Do Ideas Matter to Philosophy? How Obsession with Recognition Blocks Diversity

When suffering from writer’s block, I spent much of my time in the library browsing through books that were shelved beside the ones I originally looked for. Often these were books that didn’t have any traces of use: neither, it seemed, had anyone read them, nor were they cited by anyone. The names of the authors were often unfamiliar and a search confirmed that they sometimes were no longer in academia. Funnily enough, these books often contained the most refreshing and original ideas. Their approach to topics or texts was often unfamiliar to me, but the effort of figuring out what they were arguing was time well spent. Nevertheless, my attempts to bring them up in discussions weren’t picked up on. People continued to cite the more familiar names. Why are we letting this happen?

Most of you probably know the following phenomenon: During a discussion someone proposes an idea; the discussion moves on. Then an established person offers almost a repetition of the proposed idea and everyone goes: “oh, interesting.” Put as a rule of thumb: prestige gets you attention; interesting ideas as such not so much. There is a gendered version of this phenomenon, too: If you want to listen to an interesting idea authored by a woman, better have a man repeat it. Now, an important aspect of this phenomenon is that it seems to incentivise that we relate our philosophical work to that of prestigious figures. In other words, we will make sure that what we say picks up on what established figures say. As Kieran Healy has shown, citation patterns confirm this. Cite David Lewis and you might join the winning in-group. We hope to get recognition by citing established people. Now you might just shrug this off as an all too human trait. But what I’d like to argue is that this behaviour crucially affects how we evaluate ideas.

I think Healy’s citation patterns show that we are inclined to value such ideas that are either closely related (in content) to those of established figures or that are presented in a similar manner or method. Put simply: you’re more likely to get recognition if you imitate some “big shot” in content or method. Conversely, if you don’t imitate “big shots”, your work won’t be valued. Why is this important? My hunch is that this practice minimises diversity of content and method. Philosophers often like to present themselves as competitors for the best ideas. But if we track value through recognition, there is no competition between ideas.

Now if this is the case, why don’t we see it? My answer is that we don’t recognise it because there are competing big shots. And the competition between big shots makes us believe that there is diversity. Admittedly, my own evidence is anecdotal. But how could it not be. When I started out as a medievalist, the thing to be done to get recognition was to prepare a critical edition of an obscure text. So I learned a number of strange names and techniques in this field. However, outside of my small world this counted for, say, not much. And when the German Research Foundation (DFG) stopped funding such projects, a lot of people were out of a job. Moving on to other departments, I quickly learned that there was a different mainstream, and that mainstream didn’t favour editions or work on obscure texts. Instead you could make a move by writing on a canonical figure already edited. Just join some debate. Still further outside of that context you might realise that people don’t value history of philosophy anyway. But rather than seeing such different approaches as complementary, we are incentivised to compete for getting through with one of these approaches.

However, while competition might nourish the illusion of diversity, the competition for financial resources ultimately blocks diversity because it will ultimately lead to one winner. And the works and books that don’t follow patterns established in such competitions seem to fall through the cracks. There is more evidence of course once we begin to take an international perspective: There are people who write whole PhD dissertations that will never be recognised outside of their home countries. So they have to move to richer countries and write a second PhD to have any chance on the international market. In theory, we should expect such people to be the best-trained philosophers around: they often have to familiarise themselves with different approaches and conventions, often speak different languages, and are used to different institutional cultures. But how will we evaluate their ideas? Will they have to write a bit like David Lewis or at least cite him sufficiently in order to get recognition?

Now you might want to object that I’m conflating cause and effect. While I say that we assign value because of prestige, you might argue that things are the other way round: we assign prestige because of value. – If this were the case, I would want to see some effort to at least assess the ideas of those who don’t align their work with prestigious figures. But where do we find such ideas? For reasons stated above, my guess is that we don’t find them in the prestigious departments and journals. So where should we look for them?

My hunch is that we‘ll find true and worthwhile diversity in the lesser known departments and journals. So please begin: Listen to the students who don’t speak up confidently, read the journals and books from publishers whose names you cannot recognise. Listen to people whose native language isn’t English. And stop looking for ideas that sound familiar.

This article is shared with permission by Martin Lenz. It was originally published on Martin’s personal blog, Handling Ideas.

Martin Lenz

Martin Lenz (@Going_Loopy) is professor and department chair in history of philosophy at Groningen University. He specialises in medieval and early modern philosophy. Before joining the philosophy faculty at Groningen in 2012, Martin studied Philosophy, Linguistics and German Literature in Bochum, Budapest and Hull (M.A. in 1996; PhD in 2001 in Bochum) and spent his postdoctoral period in Cambridge, Tübingen and Berlin (Habilitation in 2009).