I have been invited, as the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (AJP), to say something about how the journal has been trying to contribute to what I hope will be an increase in visible diversity among philosophers. I agree that journals, particularly the leading ones, have a part to play in this process. In the past few years, the editorial group at AJP has been increasingly mindful of this; we will continue being so. Here are the main steps that we have taken recently.
- We have been increasing the number of women among our associate editors (AEs). When I began as AJP Editor, a few years ago, we had no women among eight (excellent) AEs. We now have six women among seventeen (all still excellent!). (The reason for that dramatic in the number of AEs is the dramatic increase in the number of submissions to the journal over the past few years – plus the desire to improve our reach into different areas of philosophy.) So, we are heading in the right direction with that improved gender mixture. We will continue doing so.
- Along with changing the gender balance among the AEs, we have expanded the range of areas within philosophy that are represented among our AEs. This has included some areas with which AJP has not historically been so clearly associated – and with which I want AJP to become more clearly associated. Thus, we have added Chinese philosophy, philosophy of religion, applied ethics, social philosophy, moral psychology, and some history of philosophy. We already had aesthetics and political philosophy; we have maintained those strong presences. (We have done all of that while maintaining our more traditional strengths in logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and epistemology.) I see this, too, as a continuing process of development for AJP.
- We have chosen to allow more second revise-and-resubmits (R&Rs) for a given paper than were formerly allowed by AJP. We know that younger philosophers, particularly, often need – and reasonably so – the opportunity to give a paper that extra round of revising. We are happy to put in the extra editorial work for a sufficiently promising paper.
- That is part of our mission of working with our authors. We aim to be genuinely helpful to an author. We edit actively. We do not regard the editing of AJP as a matter merely of being functional elements in a well-administered system. It is a matter of our editors (I and the AEs) providing guidance and opportunity where we can, so that an author knows that he or she is being respected and helped. The author wants his or her paper not just to appear in print, but to be as good as it can be. We want that for the paper, too. All of us – the author and the editorial group – are in this together.
- I have made myself, as AJP Editor, directly accessible for authors, during and after the refereeing and editing process. In my view, this is very important, especially for a major journal where the enormous number of submissions could easily make the submission-and-editing process feel merely mechanistic and coldly impersonal for authors. Of course, there will still be times when it feels like that for an author. But we try to make it less so. I strongly hope that authors, particularly younger ones and those from less financially secure or academically privileged backgrounds, take encouragement from this. AJP does value your submissions. We take seriously the pressures that you are under, and the emotional strength that can sometimes be needed to submit a paper to a prestigious journal such as AJP. (And I say this not in a patronising distant-editor way, but in a fellow-author way!)
- I desk-reject only a very small percentage of submissions. I prefer to be more, rather than less, generous at this initial stage of the process. And our AEs share that preference.
- I should add that AJP has increased the range of areas of philosophy that are covered by the books that we review. This now includes books in areas clearly beyond those ‘core analytic’ areas with which AJP was traditionally associated.
- Not only that, but when we (mainly the two book reviews editors, with some advice from me) choose which books to have reviewed, we are now – we began this as a policy a year or two ago – making sure that the books sent out for review are not only ones written or edited by men.
AJP does not use triple-blind reviewing; we have stayed with double-blind reviewing. I discussed this issue recently with the AEs. We acknowledge the symbolic benefit in triple-blind reviewing. We also note the potential for implicit bias in anything that we do as editors. (And I am an avowed fallibilist in my officially epistemological moments!) But our editorial consensus (not our unanimity, as might be expected from so many people) remains that there are tangible strengths in double-blind reviewing when it is done as we strive to do it. Importantly, it allows us increased opportunities to be encouragingly sensitive to a particular author’s relevant details (as far as we know these). We believe that we can be more humanly welcoming to authors, too. It allows (as I mentioned) that an author can contact me directly, even during the refereeing process, and that I can give him or her personal feedback and even encouragement. It fits well with our editorial bottom line, which is that I want AJP to be a widely welcoming journal, so that it can continue to publish papers of the highest quality on an exciting and increasing range of topics from a wider range of authors.
I welcome good ideas for further ways in which we might continue along that path, building upon what we already have in place. In the meantime, I am cautiously optimistic that, as awareness spreads of AJP’s attitudes and behaviour towards our fellow philosophers (along with the extremely high standards of our accepted papers, of course), an increasingly wide range of people and areas will be represented in AJP’s pages. All of us in the AJP editorial group want that to happen, so that we can be contributing to the prospering of philosophy as a whole.
Stephen Hetherington
Stephen Hetherington is a Professor of Philosophy, in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney, where he specializes in Epistemology and Metaphysics. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He is the editor, most recently, of The Gettier Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
I myself would look at how many articles are actually published that reflect diverse views and a diverse population. Women editors, in my experience, just function to give the bad news to submissions by women. This obviously is better than incredibly rude rejections. But, it doesn’t help when you are trying to get tenure or promoted. That said, these look like promising and sincere developments.
Hi Stephen,
I hope that you and members of your editorial boards will reconsider your journal’s use of the term ‘blind review’. In order to encourage you to do so, I have copied a section from my book Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017) in which I explain why the term (and associated terms) is ableist. On pages 31-33, I write (italics seem to have disappeared):
“The continued institutionalization of ableist language in philosophical discourse is an exceptional reminder of the marginalization and exclusion of critical philosophical analyses of disability from mainstream philosophy. Even now, disability remains ever-present in philosophy in the form of these rhetorical devices. Indeed, some philosophers hold on to these rhetorical practices so resolutely that they seem to imply that not another sentence could be written in the historical discourse of philosophy if they were to refrain from their use of phrases such as blind to the implications and terms such as morally blind. Due to the seeming inescapability of the association between sight and knowledge in the Eurocentric philosophical tradition, ocular ableist metaphors such as these phrases and terms are the most prevalent examples of this deleterious practice in philosophical writing. Nevertheless, auralist metaphors, that is, metaphors that disparage deaf people, are also commonly used, along with metaphors that disparagingly allude to nonverbal people, people who do not walk, people who hear voices, and so on. To be sure, some philosophers reluctantly concede that the aforementioned phrases are ableist; however, they attempt to draw the line there with respect to ableist metaphors in philosophical discourse. These philosophers argue that we should distinguish the unseemly uses of ocular metaphors from what they regard as benign metaphorical appeals to blindness; that is, they hold out for phrases such as blind review and justice is blind, citing the allegedly positive valence of these metaphors. For some of these philosophers, the integrity of the latter metaphors serves to dismantle the critique of ableist metaphors and ableist language altogether.
Should we accept this distinction between ableist and “benign” metaphors? That is, are the former metaphors “negative” and the latter “positive”? Consider the metaphor justice is blind. Now, this phrase seems sacrosanct in American society; thus, one might assume that it is harmless. Justice is good, virtuous, ethical, and so on. That is what the metaphor figuratively tells us, is it not? To some philosophers, the answer is yes. They concur with this straightforward understanding of the metaphor; that is, they argue that insofar as the metaphor justice is blind associates blindness with what is good, virtuous, and ethical, it is a mistake to claim that the metaphor is ableist. A similar argument is made with respect to the term blind review.
Notice, however, that philosophers who argue in this way misunderstand how these metaphors work. For the metaphor justice is blind is intended to describe the process by which justice is achieved; it is not meant to refer to the (positive) value of that ideal. If the phrase justice is blind were a statement about the merit of justice, then it would be a contradiction to claim that justice is “blind” (i.e., good) and that is a bad thing. Yet the latter claim is not at all a contradiction. Legal theorists such as feminists Martha Minow (1991) and Martha Fineman (2005), among others, have written eloquently about the shortcomings of notions of justice that purport to transcend the influence on decision making of allegedly natural human differences and circumstances. Transcendence of these human differences is, however, precisely what the metaphor of justice is blind purports to achieve: it describes a system of justice in which personal characteristics, attributes, and contingent circumstances are deemed arbitrary and, therefore, withheld from available knowledge. In short, the metaphor justice is blind draws an association between lack of knowledge and blindness. It is the association between lack of knowledge and blindness that makes this apparently redeeming rhetorical device a pernicious artifact of ableism. A similar argument applies to the term blind review (Tremain 2011; see also May and Ferri 2005; Dolmage 2005; M. Bailey 2011; Schalk 2013).”
Since I first argued against use of the term ‘blind review’ in philosophical contexts several years ago, more and more philosophy journal editors and conference organizers have stopped using it, usually replacing it with the term ‘anonymous review’.
I hope that the Australasian Journal of Philosophy will follow suit. Use of the term (and associated and similar terms) contributes to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy and contributes to the continued diminishment of our status as knowers.
Best regards,
Shelley Tremain