Revisiting “Slow Philosophy”

Revisiting “Slow Philosophy” Over a decade ago, Jennifer Whiting (Pittsburgh) asked us to seriously consider an idea of Annette Baier‘s regarding tenure and promotion decisions. Recent technological developments speak in favor of revisiting it. Initially, Baier’s proposal was meant to address how pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or delay the research productivity of women, and hence unfairly affect tenure decisions. Baier put the proposal this way: “One possibility, perhaps the best solution, would be to make all tenure decisions rest on evaluation only of what the candidate selects as say, her or his four best articles.” In her post about Baier’s idea, “A Modest Proposal: Slow Philosophy“, Whiting suggested we take this idea seriously. She wrote: What would happen if the APA were to set guidelines for the maximum number of pages on which a tenure decision should be based? Suppose, for example, it were 100 pages—or even 175—of what the candidate takes to be his or her best work. Of course no one would be prevented from writing—nor even from publishing—thousands of pages. But the letters of referees and departmental recommendations to deans, as well as the deliberations of departments, ad hoc committees and administrators, would all be restricted (officially at least) to the merits and demerits of the designated corpus. This would not only address Baier’s concern, Whiting noted, but other issues, such as the massive production of writings incentivized by the current system, which leads to bottlenecking at journals, and raises questions about how much of any of it actually gets read. She says: Just think. Candidates would be encouraged to focus more on the quality (and less on the quantity) of their work. They might also have an easier time balancing work with other responsibilities (including civic and family ones). Referees, as well as colleagues expected to vote on the candidates’ cases, might have more time to read their work carefully and arrive at well-informedjudgments—especially if as a result of the proposed limits these colleagues and referees had fewer book manuscripts and journal submissions on their hands. Time spared could be used—by referees and candidates alike—reading work that had actually been selected for publication by discerning referees and perhaps even improved before publication in response to the sort of insightful comments that less harried referees would have time to provide. Reviewing itself might even prove more rewarding if authors spent more time on their manuscripts before sending them out, with the result that reviewers might provide more thoughtful comments, which might lead in turn to higher quality publications. As we enter an era in which philosophers can use AI to write papers in hours that might have otherwise taken months, perhaps the consideration of Whiting’s “Slow Philosophy” proposal takes on greater urgency. This was and remains an outstanding idea I think this is an excellent idea. I’ve been talking about it a lot over the past year, as the impacts of AI on how quickly people can write papers were becoming clear. Even aside from stunt papers Claude writes for you in a morning, AI can speed up paper writing. It makes it easier to find relevant literature more quickly, summarizes things for you (in an imperfect and biased way, admittedly), and can potentially streamline writing the references section. I think people of good faith can disagree about whether any of this is a good idea, but I don’t think those things look like obvious integrity violations (at most the summarization is worrisome, but that is complicated). And they can speed up submissions to our already overburdened publishing system, including by people who are good philosophers acting in good faith. They also can’t really be policed. All this adds up to the need for some kind of slow philosophy plan. I’m highly in favor! The number of words that makes sense to me is a length that tenure committees can actually read: 50 to 80, 000 words (roughly 3-6 articles or a book) Once you’ve written that much, only publish more if it’s better than what you’ve already done! I argued for Whiting’s model in April: https://realnous.substack.com/p/time-for-slow-philosophy. Whatever their rate of improvement, LLMs will consistently be better at helping authors produce barely-publishable work than at finding groundbreaking insights. Writing an article tweaking an existing problem or finding one more counterexample is far easier than transforming a whole debate. It seems weird to me to have the APA / the profession as a whole dictate a specific number of pages to count in a tenure case. The potential for harm strikes me as very clear: people who have made valuable contributions to the discipline being punished for not fitting their contribution into a particular page limit that we all agree is arbitrary. People who write books, for example. (Imagine evaluating a book based on the first 100 pages.) Or people who make their contribution by publishing 1 or 2 extraordinary papers, because in a market where there are massively more qualified candidates than jobs, “no more than” easily becomes “exactly.” Having the APA codify 100 (or 175) pages makes it harder to make the case that 90 really good pages is enough. In short, it seems like the thing that’s likely to be best for individuals is to leave these questions to departments. Not to have a discipline-wide policy that inevitably forecloses certain perfectly valid ways of being a researcher in philosophy by trying to put a box around what’s “slow enough.” So if there’s to be a benefit, it must be a community-wide benefit. I see the case that people are making for that — disincentivizing the behavior that causes journal bottlenecks, etc. — though I must admit I’m not sold on the mechanism here. Publications don’t just matter for tenure and promotion: they matter for raises, for grants, for meeting university-wide initiatives, for getting jobs, etc. And many of the relevant decisions wouldn’t be influenced by APA guidelines either way. My university doesn’t care if the APA has a T&P recommendation for philosophy when they’re trying to figure whether I deserve a project completion grant more or less than someone in architecture. But they do care about publication numbers. So while I broadly agree with the motivations here, the specific proposal seems like it can’t avoid being arbitrary, has clear potential for harming individuals, and promises benefits to the community that I’m skeptical we’d see. Maybe I’m too pessimistic — or maybe I just publish “too much” and don’t want to admit I’m part of the problem — but I struggle to see this as a good idea. I agree with Corey’s points here. Additionally, for some folks, if you try to write just 5 articles they might not be as good as if you write 10 and pick your best 5. (and you may not be the best judge of which are your best 5). So even if your tenure case only rests on your best 5, you might need to write more to get there. Similarly for Caleb’s point about wanting to have more articles that transform a debate rather than finding a counterexample. It may be – for many folks – that the best way to get to the “transformative articles” is to start smaller and write less ambitious papers. Here’s an analogy: Imagine telling some great artist (e.g., Picasso) that you should’ve “skipped your blue period” or “made 90% fewer artworks” so that the ones you did make were all super-great. That MIGHT work for some folks, but for many (artists or philosophers or scientists or…) that could very well be terrible advice for how to produce the most best work. I agree with worrying about fitting everyone into a template. But that argument cuts both ways. In many places non-humanities fields and more loquacious humanities fields often set the bar for philosophy publications. A department, by itself, is rarely in a position to set the bar for tenure when it comes to college committees and such. So we get swept up in broader trends whether we endorse them or not. The APA (nor any other body) is never going to be in a position to dictate to the field or to the education bureaucracy generally. But it or other field-wide groups could perhaps suggest different models of evaluation. And there are likely better ways to do it than numbers of pages (given that different parts of just philosophy require different numbers of pages to generate what the subfield takes to be a contribution). 30 years ago we had a good vice chancellor at my institution who suggested something like the five best/most substantial works. That is more flexible than a page length model. Since this blog is at best a place to brainstorm, it is worth thinking about alternatives. In any case, the arms race at the level of the job market is also creating pressures that are hard to resist. I wish I knew what to do about those even while I work at a department at the low end of the pecking order where our students have to publish to be noticed. This is long overdue. The way to implement it is a collective action or coordination problem. My suggestion is that the top PhD granting departments decide to do this in both hiring and promotion and see if this presents a good Schelling point. I am not a professional philosopher, but a prof in an adjacent field–I look at this site because I was a philosophy undergrad. Is one issue here what kind of output is expected of philosophers? That is, are all philosophers expected to produce articles of a certain kind? I served on a university tenure committee several years ago, and we saw two candidates from the economics department. One was an empiricist, and had more than a dozen articles. The other, a theorist, had four. The chair of the department wrote a letter explaining how each candidate’s output was appropriate to their subfield–turns out empiricists just write a lot, and can turn out an article based on a single study, while theorist/econometricians think a lot and don’t write very much (at least so the chair claimed). If all philosophers turn out the same kind of product, then the proposal here is fine, but if there are philosophers whose subfields allow or expect them to turn out a great many articles, they would be disadvantaged by this proposal. To be blunt, this likely produces lazier philosophers–in the unlikely case of being implemented–instead of better philosophers. Enlighten me: how many of us are actively sacrificing quality of our papers to order to increase quantity? My thought: very few/rarely. But I am open to being wrong. In my observation, even the current philosophers who focus on getting fewer papers at the tiptoe top journals are often lazier, not better than, who keep writing and don’t care too much about top journals. P.S. By “lazy” I do not mean personal critism–they may be highly active in charity work or family matters. People send out stuff they would not have sent out for publication 20 years ago. And they send it out earlier in the process. They wind up sending out two papers which back then would have each been 1/2 of a different paper that through the interaction of the ideas would have been a larger contribution to the field than the two papers published separately. The phenomenon is amplified the further back you go. I recently had occasion to reread some of Gil Harman’s papers from the 70s. The contributions in one of them would now be parceled out into 5 papers. I’m not blaming anyone. We are responding to market forces. But they don’t make us better philosophers. It is true that philosophers who don’t produce much are often lazy. It is also true that philosophers who do produce much publish many mediocre papers. One way to confirm this is to open a journal and read it. I am one of those early career scholars who sacrifice quality for quantity. At the same time, I don’t dislike the system. Writing papers is a way to think – it’s part of the very activity of doing philosophy. I wouldn’t have had as many great ideas and discoveries if I had focused on writing a few papers of higher quality.