Learning how to publish is one of the more difficult parts of becoming a successful academic philosopher. It can take years, and many rejections, to publish a peer-reviewed article. However, the realities of publishing are rarely discussed. We sometimes hear, obliquely, of how long someone struggled to publish a paper–and yet, for most part, others' experiences of the publishing game are typically unknown to us. We know our own struggles, but it is often unclear how representative our struggles are. Do other people–such as "famous" figures in the field–have an easier time publishing in Mind, or Phil Review? There are (admittedly) anecdotal reasons to think perhaps not. As Jason Stanley (Yale) was quoted a while back at NewAPPS:
My book *Knowledge and Practical Interests* is the fifth most cited work of philosophy since 2000 in Phil Review, Mind, Nous, and the Journal of Philosophy (book or article). Yet the book itself is the result of three revise and resubmits, and finally a rejection from Phil Review. One of those drafts was also rejected from Mind, and also from Nous. All of those journals have accepted papers discussing, in many cases very centrally, a work those very journals have deemed unpublishable.
I also seem to recall hearing stories about how David Chalmers' and Andy Clark's article, "The Extended Mind" (which has since been cited 2,741 times according to Google Scholar) was rejected, and in some cases even desk-rejected, by a number of high-ranking journals before eventually landing at Analysis (if I am misremembering here, please do correct me!).
Anyway, because publishing is such a strange gauntlet, we have decided to begin a new series entitled, "Long Publishing Journeys." This series will feature academic philosophers sharing their publishing experiences, so that we can begin to see more clearly what publishing is like for others–documenting, in each story, the path of an article from its initial genesis to eventual publication. We hope you enjoy the series, which we will now begin with a submission by Carl B. Sachs:
A Long Day’s Journey Into Print
By Carl B. Sachs (Marymount University)
The path from finished paper to published article can be as long and meandering as the path from initial idea to final draft. It is better to think of submitting one’s work to a journal as the beginning of another phase of a journey, and not to be overly discouraged if it takes a few times for the paper to find a good home. Perhaps this story is not representative, but I hope it will be encouraging nevertheless.
In 2007, a friend of mine wanted to co-author an article with me on the then-new McDowell/Dreyfus debate. (This was right after their exchange at the Eastern APA.) We were interested in the idea of “myth” being invoked here – the Myth of the Given, the Myth of the Mental, the Myth of the Intellect as Detached, and so forth. But we found collaborative writing difficult, and we decided to abandon the idea of co-authored article. I ended up writing a paper about Dreyfus’s implicit allegation that McDowell’s conceptualism had all the problems of Davidson’s coherentism. By the end of summer 2008 I had a final draft that I sent to Inquiry, which I thought would be interested since they had published the McDowell/Dreyfus exchange.
A few months later I received a rejection with detailed comments about why exactly the paper was unpublishable. I decided that the comments were actually quite helpful – there were many aspects of the issues that I wasn’t as clear on as I should have been, and I was primarily presenting McDowell’s point of view without adding enough of my own perspective. (I believe one of the comments was something like, “McDowell is perfectly able to speak for himself. He doesn’t need someone else to speak for him.”) I made some significant improvements and then sent it out – this time to International Journal of Philosophical Studies. They too quickly rejected it, along roughly the same lines as before.
Each iteration of the rewriting had me thinking more and more precisely about McDowell’s complicated relation with Davidson, and also how that relation evolved subsequent to Mind and World. In the summer of 2010 I sat down to re-write the paper entirely, focusing on the McDowell-Davidson relation, with particular emphasis to what they say about animal minds. I did reuse large parts of what I had already written, but my purpose was to write a new paper with a new focus rather than tinker with what I knew wasn’t working.
By the time I was done, I knew that the paper was quite different from what I had initially shown Inquiry, which meant that they might not reject it – and could even be interested in seeing it again. This time it was accepted without revision. It was finally published in 2012 as “Resisting the Disenchantment of Nature: McDowell and the Question of Animal Minds”. Inquiry 55(2): 131-147.
If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it is this: firstly, writing is a solitary process, but we write for a community. Since I had no feedback from any colleagues in the first few drafts, I sent my paper out into the world with no idea of how it would be assessed. On reflection, getting feedback from people before I submitted it would have helped me avoid some significant errors. But I also think that it simply takes a while before one finds one’s voice as a philosopher, and part of that process involves rejection. There’s a process of finding one’s own voice, and also a process of finding one’s audience, one’s community of interlocutors and readers. While there are some highly defined sub-disciplines in which voice and audience are precisely defined, I suspect that for many early-career philosophers, the process of moving from graduate student to tenure-worthy scholar involves painful self-discovery. Look upon R&Rs – or even rejections – as opportunities to discover what you have to contribute to the conversation. What we have contributed to the conversation is the only immortality that matters.
Many thanks to Carl B. Sachs for sharing his story with us! Are you interested in sharing your story? If so, please just email me (marvan@ut.edu) or Helen De Druz (helenldecruz@gmail.com) with your submission.
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