MIND has long been concerned with securing fairness in the assessment of its submissions. It first made the decision to introduce a triple anonymous review process under the Editorship of Mark Sainsbury. This was over two decades ago. Under this system the author remains anonymous in relation to both the editors and reviewers, and the reviewers remain anonymous in relation to authors, but not to editors. Most journals operate with a double anonymous review process: authors’ identity is not disclosed to reviewers assessing work, and reviewers’ identity is not disclosed to authors submitting work; however, the Editors have access to the identity of both author and reviewer. At MIND the Associate Editors and Editors do not know the identity of our authors. Unless we stumble upon a paper in going about our business, we have the pleasure of finding out who wrote the papers we accept only once we have accepted them, and we never know the identity of the authors whose papers we reject.
There is no doubt that this process protects against well-known biases. Not knowing an author’s institution, gender, ethnicity, or name means that the only source of our judgment is the paper submitted and the reviewers’ opinions. That has to be good.
Yet, MIND has a pretty poor record for publishing papers by under-represented groups in Philosophy. The only remotely reliable data we have are in relation to women authors. Women are under-represented in the pages of MIND, even relative to their numbers in the profession. Why? Because women do not submit papers to MIND. Those that do submit – we know this because we recently hired someone to find out – have a slightly higher chance of being accepted than men who submit. But few submit. There is little reason to think that the same problem of under-submission does not apply to other under-represented groups. How can we change that?
We applied to undertake the editorship of MIND in 2015 to a large extent motivated by an opportunity to read the most interesting philosophy around, across a diverse range of areas, philosophical traditions, and styles. We were also motivated by an opportunity to participate in a process that saw excellent work from a diverse range of areas, traditions and styles make it in to publication. As we said in our incoming editorial, our hope was not to improve the quality of work in the journal – it was already very high – but to enlarge the breadth of its content. In that editorial we invited work from a range of subject areas under-represented in the journal and declared that we would “quite self-consciously, take risks”. We believed that a kind of risk aversion encouraged filters that meant that articles with a certain technical style were more likely to be selected. Excellent, but more exploratory pieces using methods not so easily ratifiable, had a higher chance of being filtered out.
What we did not explicitly say, but we did hope, was that aiming for greater breadth in content and style would also secure greater diversity when it came to our authors. We did not, and do not, have any hard evidence, but our sense was that authors from under-represented groups were more numerous in areas and styles of the discipline less represented by journals like MIND. We hoped that as well as securing wide interest for the work being published, having more of our authors being, for example, political philosophers, moral philosophers, historians of philosophy, continental philosophers, applied philosophers, philosophers working in interdisciplinary fields, would mean that more of our authors would be, for example, women, philosophers of colour, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers whose first language was not English. We hoped that diversity in content would aid diversity in authorship. It is hard to say yet whether we have secured in any stable way any such fortunate result through our conception of the intellectual project, but there are encouraging signs.
Consider for example, our recent 2017 Graduate Essay Prize. Our theme was Social and Political Philosophy – a theme chosen to send out the message that MIND was open for business in those areas. We received almost 40 entries to the Prize from a number of countries. Three very strong pieces were in the end selected. ‘Illocutionary Frustration’ by Samia K Hesni was judged the winning essay. ‘Disabilities Are Legitimately Medically Interesting Constraints on Legitimate Interests’, by Chong-Ming Lim, and ‘Adaptive Preferences, Adapted Preferences’ by Polly Mitchell were selected as proximes. We decided that they were of sufficient quality and interest for us to publish all three. As we said: no solid evidence of anything, but encouraging signs.
We would like to conclude this blog post – as we used OUP’s invitation to contribute to their celebration of women’s history month – by making two pleas. Our first plea is directed to philosophers from under-represented areas and groups in philosophy: please submit your papers to MIND. Do not count yourself out. Our second plea is directed to supervisors and mentors of philosophers from under-represented groups: please encourage your students and mentees to submit their papers to MIND. Be on the lookout for, and try to correct, their habits of self-exclusion, but also be on the lookout for yours of narrowness, and underestimation.
AW Moore
AW Moore is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford.
Lucy O'Brien
Lucy O'Brien is a professor of philosophy at University College London.
