saw that they were giving colloquia talks at top-25 R1's. Good for them, I thought! But wait, doesn't that compromise anonymous peer-review? Isn't it likely that if they send something to Phil Review, the paper we be sent to someone who already saw the paper given as a talk? And what about conferences? The adjunct who cannot afford to attend conferences is, it seemed to me, at an immense disadvantage. Or indeed, what about blogging? Those of us here at the Cocoon and other blogs have a pretty visible public footprint. Isn't it likely that journal reviewers will know what we are working on?
The ways in which peer-review can be (and probably are) compromised are legion. But, what can we do about it? Should editors be more invasive about making sure referees don't know who a paper's author is (viz. by asking the referee to disclose any prior familiarity with the paper)? I don't have any clearly good answers to these questions. I've suggested an alternative peer-review model before: roughly. the kind of public (rather than anonymized) review process used in physics. But, that proposal got very little traction. Anyway, I guess I wanted to write on this stuff because I thought it might be worth discussing. What do you all think?
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