Agnes Callard on why Philosophers are Zombies

The 'publish or perish' culture in Academia is often blamed for declining standards in research and pedagogy.

The solution is not far to seek. Sack those who write shite papers. There has to be a possibility of punishment to offset against a purely masturbatory pleasure. 

More importantly, Academic Journals need to specify that they won't publish any more papers from degenerate research programs. University Departments too must be 'dead-headed' periodically.

Agnes Callard has an article titled 'Publish and Perish' in the Point Magazine. Is she commenting on a meretricious aspect of her own work which, however, was a necessary step to the security of tenure? No. She points a finger at others but considers herself a counter-example. She writes-

These words exist for you to read them.

But they would exist even if nobody read them. It may be true to say 'these words exist because I hoped someone would read them' but we may be sceptical of the claim that our reading certain words was the cause of those words being written down. The longing to be read is not the same as the longing for you, a specific person, to read a particular missive. Of course, where there is some strong affectionate or spiritual bond, our feelings may be different. But, surely, we have no such tie with Callard. I read her because I am convinced that she can't write a single sentence which is not foolish, mischievous or utterly vacuous. But I don't write these words for anyone anymore than I take a dump for the purpose of conveying fecal matter to a particular sewage farm.

I wrote them to try to convey some ideas to you. These are not the first words I wrote for you—those were worse. I wrote and rewrote, with a view to clarifying my meaning. I want to make sure that what you take away is exactly what I have in mind, and I want to be concise and engaging, because I am mindful of competing demands on your time and attention.

Surely, there is a conciser way of saying this?

You might think that everything I am saying is trivial and obvious, because of course all writing is like this.

Not a Doctor's writing down the names of life-saving drugs on a prescription pad.

Writing is a form of communication; it exists to be read.

Not necessarily. Writing things down clarifies your thoughts. You may be obliged to make an oral presentation. Simply memorizing a speech written for you by a Sophist might not be enough. You might need to understand the logical structure of your argument and change the manner in which you articulate it on the basis of exigent circumstances.

But that is, in fact, not how all writing works.

So, writing does not exist to be read.

In particular, it is not how academic writing works.

There is no single way Academic writing works or fails to work.

Academic writing does not exist in order to communicate with a reader.

Academic writing, accepted as such, is peer reviewed- at least potentially or at some future date. Mochizuki's proof of the abc conjecture probably is academic writing. Kosambi's 'proof' of the Reimann Hypothesis wasn't Academic writing though it was published in some obscure Indian Periodical.

In academia, or at least the part of it that I inhabit, we write, most of the time, not so much for the sake of being read as for the sake of publication.

But these publications are either subject to 'peer review' or else pass muster at an Academic Publishing house with a Credentialized Editorial Board. Readability is not a desiderata. But the thing must be capable of being read for a screening purpose. Admittedly, lapses occur. Sokal type spoofs might evade editorial vigilance. Plagiarism is a separate problem.

Let me illustrate by way of a confession regarding my own academic reading habits. Although I love to read, and read a lot, little of my reading comes from recent philosophy journals. The main occasions on which I read new articles in my areas of specialization are when I am asked to referee or otherwise assess them, when I am helping someone prepare them for publication and when I will need to cite them in my own paper.

So worthless shite published for a Credentialist purpose has to be screened, if not read attentively. This is a Ponzi scheme where, nonetheless, some due diligence has to be done. You have to ensure the thing is signed Bernie Madoff not Bugger Madschen.

This tells you something about academic writing, and how deeply it is shaped—mostly not at a conscious level—by the refereeing process.

You have just told us it is shit which you won't read unless you have to as part of the minimal due diligence you owe to the Ponzi scheme.

The simple fact is that “success” in academia is a matter of journal-acceptance, which in turn makes for a line in one’s CV. The number of such citations, taken together with the prestige of the relevant journals, is what counts for getting, keeping and being promoted in an academic job.

So, her branch of Academia has suffered 'Agency Capture'. The referees collude so that the Game becomes adversely selective. The University Department becomes a 'safe space' for imbeciles. It has cut itself off from the world.

“Counts” being the operative word. What can be counted is what will get done. In the humanities, no one counts whether anyone reads our papers. Only whether they are published, and where. I have observed these pressures escalate over time: nowadays it is unsurprising when those merely applying to graduate schools have already published a paper or two.

Sadly, this is also the case in some STEM subjects. A confederacy of dunces seeks to remain in Academia because they have no fungible skills in the real world.
Still, Data Mining will probably give us better algorithms to spot 'useful' publications as time goes by.

Writing for the sake of publication—instead of for the sake of being read—is academia’s version of “teaching to the test.”

Nothing wrong with 'teaching to the test'. The trouble began when the tests rewarded ignorance and paranoia.

The result is papers few actually want to read.

This does not greatly matter. Provided there is alethic content of a 'first order' type, the thing is still useful. Nobody wants to read about a law case settled hundreds of years ago. Yet, right now, it is important that lawyers can quickly access all relevant details about that case simply as a matter of abundant caution and due diligence.

First, the writing is hypercomplex. Yes, the thinking is also complex, but the writing in professional journals regularly contains a layer of complexity beyond what is needed to make the point.

Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Any drunkard in a bar can make any type of point. It is good to be able to discriminate under what circumstances a point is well-made.

It is not edited for style and readability.

We are speaking of cretins. If they wrote plainly, they themselves would be able to see they were writing nonsense.

Most significantly of all, academic writing is obsessed with other academic writing—with finding a “gap in the literature” as opposed to answering a straightforwardly interesting or important question.

If the gap is 'first order'- i.e. relates to facts- then plugging those gaps with first order research is a good thing. If it is second order, then the result is nonsense.

Of course publication is a necessary step along the way to readership, but the academic who sets their sights on it is like the golfer or baseball player who stops their swing when they make contact with the ball.

What's wrong with that? Sometimes, the best play is a 'sacrifice bunt' in baseball or a minimal putter to sink the golf ball. An academic paper may have a very narrow focus indeed. That is what increases its utility.

Without follow-through, what you get are short, jerky movements; we academics have become purveyors of small, awkwardly phrased ideas.

No. They write stupid nonsense.  This is not because their movements are short and jerky. It is because they have shit for brains.

In making these claims about academic writing, I am thinking in the first instance of my own corner of academia—philosophy—though I suspect that my points generalize, at least over the academic humanities. To offer up one anecdote: in spring 2019 I was teaching Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;

which requires a thorough knowledge of Irish politics

since I don’t usually teach literature, I thought I should check out recent secondary literature on Joyce. What I found was abstruse and hypercomplex, laden with terminology and indirect.

So what? There is plenty of 'first order' literature on the period which can be read for pleasure. Start with the obvious- George Moore's 'Confessions of a Young Man' before working your way through Gogarty and Stanislaus and other contemporaries. You can do this on your smartphone. All this stuff is public domain.

I didn’t feel I was learning anything I could use to make the meaning of the novel more accessible to myself or to my students.

Joyce wrote a novel. Maybe 'Stephen Hero' was not entirely accessible, but surely 'Portrait' is completely accessible to 14 year olds? That is why it is great. What will Callard say next? 'The meaning of Anne Frank's diary is not accessible to me and my students'? 'What on earth was Mark Twain getting at in 'Huckleberry Finn?' 'Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' does not clarify whether a War was going on. There's this guy named Napoleon who features in it. What was he up to? Why can't the secondary literature enlighten me and my poor wee students as to the meaning of all this mishegoss?'

I am willing to take some of the blame here: I am sure I could have gotten something out of those pieces if I had been willing to put more effort into reading them. Still, I do not lack the intellectual competence required to understand analyses of Joyce; I feel all of those writers could have done more to write for me.

Do you have the intellectual competence to say how those writers should have written so as to benefit you? Would it have helped if they said the meaning of 'Portrait' is 'it sucked ass big time to be a young Irish poet in Dublin at the turn of the last Century'? How about, as happens on Seinfeld, if 'War and Peace' is given the meaning 'War! What is it good for?! Absolutely nothing!'?

But whether my points generalize across the humanities or not, I will confess that I feel the urgency of the problem for philosophy much more than for some abstract entity called “the humanities.” I love Joyce, I love Homer, but I am not invested in the quality of current scholarship on either. It’s philosophy that I worry about.
When I am asked for sources of “big ideas” in philosophy—the kind that would get the extra-philosophical world to stand up and take notice—I struggle to list anyone born after 1950. It is sobering to consider that the previous decade produced: Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Derek Parfit, John McDowell, Peter Singer, G. A. Cohen and Martha Nussbaum.

Saul Kripke- okay. Dennett? No. Decision theory must be regret minimizing because of Knightian uncertainty. Lewis was promising but by the end he was talking drivel about Megethology. Parfit was plain silly- like Singer. Cohen was on the wrong side of history. Nussbaum is a cretin. Meanwhile you have Voevodsky and Univalent Foundations. Both academic Econ and Philosophy failed to keep up with Mathematical developments in the late Sixties and Seventies. By the Nineties, they were anachronistic. Sadly, they were well funded and triumphalist coz of 'the end of History'. Then everything turned to shite.

In my view, each of these people towers over everyone who comes after them in at least one of the categories by which we might judge a philosopher: breadth, depth, originality or degree of public influence.

But none, including Kripke, represents anything other than a cul de sac of thought. The Open Problems have moved on. Their 'distinctions without a difference' were just plain ignorance though this may not have been obvious at the time.

Or consider this group, born in roughly the two decades prior (1919-1938), remarkable in its intellectual fertility: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Stanley Cavell, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls. These are the philosophers about whom one routinely asks, “Why don’t people write philosophy like this anymore?”

The answer is obvious. We have the internet. We know why each started with off with a false assumption and erected an ex falso quodlibet Babel on that basis. Furthermore, we can see the people they influenced were complacent shitheads who dug the hole in which young people studying shite subjects find themselves in.

And this isn’t only a point about writing style. Their work is inviting—it asks new questions, it sells the reader on why those questions matter and it presents itself as a point of entry into philosophy. This is why all of us keep assigning their work over and over again, a striking fact given how much the number of philosophers has ballooned since their time.

Why not give a 'health warning' while assigning these works? Edward Said pointed out, fifty years ago, that if you assign Gullivers travellers to Post Grad English students at Ivy League, they will stir their own shit into their coco-pops. Why? Coz teechur made me reed a buk by a Doctor called Joe Namath Swift and this Doctor showed how nutrition could be gained from eating one's poo. So I wuz jus' doin' wot the Doktor said to get a higher grade on my term paper. Instead I got a tummy ache. The Univerrsssity owes me money for making me eat my own shit! Fuck you Ivy League! Fuck you very much!

There is a reason why Professors have to talk goobledegook. If they don't, students will claim that Professor told me to eat my own poo like wot they do in Laputa.

Why is Rawls still taught? He didn't get that 'behind a veil of ignorance' we all choose what we choose anyway- viz collective risk pooling through an incentive compatible insurance scheme. Putnam was crazy enough to say Quantum Mechanics disproves itself. These guys shat the bed! Have the honesty to say so.

And it’s not just a matter of a few exceptional figures. A few years ago, I happened to browse through back issues of a top journal (Ethics) from 1940-1950—not an easy decade for the world, or academia. I went in assuming those papers would be of much lower quality than what is being put out now. Keep in mind, this is a time when not only was publication not required for getting a job, even a Ph.D. was not required; there were far fewer philosophers, and getting a paper accepted at a journal was a vastly less competitive process.
In general, I would describe the papers from that decade as lacking something in terms of precision, clarity and “scholarliness,” but also as being more engaging and ambitious, more heterogeneous in tone and writing style, and better written.

But they were still shit. Just recently, I was reading over Knight's 'Ethics of Competition' which influenced Rawls. The thing is a crock of shit from first to last. The guy already had the notion of Knightian Uncertainty but refused to apply it. Instead he pretended that 'efficiency' was a 'Value' category. It isn't. It is purely ordinal. There may be a 'Value' category but it can only be known ex poste.

Perhaps some amount of academic competition is salutary, but the all-consuming competition of recent years, it appears, has been less productive of excellence than of homogeneity and stagnation.

Being older than Callard, I am not aware of any period when this discipline wasn't shite. There were moments when a young philosopher would pick up a good idea- like Schelling's focal points- and run with it- e.g. Lewis on Conventions, but the first order discipline burgeoned in a manner which philosophy could not follow. Yes, a genius like Freeman Dyson could intervene successfully- e.g. in Prisoner's dilemma- but if a Philosopher has those sorts of chops we want him doing useful stuff. Von Neumann could have been a Philosopher. But it would have been a waste of his talents.

Because the most reliable mark of “quality” is familiarity, the machine incentivizes keeping innovation to a minimum—only at the margin, just enough to get published.

What sort of market is Callard describing? Monopolistic Competition with increasing excess capacity and negative r.o.i. For Credentialism, this is a repugnancy market. Close it down. Won't someone please think of the children?

It constricts the space of thought.

Why let it do so? Get out and get a proper job!

Over time, we end up with less and less to show for all the effort, talent and philosophical training we are throwing into philosophical research.

But the supply of talent has already fallen and the training is now geared towards victims of epistemic self-abuse belonging to subaltern communities of an abject type.

If I wanted to make progress on one of my own papers, I’d certainly be better served with a paper from Ethics in 2020—I’m much more likely to want to cite it.

But it would still be shite.

But if I were just curiously browsing for some philosophical reading, I’d go for one of those back issues. We might be hitting more balls today, but none of them is going far.

How far did shite written in 70 year old copies of 'Ethics' go? Not very far at all. Those articles were ridiculed by the undergraduates who skimmed through them. Thus has it always been. Pedants are paid to serve the same purpose as drunken helots at Spartan feasts. Young people look at these cretins and decide not to seek a 'safe space' on campus but go out into the world and do something useful.

Some see a way out: they call it “public philosophy.” But it is a mistake to think that this represents an escape from the problem I am describing. We do not have two systems for doing philosophy, “academic philosophy” and “public philosophy.” “Public philosophy,” including the piece of it you are currently reading, is written mostly by academic philosophers—which is to say, people who studied, received Ph.D.s at and in the vast majority of cases make a living by working within the academic philosophy system.

while earning a few bucks on the side whining about how academic philosophy is utterly shite.

I have no objection to applying the title “philosopher” broadly, including to those public intellectuals who have had so much more success in speaking to a general audience than I or any of my colleagues who operate more strictly within the confines of academic philosophy: from Judith Butler and Bruno Latour to Slavoj Žižek, Camille Paglia and Steven Pinker.

Latour and Paglia write quite well. Pinker and Paglia weren't trained in Philosophy. Zizek and Butler are antagonomian cranks but the former has entertainment value and the latter was once a promising stick to beat Israel with.

But it is one thing to be a “philosopher” in the sense of being a source of intellectual inspiration to the public, or a subset thereof, and another to be a member of a philosophical community. The latter designation requires a person not only to be beholden to such a community argumentatively, but also calls for participation in the maintenance and self-reproduction of that community through education, training and management. Academic philosophy is the system we have. You can’t jump ship, because there’s nowhere to jump.

The ship ran aground long ago. Get off it, if you love Knowledge. Otherwise stay put till the rations run out.

The sad thing about being stuck reading narrow, boring, abstruse papers is not how bad they are, but how good they are.

So, get off the ship, do something useful and learn stuff others will be grateful to hear about.

When I am enough of an insider to be in a position to engage the writer in back-and-forth questioning, either in speech or in writing, that process of objection and pushback tends to expose a real and powerful line of thought driving the piece.

A friend of mine returned to South Africa and took on what must be one of the worst jobs in the world- working with convicts with mental health problems. This elderly Jew found his work rewarding. He is not a professional writer, but his account of his experiences is an eye-opener. These are rational, sensitive, affectionate- but very very frightened, very very traumatized- young people or people no longer young but who never had a youth. I suppose you could say they have philosophy. What is certain is they have poetry. I don't. On the other hand, for just $9.99 I could supply you with a Diploma in Socioproctology which entitles you to ten percent off on all your purchases of my books.

Philosophers haven’t stopped loving knowledge, despite the increasingly narrow confines within which we must, if we are to survive, pursue it.

One might say of animals in a zoo, that they can't survive anywhere else. No doubt, the lion still wants to hunt and roam free. But we mustn't let that happen because...urm...actually we can protect wild animals without curbing their freedom. Indeed, it may be more remunerative to do so.

Some in the philosophical community will defend this “narrowing” as a sign of the increasingly scientific character of philosophy. But no matter how scientific some parts of philosophy become, the following difference will always remain: unlike science, philosophy cannot benefit those who don’t engage in it.

Like Science, Philosophy either has a Social Benefit greater than its Social Cost or it imposes a loss on Society. Some may receive money but others pay more than that sum. A 'Pareto efficient' solution would be to pay the practitioners to stop doing Philosophy and go do something useful.

Philosophers have traditionally believed that Philosophy is a 'merit' good- i.e. it has eternal benefits not received through the market. It is interesting that Callard denies that any such externality obtains. But, given her gravamen, if follows that Philosophy is a demerit or repugnant market- at least at the margin. Defund it. Do it now.

Philosophical technology—ideas, arguments, distinctions, questions—cannot live outside the human mind.

Unlike what? Words? When is the last time you stumbled over a word or a phrase, that your kids had carelessly left lying about?

One doesn’t need to idolize Socrates, as I happen to, to think that philosophy is an especially dialogical discipline.

What if you idolize Parmenides? Would you think philosophy, at its best, can't be dialogical?

All academic work invites response in the weak sense of “there is always more to be said,” or “corrections welcome,” but philosophical talks, papers and books specifically aim to provoke, to incite, to court pushback and counterexample.

The trouble is, this is too easily done.

Our task is not to take some questions off humanity’s plate, but to infect others with our need to find answers.

This was all very well in the days before the smartphone. The trouble with guys who say they are looking for answers, but are actually looking for a time wasting argument, is that when you Google their question and give them a factual answer, they don't like it at all. They start babbling about Socrates.

The philosopher is an especially needy kind of truth-seeker.

I wish that were true. Nerdy truth-seekers make the world a better place. Needy time-wasting argument seekers don't. They crave attention not alethia.

Like vampires, zombies and werewolves, we are creatures who need company, and who will do whatever it takes to create it.

This is very revealing. Philosophers are zombies who unwittingly create other zombies when they take a bite out of a human. Vampires and Werewolves may be objects of a romantic type of pity. Not Zombies. Callard, with her usual gift for the mot un-juste, lifts the curtain on the true horror of her professional life.

No one thinks that Plato, Descartes, Kant and the rest were right about everything; nonetheless, centuries and millennia later, we cannot stop talking not just about them, but to them, with them.

But we do so outside the Academy because, as Charles Lamb pointed out long ago, pedagogues are infantilized by their pupils. Callard goes one step further. Pedagogues are Zombies who want to feast on the brains of the young.

They made us into one of them, and we need to keep paying that forward.

Unless we accept we are not actually zombies. We can quit biting people and get a job. Not all of us, of course. Socioproctologists must continue to bite postmen otherwise, one of these days, they will deliver my eviction notice.