What It’s Like to Be a Philosopher with Unpopular Views on a Controversial Subject (multiple updates)
“A couple of weeks later, I heard that OUP would not be publishing Trouble with Gender… for the sole reason that ‘the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.’ No errors in the manuscript were identified and… no revisions were allowed.”
That’s Alex Byrne, professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an essay describing his experiences writing about transgender issues. He continues:
The (unsubstantiated) allegation of unseriousness was particularly galling, since the draft [totaling over 100,000 words] had 16,000 words of endnotes and a massive bibliography. To excuse the large number of citations, I had earlier written to OUP, “a persistent criticism of people not hewing to the party line is that we haven’t ‘read the literature,’ so it’s probably a good idea if I demonstrate that I have in fact read the literature.”
Regardless of one’s positions on various questions regarding gender, sex, and trans issues, those acquainted with book publishing in philosophy will recognize this as a very unusual way to handle a contracted manuscript.
[See OUP editor’s reply in Update 1.]
Byrne did not contest OUP’s decision about his book manuscript, he says, because of a recent experience regarding his invited chapter on pronouns for the Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. The chapter’s eventual rejection (itself somewhat unusual, given the normal way these volumes are put together) was telegraphed publicly on Twitter by one of the editors of the volume.
His book will be published with Polity. A version of his handbook chapter is forthcoming in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.
Byrne takes his recent experiences to support the view that trans issues are a subject on which a reigning political orthodoxy within academic institutions is stifling legitimate inquiry.
* * * * *
Here’s one way of characterizing all of this: a philosopher whose subpar work in an area he is relatively new to is bitterly and unjustifiably blaming the powerful forces of political correctness for his deserved rejections and ill treatment by editors and publishers.
I think leaping to that characterization would be a mistake.
I haven’t read Byrne’s handbook chapter or his book manuscript. Maybe they are quite terrible, and so the rejections were warranted. But how likely is it that they were so unsalvageably bad that the unusual deviations from standard publishing protocols, and even the lack of substantive explanations for the rejections, were warranted? Isn’t the answer much closer to the “not likely” end of the spectrum? (And if so, shouldn’t we be curious for more details?)
Let me state that while I don’t know Byrne personally, nor am I familiar with all of his views on the myriad questions that arise in regard to “trans issues,” I think he and I would disagree about them quite a bit.
Also, as I’ve said before, we should take seriously just how difficult existing discourse about transgender issues can be for our trans colleagues and students—in academia and also in the broader discriminatory culture. Recent legal developments in the United States have made things even worse for them.
Still, even if one thinks that Byrne is seriously mistaken, and perhaps insufficiently sensitive to the difficulties trans persons face, one can still think that his testimony about his experiences describes actions (and omissions) by editors and publishers that are concerning. Just think of yourself undergoing them. Think of an untenured professor with views you like undergoing them.
You may recall our discussion of “t philosopher,” the trans philosopher who found philosophy too transphobic to stay in it. Here’s a part of that post I’d like to share again:
The more I have learned about the philosophical and policy arguments regarding transgender issues, and in particular trans women, the closer I have come to a fairly strong trans-inclusive view. Like most philosophers, I’m not the kind of person who, on controversial matters, just takes others’ words for it. I want to hold the view of the matter that I believe is most justified, and to do that I need to understand the issues and to be moved by reasons and arguments, and to do that well, I need to make sure I’m getting a good accounting of the relevant considerations and opposing arguments. How can I do that? By engaging with the best work those with competing views have to offer.
If the institutions of philosophy prohibit the defense of trans-exclusionary views, what then? Do the views disappear? No. Rather, their best defenses go elsewhere, to less reliable, less seriously-vetted venues… where argumentative errors, rhetorical nudges, strategic omissions, and polemical sleights-of-hand are more likely.
Furthermore, the absence of trans-exclusionary views from academic venues under such conditions does not thereby signal their weakness to philosophers who’ve yet to form considered opinions on the matter. It signals instead a kind of dogmatism that threatens to alienate allies. The very love of philosophy that is central to t philosopher’s identity, and which contributes to the awfulness of what has happened to her, is also what makes so many in our community uneasy with prohibiting the expression of views on matters they think involve a lot of interesting and unresolved philosophical questions.
In short, if your interest is in more philosophers coming to reject trans-exclusionary views, then we have to talk about trans-exclusionary views, and to do that well, we have to let those with trans-exclusionary views talk to us through the institutions we’ve found valuable for pursuing the truth. This argument doesn’t depend on prioritizing philosophical questioning above all else, or on the idea that as philosophers we question everything. It is based on a confidence in the justifiability of a more trans-inclusive view, and a belief that Millian considerations regarding the expression of ideas are not unrealistic for the philosophical community.
Additionally, to say that we have to let those with trans-exclusionary views talk to us is not to say that everything goes.
(See also: disagreeing with Kathleen Stock but arguing against her disinvitation from a conference and criticizing Holly Lawford-Smith’s anti-trans website but defending her right to make it, for example.)
In Byrne’s case, we have just one side of the story, and most readers will not have read the relevant works by him (nor, some might add, know enough about the subject to assess them in a worthwhile way). I think this favors caution and tentativeness in any discussion of that case.
Especially welcome, though, would be constructive suggestions for how to best think about, promote, and protect academic freedom in ways that adequately acknowledge its potential for tension with other values worth promoting and protecting, too.
UPDATE 1 (4/19/23): In a comment below, David Wallace reproduces the text of a letter he sent Oxford University Press philosophy editor Peter Momtchiloff expressing his concern about Alex Byrne’s account of his treatment by OUP. Momtchiloff replied today. According to Momtchiloff, Byrne’s book manuscript “underwent peer review, and Alex was given comments on the manuscript from me and from four expert readers.”
Here is Momtchiloff’s reply to Wallace in its entirety:
Dear David
Thank you for your message, and for your kind words about OUP.
You will understand that I can’t discuss the details of a specific review process, as this is a confidential matter. I can confirm, however, that the decision not to proceed with Alex’s book manuscript was editorial in nature. By way of clarification, let me assure you that the manuscript underwent peer review, and Alex was given comments on the manuscript from me and from four expert readers. On the basis of these assessments, my judgement was indeed that the work was not appropriate for publication by OUP. And Alex’s submission for the Handbook also went through a process of review by expert readers.
Feel free to share this reply if you wish. I just ask that, if so, you share all of it.
Best wishes
Peter
Byrne, in Quillette, had said:
A couple of weeks later, I heard that OUP would not be publishing Trouble with Gender either, for the sole reason that “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” No errors in the manuscript were identified and, as with the pronouns chapter, no revisions were allowed.
Apparently, all that the four expert readers and Peter Momtchiloff told Byrne is that “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” Is that logically possible? Sure. How likely is it? Isn’t the answer much closer to the “not likely” end of the spectrum?
Perhaps Professor Byrne will share the comments he received on his book manuscript in their entirety.
UPDATE 2 (4/20/23): Byrne replies in the comments below.
UPDATE 3 (4/20/23): David Wallace makes a Freedom of Information Request to Oxford University Press requesting correspondence pertaining to publication decisions regarding Byrne’s book and handbook chapter, a book and an edited collection by Holly Lawford-Smith, and a volume of essays on women philosophers proposed by Richard Marshall. (Edited to add: the request explicitly asks that any identifying information about the reviewers and OUP’s non-editorial staff be excluded from the produced materials.) See his comment here for details.
UPDATE 4 (4/21/23): Comments on this thread are now closed.
UPDATE 5 (5/2/23): A pseudonymous commenter writes about this post (and this related one) at Quillette.
At a minimum, I hope we can all agree that editorial decisions should not be made or communicated via Twitter.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Like it or not.
I think anytime a piece of philosohy that was invited or accepted for publishing is not published because of the perceived effects that publication is meant to have that we’ve harmed ourselves as a discpline. That sort of “bad philosohy” (i.e., when perceived harm or offense of academic work is taken as a reason not to publish it) does more harm to us and our shared profession than any amount of salami-sliced analytic articles will do.
I’m not saying that this happened in Byrne’s case (I haven’t been following it at all) but if there’s evidence that his work has been pulled for these reasons then I think we’ve all been done a disservice.
This doesn’t mean that [Identity] supremacist articles should be welcome or encouraged but if, as happened with Tuvel’s article on transracialism, an article goes through the peer-review process (or the invted editorial process) and is accepted for publication then that should be the end of the story. The right response to legitimate but wrong positions should be reasons. When socio-political power, and not argument, guides the publishing process I would say that we’ve stopped doing philosophy and started doing something else, propoganda maybe, instead.
It certainly would be helpful to hear from the relevant OUP editors. I hope they step up. Perhaps someone with the right connections might invite them?
I think one of the reasons this has become a sticking point in philosophy is because the social meaning and literal meaning of claims about gender have come apart.
I think most people who have strong views about the existence (or non-existence) of non-traditional genders primarily care about how we treat people who identify in certain ways (eg do we demand people use birth gender or one of male/female on certain forms). But at a literal level that’s often very different than statements such as “there are more than 2 genders” or claims about the nature of gender.
For instance, you might believe (as I tentatively lean towards) that in American culture there are only 2 genders (w/ maybe N/A) because a gender is something like a cultural stereotype/norms that play a similar role to ‘male/female’s (while other cultures may have more) but that we should work to change our culture to recognize more genders. OTOH you could accept that as a linguistic/conceptual matter there are hundreds of genders but believe we should try to squealch them.
Unfortunately, this mismatch tends to mean that most philosophers (or others) who are supportive of trans individuals are reluctant to challenge (even tentatively) claims that are associated with support for trans individuals. After all, such arguments might be misused to harm trans individuals or be misinterpreted. And that danger is real.
However, this leads to a harmful spiral in which it’s mostly people who aren’t sympathetic to trans issues who raise concerns about various literal claims thereby making the inference from raising concerns about the literal meaning to bad motives ever stronger. And can create the impression that only the anti-trans advocates are willing to seriously address issues.
Unfortunately, I think in the long run this harms both philosophy and trans rights. I believe it would help convince people if we could give a more robust account of what a gender is (but only if that account is willing to bite bullets like any other view) and if we had more people who were clearly not anti-trans willing to ask and press hard questions about the nature of gender I think philosophy could both help learn truth and give trans advocates more robust answers to criticism.
In other words to avoid constantly having this kind of problem we need more people publishing criticism of philosophical claims associated with trans issues that are unimpeachably not anti-trans.
“In other words to avoid constantly having this kind of problem we need more people publishing criticism of philosophical claims associated with trans issues that are unimpeachably not anti-trans.”
This is very reasonable and sensible, just like Justin’s request for constructive suggestions for ways to promote academic freedom while acknowledging other values, which is exactly why it won’t work.
One of the striking things about trans activism in and around academia is the intensity of its antagonism to its most moderate critics. I remember when Kathleen Stock was saying, essentially, that we can accept that trans women are women and trans men are men for many purposes, but there are some areas where sex remains important – and the reaction to this very mild form of gender criticism was, I think it’s fair to say, deranged. Apart from the demands that she be sacked, silenced and deplatformed, and the harassment and threats directed at her personally, it was made clear that anyone else who even appeared at the same event as her risked receiving the same treatment. She became an “eliminationist”, an agent of “genocide”. Stock is only one example of this.
(I think her views have evolved since then, unsurprisingly.)
These days, trans activism is taking on a kind of religious intensity: the culture of purity in thought and action, the identification of disagreement as blasphemy, the contamination by association, the catastrophisation, the persecution complex, the rejection of the flesh, the endless search for witches, etc etc.
There’s no possibility of compromise. Moderation is just another word for apostasy. You’re either with them or you’re against them.
It’s kind of wild that you would call people demented and fanatical while claiming criticism of their social group is mild.
The objections to the professor were primarily around political activism to limit the rights of transgender people.
The professor was not fired. However, students objected to the political activism, and called for firing as this professor as part of a movement seeking to characterize transgender people as dangerous and harmful and limit rights and freedoms they previously had..
The belief of this gender critical movement is that not only are transgender people demented and fanatical, and their identity somehow like a religion, as you say, but that they are also a threat to good people, and should not have the rights they previously enjoyed.
Academic freedom did protect the professor’s job, as it is meant to. A strong statement by the union that did not mention Professor Stock but claimed transgender students should be respected in their rights was seen by Professor Stock as an attack on her, and she stated she decided to quit her position as a result.
Students should not call for firing of people for speech and political activity, but generally if you work in a movement intending limits on rights and freedoms for a social group, its members and supporters inevitably make a demand of this kind.
It’s not specific to transgender people to object to the loss of legal and social status, so it seems a bit hasty to make so much of their reaction.
1. I don’t see how it is the responsibility of a philosopher (or any other academic) to pay heed to the affect their work might have on a putatively marginalised population. The question is just irrelevant to any intellectual pursuit. One should perhaps avoid giving gratuitous offence, but even that is mostly tolerated and Alex has received his fair share with good grace.
2. The question of the quality of Alex’s work has a certain irony. At any rate, it is perfectly legitimate for one to wade into an area and claim that most of what people say is confused. Philosophers do this all the time. Sometimes, they might be right. Sometimes, they are not, but light is shed on issues; other times, it is a simple matter to point out the flaws in the naïve claims. Nothing of the latter sort has done vis-à-vis Alex’s contribution to the issue of gender. On the contrary, he has been abused and now ‘blacklisted’ (albeit from one publisher). Chomsky once said that the only disciplines where credentials are not asked for are mathematics and philosophy. It is a grim pass that this great compliment to philosophy no long holds, at least not where gender is at issue. We might add that the strength of the demand for credentials is inversely proportional to the quality of a field.
“I don’t see how it is the responsibility of a philosopher (or any other academic) to pay heed to the affect their work might have on a putatively marginalised population. The question is just irrelevant to any intellectual pursuit. One should perhaps avoid giving gratuitous offence, but even that is mostly tolerated and Alex has received his fair share with good grace.”
Insofar as engaging in research, inviting or publishing a contribution, etc. are actions, why wouldn’t they be governed by the same moral principles as the rest of our actions? If I think my essay on some question is correct as far as the content goes but in the political context will contribute to some terrible thing if I publish it, why wouldn’t ordinary moral concerns at least count against me publishing it? I wonder if you mean to express something more narrow than what you said in the comment, but in any case I’m curious how you would answer these questions.
It is an interesting issue. I’d certainly not suggest that, qua human, we ought not to care less about predictable consequences of our research. I just think that if all else is equal (the research being sound and otherwise interesting), then political/moral constraints ought not to be in play as academic norms, not least because consequences are rarely clear, although an individual is free to make her decisions on such matters. The problem with the current case is that potential harm is often cited against ‘gender critical’ work without any kind of clear evidence or even an attempt to provide such, as if all research is supposed to be moral or contributory to the social good. The whole ameliorative conception has badly warped a lot of people’s thinking. I actually think, though, there are some pretty clear cases where research should not be done regardless of the truth of the matter, such as with ‘race’ and IQ. Yet here I just can’t see any value in the research and am hard pressed not to see it as just racism with stats. One can consider other such cases. So, in general, as humans we can make our decisions with all due consideration and caution; I am only against the relevant considerations being elevated to intellectual norms.
Ok, thanks for the reply! I will just register that I suspect some of the people who object to publishing Byrne and others may be happy to say the norms they are appealing to are just moral or political ones that apply to us as humans rather than intellectual norms per se.
Maybe, but being immoral can’t be an argument for effective censorship. I’d suggest that the people read Spinoza, Milton, Voltaire,… As I said, ameliorative thinking has turned a lot of people a bit daft.
When you said an academic shouldn’t “pay heed to the effect their work might have on a putatively marginalised population,” did “paying heed” just refer to potentially censoring? And if so, does an editor or whomever deciding not to publish a book or article on moral grounds constitute censorship? I’m a bit confused about your position especially given what you said about the case of race and IQ!
I take it as given that editors are not moral arbiters. That’s not the job.
Well, it could be that a particular press has as part of its mission a set of values – for example, in the case of OUP, that might be to “inspire progress and realize human potential” (https://global.oup.com/about/?cc=us). That said, I agree with the spirit of what I take you to mean in saying editors are not “moral arbiters.” They are, however, human beings, and as such they might take moral norms into account when they perform actions like publishing something.
I honestly think this is all academic, for I seriously doubt that anyone is being moral hereabouts. Alex just wants his stuff out and to be treated with respect. The publishers want to protect reputation and produce a marketable text, while keeping all stakeholders happy, and the people who apparently spiked Alex appear to be animated by some odd ideology that permits them to act in horrible ways.
It must be pleasant to have such a cushy existence that the worst thing imaginable, the greatest conceivable injustice, the mere suggestion of which really stirs the moral emotion — is the possibility that one’s work might be assessed on its moral merits.
Truly, a horrible act to do this to another human being, the only explanation for such moral depravity being some reprehensible ideology.
Get a grip, John.
Why be snarky like this and misrepresent the arguments of your opponents? The point is that philosophers have all kinds of views about the moral merits of various pieces of normative philosophy. Some moral realists think that moral anti-realism is a deeply immoral position to take that poses a danger to society. Some conservatives hate Jeff McMahan’s argument that soldiers who fight for their country are generally not heroes but rather morally blameworthy because of their failure to ensure that a war is just before they participate in it. If there was a norm that editors can use these kinds of personal moral judgements to reject work then philosophy would be doomed. How would you like it if a editor sympathetic to the position of gender critical feminism consistently rejected philosophical work that defends trans activist positions on the grounds that this view is immoral and harms society? I would think that this was terrible. Perhaps your view is predicated on the hope that people with your moral and political outlook will soon have completed a take over of all the major academic institutions so that only the views that you find immoral are rejected on these grounds and none of the views that you favour are. However, this is a foolishly shortsighted view. A complete takeover is unlikely to happen. If it did happen, infighting would soon emerge among the woke elite controlling these academic institutions and they would start to morally censure each others views, despite their broad agreement. Eventually, some of those who you initially thought of as “on your side” would end up censuring as “immoral” views that you accept. All of this would also trash the reputation of academia and it would become more and more irrelevant. Meanwhile, it would be likely that at some point, your political opponents would win back control of the key institutions and use the norm you want established against the moral outlooks you favour.
“The question is just irrelevant to any intellectual pursuit.” I confess this baffles me. How could it be an irrelevant question? At least this claim is far too strong: it’s obviously relevant to some intellectual pursuits, and the question is whether it’s relevant to intellectual pursuits related to gender identity and associated issues in the use of language. I would say yes. This doesn’t mean anyone’s academic freedom to say what they think is true should be restricted. The discourse doesn’t happen in a vacuum and it’s ethical to acknowledge this, regardless of the views for which one argues.
Laura: My initial statement concerned ‘putatively marginalised populations’. Of course, ethical considerations arise constantly for humans, and are sometimes codified in medicine, experimental research, etc. I happily grant that, as I did above. My point concerned social justice, broadly speaking, being a constraint on academic work. One can and should have the greatest concern for truly marginalised people (women in many parts of the world, those who suffer from mental health problems, those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, many indigenous populations, etc.), but I see such concerns as wholly disconnected from intellectual work. You are probably right, though, that there is some pursuit my generalisation runs foul of.
Thank you for clarifying – I was responding to the general idea that philosophers don’t have a “responsibility … to heed” the effects of their work on other people. I believe we do generally have that responsibility and I don’t see it as a negative constraint. It’s good to be ethical, and being ethical includes taking responsibility for the effects of implications your work might have. This is particularly true when you’re talking about the lives and experiences of others, and people are suffering some bad things.
Laura: I can recognise that as an ideal. It is good to be good, and no-one should be reckless. Still, I have trouble seeing how one might arrive at something like a norm that could guide or interdict research. I mean, the potential consequences are just to nebulous – it would be crippling to consider them, and one might get things wrong anyhow. I am a Kantian when it comes to morality, and the problem with judging research hereabouts ethically is that it is all consequential ( is one doing harm?), the truth not being moral or not. The common appeal to the plight of this or that marginalised group might be very real, but we have no algebra to deal with it. The injunction to be kind becomes a club. So it seems to me.
Isn’t recognizing a personal responsibility to consider the consequences of publishing X quite different from coming. up with general norms for everyone. Lots of people engage in genuine practical reasoning without even considering the broader theoretical question, except perhaps as a source for implicit defeaters. Personally I think there is an extremely strong presumption that one should publish as long as one is sincerely presenting an argument that they believe is good or at least interesting and provocative. As JS Mill said, it is important to be challenged and forced to rationally defend one’s view and also reflect on the meaning of whatever view one holds..
“I don’t see how it is the responsibility of a philosopher (or any other academic) to pay heed to the affect their work might have on a putatively marginalised population. The question is just irrelevant to any intellectual pursuit.”
You’ve never had to submit an IRB for work involving real people, have you?
I addressed that issue in my previous comment. Since I have never done medical research in the US, the answer is trivially ‘No’.
Plenty of social-sciences work requires one too. I have written IRBs for anthropology proposals and you absolutely do address the question “will this work with a marginalized population potentially harm that population?” in the IRB. If you don’t, the university won’t give you money. So this isn’t some exotic concept limited to medical research; other academics do and have paid heed to this for a while.
I am a philosopher, but I’ve had to submit IRB proposals/deal with IRB issues more generally. I just want to suggest that, perhaps, there are important differences between philosophy (especially ethics) and the sciences, such that review boards are more appropriate to the latter than to the former. One such reason is precisely that ethicists defend or object to moral claims, give and assess moral reasons, etc. The risk, essentially, is that an IRB-style board could beg the question against some ethicists, closing off legitimate lines of inquiry on exactly the grounds under dispute. I do not claim, however, that philosophers should be insensitive to the broader consequences of their work.
I’m not an American and have never done research in the US, but thanks for the information. We have something similar in the UK (EU as was), which covers ethical impact of all kinds of research. None of this is relevant to my initial point which, in the context, concerned assessment of impact on populations who are not the subject of the work in any sense at all. Obviously, a whole range of issues arise when a study is invasive, as it were.
I think the reason someone brought up IRB is because your initial claim, perhaps unintentionally, suggests that IRB/ethics review boards should not impede or constrain the “intellectual pursuits” of “a philosopher (or any other academic)”, and so, one might reasonably take you, in that remark, to be against the concept of these sorts of ethical limitations tout court (since that is what your remark entails); rather than that IRB or ethics review boards would apply in this specific case.
Put another way, your initial remark suggests that the very concept of professional ethics for intellectual research is a sort of category mistake, which IRB is a handy concrete example of how that is not so.
Thank you; this was my intention.
I see, yes. No such implication was intended. Sometimes, context and intention do not suffice for communication.
But, given that you do not intend to claim the total irrelevance of ethical considerations to the scope of intellectual pursuit, it becomes a question of how to set the boundaries, as it were.
How about this?
Actual studies use actual human or animal subjects and so may produce tangible, direct, harms on those subjects throughout the course of an experiment. Thus, those subjects (and not others who are not part of the study itself) need to be protected. IRBs are necessary for that purpose.
Ressearch that consists purely in the creation and exchange of ideas work very differently. Ideas don’t harm people and so publishing them doesn’t require IRB oversight.
“Ideas don’t harm people…”
Ideas can very much cause harm, and authors can be culpable for it:
https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVWAA
Marcus,
I respectfully disagree though if you manage to convince the IRB at your university to start screening all research for potentially harmful ideas, I may change my mind.
@Caligula: whether authors can be culpable for causing harm is one question. Whether philosophical research should have to pass an IRB is another question. An IRB process could be all too easily abused by those in power (whomever they may be) to inappropriately censor research. Hence why I quoted only the first part of the sentence, not the latter.
My only point here is that we shouldn’t pretend that published ideas can’t cause harm and that authors are never responsible for it. Whether formal bodies (such as an IRB) should enforce judgments about these matters is a different question.
That is not a question with an answer, I fear. One can tow an absolutist line, which is what I intended, that unless a population is the direct object of the research, then there are no implications to consider as intellectual norms, although individuals might make their own decisions. This might be inconsistent with other values, but values conflict, here as elsewhere.
Presumably you would take issue with me publishing a paper or hosting a conference on the topic Should John Collins be ostracized entirely from polite society and forever after addressed only as “dirt”.
Maybe if it were just me, you would laugh it off. But if I had a group of friends who wanted to go to that conference, I imagine you’d be concerned, whether or not there was hands on research that required IRB approval. If you add a specification that I cannot target you personally, please pre-emptively assume that I have the wherewithal to find some set of qualities you somewhat uniquely possess to replace your name in the paper with “people who have such-and-such qualities”.
To be clear, this is not the claim that Byrne has done this (though I am sure I find his work more objectionably transphobic and hostile to trans people than you do), it is to point out that your absolutism may be less tenable than you think against a hostile and determined scholar who wishes to advance their hostility against a group.
I do not intend to try to settle the question of how to draw the line here with you. My point is simply that if you think the questions are simple and the lines are easy to draw, I think you should reconsider. They are not.
I said the contrary. There are no lines to be drawn where values conflict, only piecemeal judgements. My point, however, was that such conflict does not preclude taking an absolutist line on a given value. That is how I see things. I don’t do analogies and seminar games, so excuse me if I neglect the rest.
IRBs are tasked by the federal government to protect human research subjects. They apply federal regulations using vocabulary provided by those regulations, including definitions of what counts as “research,” who counts as a “subject” and so on. These regulations are wholly inapplicable to the sort of work under discussion in this thread.
Yes. The most relevant things to know about IRBs are:
1) The title of the section of the US code of Federal regulations that establishes and empowers IRBs is “Protection of Human Subjects.” Their purview is human subjects research that’s funded by a set group of federal agencies. The rules do not apply if you are not doing human subjects research.
2) Human subjects research is defined as research which generates data through intervening on or interacting with an individual or which uses identifiable private information.
3) The US federal regulations were written in response to biomedical scandals, specifically Tuskegee, and with biomedical research in mind. Arguably, they are not even a particularly good fit with social scientific research that uses human subjects, let alone philosophical research which does not use human subjects at all.
In my own judgment, extending current review processes to cover all research qua research would be a disaster; but, regardless, the fact is that current practices simply do not apply to Byrne writing a book that reports no original human subjects research.
It is probably difficult for people not working in these areas or who haven’t otherwise followed them closely to understand just how stifling the intellectual environment is in academia right now, at least with respect to sex and gender. Byrne’s testimony about his and other philosophers’ experiences generalizes to other areas of the academy, including academic medicine, and also to areas outside the academy such as clinical medicine and mainstream journalism. Publishers worry about the blowback they will inevitably face if they publish the wrong ideas–plenty of examples can be adduced to support these worries (Byrne provides a few); emails targeting individual scholars, casually and groundlessly accusing them of bigotry, are sent to university administrators; faculty face complaints and must face DEI administrators for using the “wrong” words (and I don’t mean slurs or anything approaching slurs).
One solution is for the gatekeepers to grow a spine. Another is for members of the relevant professions–including professional philosophy–to speak out against this sort of censorious and anti-intellectual behavior and to insist that disagreements be addressed via free and open discussion and debate.
(One minor qualification I’d add to Justin’s headline: Byrne’s views are only “unpopular” relative to a fairly narrow range of elite and highly politicized opinion–the one that matters with respect to academic publishing.)
Maybe those who are self-gatekeeping could also grow a spine?
What does it mean to “grow a spine”? I hear “spinelessness” used as a criticism in many cases, but in some cases (including this one) it seems to me to be used with the precise opposite meaning of what I would imagine! (A “spineless” person presumably doesn’t stick up for things they care about and just lets other people get their way, is my interpretation.)
Without affirming or denying this view, presumably the commenter meant:
The gatekeepers are the publishers. They don’t stick up for the academic freedom to publish controversial ideas, for fear of backlash. Hence, they are spineless. Hence also, growing a spine means having the courage to stick up for that freedom, even at the risk of backlash.
I am not endorsing or rejecting this view, either, but I interpreted the commenter to be taking issue with those who self-censor. The thought seemed to be that if you have something you want to say, you should say it and not worry about the backlash.
Ah, that could be, too. I read “gatekeeper” as someone other than the self-censorer, because it appeared right after the publishers/administrators/DEI comment, and was distinguished from the option concerning professional philosophers (who I assumed were the self-censorers, in many cases).
Then again, I’m still not sure I understand Kenny Easwaran’s question in either case. If it’s the publishers, then the claim is that they are spineless and hence should grow a spine and stick up for academic freedom; if it’s the self-censorers, then (as you say) they are spineless and hence should grow a spine and stick up for their own beliefs. I guess I don’t see how “spineless” is being used with the opposite meaning here.
I was referring to publishers, editors, and other professional gatekeepers. Someone then replied to my comment about self-censorship, which is a related but separate issue, ie if the gatekeepers grew a spine, there would be less self-censorship.
I had interpreted “gatekeepers” as the people who were objecting to the work! If you interpret it as the publishers, and think that the publishers do not themselves object to the work, then I can see how this interpretation makes sense.
I know people with very liberal, CNN approved views on trans issues (philosophers far, far to the left of Byrne) who have abandoned writing on gender and feminism because the peer review situation in these areas is so bad. What is and isn’t acceptable to say moves rapidly fast, and getting it wrong means potentially get screamed at in a referee report, and I think these people just got sick of dealing with the unprofessionalism in the area.. It’s really like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
Yes peer review in all areas of philosophy is problematic, but feminism and especially trans stuff seems pretty next level. If you haven’t encountered it first personally, it’s almost hard to believe.
If the subfield wants to be take seriously by the rest of the field, it needs to clean up its act.
If the sub-field wants to be taken seriously…
Thanks for making my point for me.
Some of the people I know who have stopped publishing in this subfield are marginalized along multiple axes of oppression and were writing what they saw as trans affirming philosophy. This is the kind of knee jerk snideness that made them (and me) just peace out of the subfield.
The rhetorical move of this cartoon depends on a crucial question whose answer is assumed here:
Did the people who spent decade critiquing the norms of the profession, etc. etc., develop the beliefs they now take for granted by subjecting their views to the rigorous philosophical criticism of those who do not share their assumptions? Did they win the day by responding to criticisms fairly and effectively, in an environment in which reasoned discussion was prized rather while character assassination against their interlocutors was frowned upon?
If the answer to that question is no, then obviously(?) the mere fact that people of a certain viewpoint have been saying the same thing for decades really doesn’t count for anything. It’s very easy to keep insisting on the same claims, over and over again, if one doesn’t have to respond effectively to criticisms.
On the other hand, if the answer to that question is yes, then those who wish to exclude all other viewpoints as illegitimate should not damage their credibility by merely pointing to the fact that their side has been saying something for a long time. That gives the strong impression that they’ve really got no good reply. Instead, it would be far more persuasive for them to present the knock-down arguments and objections they’ve supposedly honed for decades now.
Isn’t that especially evident in this case, where the whole discussion arose because some editors apparently used underhanded tactics to block publication of arguments they wished to suppress? (Talk about philosophers being ‘marginalized’!). Again: if the referees, or whoever, had found poor reasoning or other errors in the submitted manuscripts, why wouldn’t they have just shown that there were errors?
We see this over and over again. If there’s something wrong with the criticisms of Byrne, Stock, and the few others who have dared to raise questions on this topic, it would really enhance the credibility of the mainstream view if they responded with clear arguments rather than bullying, intimidation, and the suppression of publications. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks.
We have. Over and over and over again. At this point if you’re not aware of those arguments yet have a genuine interest in the debate, maybe the issue isn’t on us?
But it is on you—if you want to convince people of your viewpoint or further a cause, the work of doing that is always on you. That’s true for any cause.
Nobody is going to convince themselves for you. It’s not human nature, and possibly even irrational.
The “it’s not my job to educate you” argument you see all the time on social media may be well-motivated (after all, I understand that it is tiring to say the same things again and again when you already feel marginalized and oppressed).
But there really isn’t an alternative—convincing people is hard work. To someone that isn’t already convinced hearing this sounds dismissive, and arrogant and makes them less likely to want to engage in the debate. It has done, I think, a lot of damage to progressive causes.
//if you want to convince people of your viewpoint or further a cause, the work of doing that is always on you.//
There are responsibilities on all sides here. There’s a responsibility to be ready to give your case. But there’s also a responsibility to be informed and open. When both sides are upholding their responsibility, it helps the other do even better with theirs. When one is not keeping up their end of the bargain, it makes it impossible for the other to uphold theirs.
I absolutely agree with that.
Mhm yes, and if you find convincing people too hard, you can just go to Quilette and complain that nobody is listening to you.
Or you can just snark online.
“We have. Over and over and over again.”
You have… produced arguments that clearly demonstrate, to any neutral and reasonable observer who listens to those arguments, that all the main positions and arguments and objections Byrne, Stock, and every other seemingly competent philosopher who dares to disagree with you makes is wrong — and in fact, so clearly wrong that there is no good reason even to examine the argumentative moves they make in any philosophical forum, because they have been so decisively refuted by these miraculous refutations?
And there’s no basis for concern that people with your convictions on the issue could be overestimating the strength of these amazing would-be refutations because you reached a conclusion on the issues independently of hearing these airtight arguments? The philosophical merits of the moves you are making are just so overwhelmingly clear to any neutral and informed observer that, once such observers become aware of these moves of your side, they all see that what your interlocutors have to say is just not worth anyone’s consideration?
And yet, somehow, these incredible moves on your side of the issue are just being overlooked or forgotten again and again, even though your side has presented them “over and over and over again” for years now, in the usual venues?
In that case, it seems best for you and others in possession of these amazingly decisive arguments to just create some resource — say, a public website — in which you enumerate the incredible arguments and respond to the objections you’ve supposedly dealt with hundreds of times. This would require everyone on your side of the issues, collectively, to write this up just once more.
Thereafter, whenever another Byrne rises up to make arguments that have already been easily refuted, you could just settle the issue by saying, “Ah, but that’s just a repetition of Bad Argument 17 on our website, which we have utterly refuted as you can see by following this link.” It would take almost no time to say that, and all those who wanted to verify whether your side had really refuted the opposing argument would be able to see with their own eyes that the matter had been settled beyond any plausible response. And after we had gone through this process so many times, seeing every time that your arguments are so rock-solid that they preclude any reasonable philosophical doubt, it would be acknowledged at last that the amazing work of the philosophers who agree with you have sewn the matter up so neatly that Byrne comes off as an uninformed novice.
But instead, for some reason, I have never once heard people on your side presenting or referring people to these supposedly decisive arguments. Instead, it’s always, “Well, you see, there’s this vast literature that you don’t know anything about — the complete corpus of these eleven philosophers, is a good place to start — such that if you were to read it all and understand it, you would discover, somewhere or other something that decisively refutes what you’re saying. And I know exactly what that argument is — I’ve had to repeat it at least a hundred times now — but I’m not going to tell you, because it’s your job to immerse yourself in this literature and discover the secret and decisive argument for yourself.” Either that, or just things that look like dogmatic claims that everyone must accept on pain of being denounced as ignorant and hateful, and all the while nobody ever seems to summarize a single one of the amazing arguments that show how absurdly simple it is when you truly understand.
It seems easy enough to create such a resource to preserve these incredible arguments you should all know very well by now if you’ve repeated them hundreds of times. Otherwise, it seems fair for the rest of us to carry on thinking that Byrne and others should be given room to make their cases.
If you choose not to present the refutations you claim to know, or to find some way of directing us to a summary of the refutations, you can’t expect us not to doubt whether the refutations exist.
Better without the sarcasm.
There are a lot of propositions in this area, what is one that you are interested in seeing a knock-down argument for?
Byrne here is too restrictive when he references junior members of the profession. Just one anecdote, but I’m a senior member (middle aged, tenured and promoted to full professor, and feeling very secure, at a job I like). Nevertheless, my own academic speech on this topic has been chilled by these controversies, including but not limited to the reception Byrne and Tuvel received…even though I do not share their views.
I mean that my speech has been chilled in the most basic sense: I cut from now-published work an entire subsection that explored how gendered language works. As far as I could tell, nothing that I was saying in those passages could reasonably generate a negative reaction from the usual contestants about gender. In particular, my claims were compatible with either the inclusive or the exclusive view of gender, my personal views lean against the views of someone like Byrne and towards those of his opponents, and I had the section vetted by colleagues. But I still pulled that subsection because I concluded that, in our current environment, I could not trust that my claims would be read fairly–or even read at all–before somebody got an idea to shame or cancel my speech (or worse, me as a person or me as a member of the profession) simply because I decided to write words about gender. Even when it is inoffensive, approaching these topics just isn’t worth it anymore, even if avoiding the topics will result in setbacks to our acquisition of knowledge…or even setbacks to the progressive march toward social justice.
This is no longer just about contentious speech, or offensive speech, or unpopular speech, or the speech of the professionally vulnerable. Speech on the entire topic has been chilled, even for people like me, because of how people with views opposed to mine are being treated by some people with views similar to mine.
I’m just a plebeian at-will employee myself, so I’m not out as trans at work because I reasonably fear loss of my livelihood. Your comment inspires me to wonder exactly what potential repercussions you face that could be so awful a tenured full professor who feels “very secure” in their job would sacrifice production of knowledge and social justice to avoid. I thought tenure was intended to protect academics in exactly this sort of situation- your speech can’t be cancelled. Perhaps I misunderstand academic privileges. Tuvel and Byrne are both still professors, even after they’ve been subject to shaming speech. Having slurs shouted at me on the street has certainly calloused me, but I stride onwards because I have no other choice. I hope you develop a similar fortitude.
I am sorry that you face such discrimination. There should be employment laws, and anti-harassment laws that protect you against such treatment. In Australia, Canada, NZ, and the UK, there are such laws that would protect someone like you and a police culture that would work to protect you. But in the US (which is clearly a less civilized country) there often isn’t.
While I am sympathetic to your plight, I don’t think that your comparison is fair. The injustice that you face does not mean that academics (especially those from Australia, Canada, NZ, and the UK) should be embarrassed to complain about the professional threats they face that are used to enforce ideological conformity. Clearly the threats that you face, in your society, are much worse, but that does not mean that everyone else from other parts of the world must not complain about things that are lessor threats. By analogy, imagine if a philosopher in the UK faced credible threats of professional backlash, blacklisting, etc., if they were to argue that abortion is immoral. This would be unjust and legitimate to complain about. The fact that, in El Salvador, a woman can be jailed for life because of (often flimsy) evidence that she caused her pregnancy to abort can hardly be held up to the UK philosopher as a reason why her complaint is weak and she should be embarrassed about it.
Where I do agree with you is that “Not worth it” is being a bit cowardly here. There may indeed be significant professional backlash, but if you have tenure then your livelihood is not threatened. So, if you have integrity you must standup to that backlash and speak from your conscience. If this means that several woke colleagues will be nasty to you, that you will miss out on many professional invitations and accolades, and that some philosophers will say means things about you, so be it. Personal integrity is more important than these professional courtesies and perks.
Original “Not Worth It” here (just failed to save my original credentials–sorry JW!).
I cop to my behavior being cowardly. I have no problem with that assessment. I’m a sub-optimal person. (Just like everyone else here, I expect including JTD and Caia.)
At the same time, JTD is right: there are lots of consequences here besides losing my job. That said, I work at a university some parts of which have been captured by the same forces many of us are bemoaning here. So while I currently feel safe and secure in my job, I do not trust that this security would continue if the mob came after me–not even if it did so for demonstrably false reasons. And while Tuvel and Byrne are still employed, not everyone who has been targeted by the forces of cancellation is. It would be naive to ignore those consequences.
I have a request: please don’t presume to know me. While I am being cowardly, I also suffer from a fairly debilitating form of social anxiety disorder, which many times and for many reasons has left me feeling like it might be prudent of me to leave this profession that I love (and am pretty good at, I think) for less rewarding work in a back office, factory, or farm somewhere where I don’t have to deal with anyone at all, ever. For someone like me (who also cares about trans people and the oppression they face), being at the middle of a gender-related scandal could have led to disastrous consequences. Even a local, small-beans scandal with me at the center would set me back years or decades in my ongoing struggles to keep my grip on my chosen profession. Relatedly, I don’t know Tuvel personally, but I imagine what that experience was like was very difficult. (For me, it would have been an unmitigated disaster.) Not everyone who has interesting things to say and publishes those thoughts relishes the limelight, being the center of a newscycle, or the temptation of intellectual stardom. Many of us just want to do our work and go back to our lives.
With all that in mind, is it rational (all things considered, not just morally rational, so let’s not get too hung up on how courageous or cowardly many of us are) for me to write about gender? No. It’s not worth it, even though other people face much worse challenges elsewhere.
What would be worth it–what I thought was worth it when I wrote the now-chilled speech–would be to talk about difficult, controversial topics in an environment where I can rationally conclude that I could write words about gender without potentially being forced to wear a scarlet G all over town.
I’m not sure we have sufficient reasons to say the rejection is unjustified . First, it seems unlikely that the sentence “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way“ is the only objection the manuscript got. Probably this was further substantiated but not the the author’s satisfaction . I think the fact that the manuscript has a very long reference list does not imply that the manuscript treats the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful manner. There are values that are constitutive of good research and the referees might justifiably believe that this manuscript does not satisfy those values. Many manuscripts are rejected all the time. Also, OUP has published other books defending so-called “gender critical feminism”. So there is no general opposition to publish works defending those views.
I have written to Peter Momtchiloff, OUP’s (UK) Philosophy editor, about this – text below. I would encourage other OUP authors, especially those with enough seniority not to worry too much where they publish, to do likewise. I have a lot of respect for Peter and I’m hopeful he will listen to civil feedback on this matter.
—
Dear Peter,
I’m writing to express my very grave concern about the recent article by Alex Byrne (published in Quillette, linked to on Justin Weinberg’s and Brian Leiter’s blogs) about his recent experience with OUP, especially (but not only) the abrupt cancellation, apparently with essentially no explanation, of his contracted book, “Trouble with Gender”. (I won’t try to summarize further: the details are easy to find online and you probably know them already.)
Perhaps there is another side to the story. But at face value it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that OUP cancelled Byrne’s contracted book, outside the normal process of peer review and iterated feedback, because for whatever reason it does not want to be associated with a certain constellation of views on one side of the very heated debate on trans issues and trans rights.
I don’t think this is an academically defensible position for any university press to take, especially one as preeminent as OUP. I don’t think anyone in academia or academic publishing, whatever their position on the first-order issues, could think that the way Byrne (and, by his account, other authors) was treated is appropriate or acceptable. I don’t think progress on these difficult political-moral questions is well served by censorship, and I don’t think an academic press should countenance censorship even if it did serve some political goal.
I would be delighted to learn that this is some pure misunderstanding, or some transitory error of judgement that is now being put right. I have enormous respect as an author, reader, and partisan of Oxford for the service OUP provides for the academic community and especially for philosophy – but right now, and I really regret having to say this, I have serious doubts about continuing to publish with OUP.
Best wishes
David
PS I have made the text of this letter public, since I think it’s important that senior academics make public the strength of their feelings on the need to protect academic freedom. However, I will treat any reply you make as confidential.
**Thanks** for taking this step, David. I’ve written to Peter as well, letting him know that I endorse your concerns and that I hope OUP can at least be transparent about what happened.
If you have a lot of respect for Peter, why do you take at face value the report that he canceled the publication of the book with no explanation? Before encouraging others to engage in this letter writing campaign, did you do anything to attempt to substantiate the claim that the feedback matched his description of it? I don’t want to suggest that on a heated topic where one feels strongly one might not read negative referee reports of one’s book maximally charitably, but, there is, after all, a chance that the referees at OUP did have some reason not to publish his book, and you just aren’t privy to the evidence that would license that judgment, right?
“Perhaps there is another side to the story.”
“I would be delighted to learn that this is some pure misunderstanding, or some transitory error of judgement that is now being put right.”
It’s a chapter in a handbook, that everyone now knows will now not be published in that handbook, after a Twitter comment by an editor, and there is (at the very least) considerable confusion about why (and at most, one party claims that there is no good reason at all). Given this, and the lines I’ve quoted above, David Wallace’s letter seems perfectly respectful.
Sorry, to clarify, this is not about a chapter in a handbook, but about the book contract being terminated due to referee reports. David Wallace is encouraging a letter writing campaign about an editorial decision on the part of OUP, based on the background knowledge that the topic is controversial, and Alex Byrne’s self-report of the contents of the referee report. It would be one thing to simply send this email. But to encourage others to do so strikes me as having a fairly high degree of confidence that OUP has acted wrongly, and not that it is a simple misunderstanding, because this is not the correct way to address ordinary editorial decisions that are wrongly decided (or else, we’d have much better ways to ameliorate poor decision-making by editors, in general).
You’re absolutely right, my apologies. I had mixed up the subject of his letter with that of the other story mentioned in Justin’s post. I’ll leave my other comment up as evidence of my error.
Edit: undo your upvotes on my comment! Those upvotes are misinformed!
This is all Byrne says about the reasons for the cancellation of the contract: “A couple of weeks later, I heard that OUP would not be publishing Trouble with Gender either, for the sole reason that “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” No errors in the manuscript were identified and, as with the pronouns chapter, no revisions were allowed.” If he’s telling the truth, then letters of concern to OUP are justified, given the recent history with Lawford-Smith’s book, which provides the context for the Byrne book decision.
I agree that is all Byrne said about the reasons.
Because unless Alex Byrne is actually lying (in a way which will clearly be quickly identified and cause significant professional harm to him) then the way his book was handled was radically outside the norms of academic publishing. Byrne’s account implies that he received no detailed peer review commentary, but frankly even if he had, his treatment would be wildly outside academic-press norms. To enter into a contract with an author, normally after an original round of peer review, then to receive a draft of the manuscript, and then to simply reject it without any further dialog with the author? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
That, together with the other documented issues with OUP in the recent past (Holly Lawford-Smith’s travails, Alex Byrne’s other experiences, the bizarre ‘non-consensual co-publication’ thing), seem to me to create a reasonable prima facie case that this is not just an editorial-judgement issue but a violation of procedures and norms.
But, as I said in my email, maybe that’s not true and there’s some clearly exculpatory account that OUP can offer. If so, great, and I look forward to hearing it – but if so, the reputational harm to OUP is best addressed by swift transparency, and I don’t feel bad about trying to expedite that.
(Also, I made my letter public for the reasons I give in the letter itself: where there are serious chilling effects on academic freedom, I think senior academics ought to say so publicly and not keep quiet. Otherwise what is tenure for?)
Incidentally, I wrote to Peter Momtchiloff because he’s my editor at OUP UK, not because he’s necessarily the decision-maker in this particular case.
While I haven’t claimed Byrne is lying I really think a scenario worth considering is this one. Imagine I get what seems to me like a very weak referee report. The referee has misunderstood my core thesis, they aren’t reading me the slightest bit charitably, and they recommend rejection. The report has sentences in it saying why, but when I tell someone about it I say “they said to reject my paper for no reason!”. Now, maybe I am right and they didn’t have good reason because my paper was great. Maybe I am wrong and their report was sharp and incisive but I like my paper a lot and couldn’t see that. Maybe somewhere in between. None of those are cases where I am lying about what the report said! Byrne said the report said he didn’t engage substantively or seriously with the topic. He didn’t say that was all it said. Maybe he thinks the rest of what it said was piddling worthless minutiae. It’s hard to say because I haven’t read it!
Anyway, I’m glad I’m not your editor, since you have no idea if he’s remotely involved in the process and have invited a huge number of people to start emailing him about this!
“you have no idea if he [Peter Montchiloff] [i]s remotely involved in the process and have invited a huge number of people to start emailing him about this!”
It is totally normal to contact senior decision-making people in organizations to express concerns about how that organization is conducting itself. And since OUP serves and engages with a large philosophical community I really don’t see the issue with encouraging members of that community to communicate their concerns.
“ I’m glad I’m not your editor“.
The feeling is mutual!
“Byrne said the report said he didn’t engage substantively or seriously with the topic.”
No he didn’t. And he also said no errors were identified. Your hypothetical is inconsistent with Byrne’s testimony. What you are implying is that Byrne’s testimony is incomplete in a way that’s possibly misleading.
Maybe you are right, but it looks like pure speculation. And given the background facts (Lawford-Smith’s treatment), I think it’s far more plausible that OUP got cold feet than it is that Byrne is publicly misleading readers. Wallace’s letter, and others like it, might help shed some light on the matter.
Everyone keeps suggesting that in order for me to be skeptical of the stated conclusions about the basis for this decision, I have to call Byrne a liar. This is a fairly bizarre stance to me. In areas that are not politically controversial or heated at all, people frequently receive decisions of “reject” from editors which they could sincerely say identified no errors in their work, and didn’t offer any objections, etc. etc. etc. I just think it is a basic and common fact about publication related matters that people are not sympathetic readers of negative reports surrounding whether to publish their work. Does that mean that they are automatically wrong about the contents of those reports? Obviously not. It also doesn’t mean I have to be calling someone a liar to think that they may not have reported every single sentence of the communication they received, and gave their own judgment of the summary contents, which could well differ from my own, from the editor’s, from what other people would say.
You say it is pure speculation, but I think it is just a straightforward observation that, in general (and completely irrespective of how controversial the topic is) people frequently report situations like this a) with total sincerely, and b) in a way that does not do justice to the literal extent of the criticisms that were conveyed to them, because they do not judge those criticisms to have much merit. I think this point should be uncontroversial regardless of whether you think the person in question is apt to be right about the criticisms, if any, lacking merit.
What I said is that you are speculating about what is or is not in those reports, about which Byrne has said nothing. I didn’t accuse you of accusing Byrne of lying. There are at least two possible explanations for what everyone should agree is an unusual editorial decision (rejecting a book at such a late stage):
Which explanation is more plausible? I think it’s obviously 2, given what we know about OUP’s handling of Lawford-Smith’s book around the same time, the OUP staff complaints that book, the other open letter, etc.
You might think 1 is more plausible. If that’s the case, then you can either explain why you think that’s the case, or not. It doesn’t really matter what we think, and we won’t know more unless we get more information from OUP or Byrde.
I am not sure what is the right place to enter this conversation, but hope this is as good as any to offer a view on publishing from a former editor. I will try to touch on a few points raised in various places:
1) It is highly unusual for reasons, often extensive, not to be given for cancelling a contract. This is both out of courtesy and often due to contractual terms that require justification and give author an opportunity to revise. If the reasons are due to reviewers’ comments but the editor does not want to share the comments, they can be excerpted or paraphrased. Alternatively the editor can delete anything that identifies reviewer or that is offensive.
2) Any editor familiar with a field knows who is who and what opinions/view they have, as well as whether they will review “fairly”–meaning clearly stating their disagreement, indicating how the MS could be improved, etc. Editors (generally) know the difference between criticism intended to help make a MS stronger and criticism meant to undermine the MS. The latter typically is discounted.
3) No editor takes lightly the decision to cancel a contract. There are reputational costs, both internally and externally. Time and effort had been invested, without any payoff. And to do so is to admit, at least implicitly, an error of judgment at earlier stages, which is hard to do.
I don’t think that in a time of rampant anti-trans legislation, we can ethically play the “what about academic freedom” hand-wringing game anymore. To do so, as you are doing here, Justin, is not just doing a disservice to trans people, but a disservice to the profession at large, and to the very notion of academic freedom.
We have, and always had, standards for seriousness and good-faith. They exclude racist, antisemitic, homophobic theses, no matter how large a bibliography their proponents attach. This is not a conflict with academic freedom.
What is at stake here is not whether a work is “subpar” or “citing the literature” or written by someone with a fancy appointment at a fancy university and a track record of solid philosophy, but whether it is a good-faith, philosophically serious engagement. Therefore, I fail to see why appealing to one’s bibliography is a defence against an allegation of unseriousness (given that I don’t know Byrne’s manuscript I cannot see whether this applies here, naturally).
There is a serious and good-faith way to engage with the question “what is gender identity?”. It beings with the empirical fact that people have one. Then one can do some good ol’ philosophical analysis on what kind of thing a gender identity is, and what kind of bearing it has on ethics, society, etc. That’s what serious people working on this do, and they rarely are subject to any kind of backlash (from within the profession, at least).
The unserious, bad-faith way is to ask that question with the pre-set goal of deeming it an incoherent concept. It is well compatible with academic freedom to brand such works as unserious on these grounds and hence exclude them from our most prestigious venues. As said, I don’t know Byrne’s manuscript. But I can see how an editor might regard a manuscript (as a whole) as inherently unserious in this way. If this is the case here, then it would also not be surprising that a list of individual mistakes would not be provided.
So here’s then a “constructive suggestion for how to best think about, promote, and protect academic freedom:” those with the “controversial ideas” should begin by demonstrating good faith. Unfortunately, this is an uphill battle in this area.
First, because the matter of whether there is such a thing as gender identity is an empirical one, not to be settled by philosophy alone. So any work purporting to refute the existence of gender identities by philosophy alone is comparable to attempting to disprove the Copernican model by philosophy alone. Unserious.
Second, because some self-described “gender critical” scholars have allied themselves with the conservative forces that seek to push trans people out of public life. The suspicions of unseriousness this has engendered may be regrettable for good-faith scholars, but it is their burden to bear, and up to them to fix.
The problem is that, despite some efforts, I have not been successful in having such a good-faith debate with anyone who identifies as “gender critical”. All attempts to “reach out across the aisle”, as it were, are met with an outright eliminationist attitude towards trans people. The well is poisoned, and I don’t think trans people bear the blame for this. (This is not an accusation against Byrne or anyone else mentioned by Justin, with whom I had no interactions; this is to support my point about the uphill battle).
There is readiness to discuss, e.g., how the sincerity of a self-identification as a particular gender is to be assessed, as long as it proceeds from a good-faith agreement that people who self-identify should not be put under a blanket suspicion. There is readiness to discuss, e.g., how access to gendered spaces is policed, as long as it proceeds from a good-faith agreement that the matter is more subtle than chromosomes, gametes, or genitals.
It is quite obvious that trans people are willing to have such debates about policy in good faith. Nobody wants bad actors to abuse self-id laws; trans women want save gendered spaces as much as cis women.
Justin has kindly allowed me to comment this anonymously given my precarious position in the profession, but not to name examples any individual actors who has demonstrated lack of seriousness or good-faith. So I won’t be able to answer any challenges of that kind.
“There is a serious and good-faith way to engage with the question “what is gender identity?”. It beings with the empirical fact that people have one… The unserious, bad-faith way is to ask that question with the pre-set goal of deeming it an incoherent concept. It is well compatible with academic freedom to brand such works as unserious on these grounds”
Concepts that have been deemed incoherent in well-respected works of philosophy have included (inter alia) free will, chance, morality, qualia, the passage of time, God, and the external world. It’s not obvious why gender identity uniquely is presumptively immune from that criticism.
None of the ones you have listed concern empirical matters, whence the difference.
Almost all of them do. The case of qualia in particular is almost perfectly analogous. (I don’t think even the most hardline eliminative materialist or Dennettian thinks that David Chalmers is *lying* when he states that he has an irreducible experience of redness that can’t be reduced to his behavioral dispositions.)
Here’s two empirical facts, not to be refuted by conceptual analysis: people have introspective experience of redness; people have introspective experience of their gender identity.
Here’s conceptual analyses, to be refuted by further conceptual analysis: such introspective experiences are reducible, dispositional, innate, learned, …
If someone argues that “qualia do not exist” (e.g. by naturalistically refuting irreducibility) in order to conclude that regular people who experience redness are mentally ill and that we should eliminate appeals to redness from public life — then they are engaging in exactly the kind of fallacy that I am pointing out above.
I’m absolutely not going to get into a conversation on gender identity, but on redness, this is just false as a matter of philosophy of mind. It’s an empirical fact that (some) people utter the sentence “I have introspective experience of redness.” But any number of serious philosophers have thought that they are mistaken, or conflating theory with experience, or in the thrall of a confused folk psychology, or…
I mean, you can think all of this is wrong. But it is absolutely mainstream, legit philosophy of mind. Read Dennett on heterophenomenology; read Wittgenstein on private language, come to that.
I don’t know how I can convey to you, at this point, the difference between data and theory.
Introspection and experience are sources of data for philosophers. There are experiences we refer to by color terms. That’s data. This is undisputed.
If you have a theory that involves theoretical entities you call qualia, or properties, or “redness”, Platonic ideals, immortal souls etc. and you conclude on theoretical grounds that these entities do not exist — that’s all good. But the data remains.
And must note that you ignored my final point — whatever these theoretical conclusions, they have no bearing on we treat the people having the experiences.
I think I’ve run out of polite synonyms for “this is all badly confused about 20th century philosophy of mind” so I won’t try further.
Here’s another fact, as empirical as the ones you offer: people have introspective experience of God. Yet one can argue that the concept of God is incoherent. BTW it seems you are as well misunderstanding what is “empirical.” What is only incontrovertibly empirical is that people *claim* to have introspective experiences. See the “other minds” problem.
I might strengthen it to “sincerely claim”, but otherwise: yes,exactly.
Gender scepticism is hardly proof of bad faith or lack of seriousness; indeed, such scepticism was the norm in second-wave feminism. It is a fact that some people think they have a gender identity, but it is not a fact that any such views are true.
“This was a widespread view in the past, therefore we must take it seriously today” is a fallacy if there ever was one.
That is a fallacy, but is not what I said or even suggested. My claim was that gender scepticism used to be the norm in feminism without any accusation of bad faith. I’m unsure what has supposed to have occurred in the interim to make the position beyond the pale. I’d suggest that such scepticism remains the norm outside of ideologically committed circles.
It’s called “social progress”, I don’t really know what to tell you.
What was the norm in second wave feminism? You aren’t very clear, here.
It was not the norm to conflate sex assigned at birth with gender. Most second wave feminism, with the exception of those who intentionally included transgender people, can be read as compatible with a rejection of the biological essentialism that the Gender Critical movement generally falls into.
The norm was to view gender and sex stereotypes as non-natural, essentially coercive, and so structures to be overthrown (think Marx on the ‘naturalness’ of social inequality). You are obviously right to suggest that this incorporated a rejection of essentialism but only primarily with respect to the stereotypes, not typically to the extent of speculating about biology, which is now all too common. I think the relation of the current disagreements to this SW position is complex. For example, GC people tend to row back a bit on what is merely stereotypical, but I would hardly call them essentialists – ‘naturalists’ would be a better term (in these debates ‘essentialism’ is too overdetermined to be useful). Equally, the charge from the GC side against many current feminists, and this is the pertinent point, is that they treat gender as not mostly or merely stereotypical. So, I think it would be fair to say that SW feminists were gender sceptical in the sense of treating gender as a set of stereotypes or expectations that can and should be overthrown, and this they share with GC types. My point above was not to take sides, but merely to point to this heritage, and note that five minutes ago no-one would have thought that gender scepticism was non-serious or obviously in bad faith.
This is a nice illustration of the very problem at issue. Certain substantive views are dismissed without argument as “unserious”; questions are begged (“it is an empirical fact that people have [a gender identity]”–this is a contentious claim, as anyone who has looked at the empirical literature knows–e.g., the brain studies and attendant questions about what they do or don’t show, the problem of controlling for sexual orientation in these studies, etc. It is of course an empirical fact that people claim to have a gender identity, though there is nothing close to a consensus view on the nature of what it is they are claiming to have, and it is also an empirical fact that there are people who deny having one); claims are advanced about “eliminationist” rhetoric; criticisms that amount to nothing more than guilt by association (“gender critical scholars have allied themselves with conservative forces”); vague but negative insinuations based entirely on speculation about the contents of a book that admittedly hasn’t been read; “good faith” is construed in a manner that by definition excludes the very viewpoints for which people are arguing; etc.
I agree that this exchange is a nice illustration of the problem.
We can agree that certain research questions are beyond the pale. We can also agree that certain research methodologies are unserious. We only disagree on whether a particular type of question and/or a particular methodology is beyond the pale.
The only response of the GCs to this situation is to cry foul, accuse people of “cancelling”, of being ideological etc. This isn’t working very well, and GCs should note that the same strategies are well available to people who have no interest in good faith argument at all. So they have to do better than to cry foul in sympathetic media. Show that they actually are engaged in serious philosophy.
Whether or not the GC view is beyond the pale is an assumption that could be the substantive matter of a debate. That debate is not aided (or even gotten off the ground) by anything GCs have been doing to this point. Nothing so far has demonstrated good faith.
As for guilt by association: If I’d see my view and work being used to support policies that hurt and marginalize a group of vulnerable people, I’d be VERY concerned. And if I’d not at least distance myself from it, I would not be surprised if people questioned my motives. I thought we had moved past the idea that academics can absolve themselves from moral responsibility by claiming “I’m just doing the research, I have nothing to do with how people use it.” Actions one takes in the course of research are not magically exempt from being morally assessed.
“So they [gender critical philosophers] have to do better than to cry foul in sympathetic media. Show that they actually are engaged in serious philosophy”
I find this genuinely puzzling.
Presumably, one way they can do this is by publishing their views and arguments. And the whole point of Byrne’s essay is to show what happens when they try to do so. The same thing happened to Holly Lawford-Smith (Byrne discusses this case) when she did exactly what any serious academic should do–develop views and arguments and publish them with a reputable press.
Scholars have been deplatformed; norms have been invented to exclude them (e.g, “non-consensual co-platforming”); editors are demanding additional and unprecendented review at very late stages of the publication process and, evidently if Byrne is to be believed, sometimes reneging on the contract; a post-doc in the UK (non-philosophy) was recently fired and had her data taken away from her; there are many other examples.
So I find it genuinely puzzling when you suggest that GC scholars aren’t doing exactly what one would expect they do, as scholars, to get their views disseminated for engagement in the wider academic community. The problem isn’t that they aren’t doing philosophy. The problem is that they are being prevented from doing philosophy on the kind of question-begging grounds you set out in your longer comment above.
As I said, today the well is poisoned. But a few years ago, there’d been space to react to accusations of one’s work being beyond the pale by engaging in an argument over the matter (whether it is indeed beyond the pale), rather than by doing the “I have been cancelled” media tour.
We, as a field, don’t negotiate what we publish through op-eds in the tabloids.
If you want to stand up for a position that is regarded as amoral by your peers, you have to be ready to defend against that charge. As said, taking up “cancel culture” rhetoric is not a good-faith way of doing it. If for no other reason, then that this rhetoric is equally available to (and often actively pursued by) people with views who are unquestionably beyond the pale. And we as a field OUGHT to be resistant to this rhetoric for this very reason.
Historically, GCs (even before they even called themselves that) reacted to *any* critical engagement with their view (e.g. on this very website) by whining on every outlet that they’re unfairly targeted. This often involved vast misrepresentations of how they had been critiqued.
If that means that today nobody wants to have this debate anymore, because there’s no expectation of good faith — I can hardly feel sorry. Today, work needs to be done to reestablish a presumption of good faith.
If you are interested in assessing the quality of people’s will, that’s fine, I suppose, but it will be challenging to get access to people’s inner states. I think as a profession we should be interested in assessing arguments. Maybe I’m old fashioned.
I suppose, then, that you do not agree that certain theses are beyond the pale. Everything is fair game. You’d be willing to give a fair shot to a well-argued book in favor of slavery, I take it.
I’m not old-fashioned enough for this.
Some philosopher writes (in your words) a “well-argued book in favor of slavery”; the manuscript is sent out to reviewers with the relevant expertise; reviewers raise the usual objections, make the usual suggestions, call for the usual clarifications. Case 1: they recommend the book not be published because it doesn’t satisfy the relevant scholarly demands. End of story.
Case 2: reviewers recommend the book be published; the publisher agrees and the contract is signed; the author polishes the book; the book is published. Various other people then publish objections to the arguments set out in the book. Maybe some of these objections are decisive. Maybe others lead to further argument. Other people choose to ignore the book. Yet others don’t read the book but make assumptions about its content and complain on Twitter or on Daily Nous that the book is “beyond the pale.”
This is the way it should work if we are at all serious about academic freedom.
The alternative is to do exactly what your friends in Florida are doing, namely, to rule out/ban entire categories of theses due to the purported harm they cause, or their being “beyond the pale” on other grounds. Harm to heteronormative families, harm to the reputation of this great, freedom-loving country of ours, harm to God, or whatever. DeSantis has views on what’s “beyond the pale,” too. This is nothing but rule by the powerful.
This is free speech/academic freedom 101.
Since we’re mentioning Florida and academic freedom, I’d just like to note that, regardless of one’s first-order views, now is an excellent time to be principled about academic freedom. I have not read Byrne’s paper, I suspect I might disagree with at least parts of it, but that is irrelevant. I am, however, in the crosshairs of DeSantis’s attacks on academic freedom, free speech, tenure, women, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants, and the rights of felons, among other charming moral panics.
You don’t want to entrench tools or norms—such as locating certain ideas beyond the pale on the basis of flimsy evidence of harm—if such tools or norms could be used by your opponents. Always ask yourself if you’d tolerate a restriction being used by your worst enemy because, once they are in power, they will use it against you.
I wish we’d made it harder, not easier, for the likes of DeSantis to restrict speech. Unfortunately, many of us have planted the seeds of very bad ideas in the minds of ill-intentioned people—speaking of harmful ideas.
Again, none of that implies an endorsement of Byrne’s views. I happen to find a lot of gender-critical arguments needlessly offensive and conservative. But I also just taught Mill’s On Liberty and, in a context in which my governor and administration are effectively on track to censor what and how I teach, I found his arguments a lot more attractive than I would have if I were the one in power.
Be safe, everybody.
“Now is an excellent time to be principled about academic freedom.”
I totally get your point, and agree, but this line got a chuckle out of me. Like, “I’m not principled about being principled about academic freedom, so—now that the time is right, but not other times—I’ll be principled about academic freedom.”
That’s obviously not what I meant. Now is the time to show that you are in fact principled, not opportunistic, about academic freedom, or to form a firm commitment to it in case you didn’t have one already. It was poorly phrased, but you totally got the point.
Sorry, let me clarify. Your point was not poorly phrased at all. I just found it funny that there was an ironic misreading of your claim. My comment was meant as lighthearted; I know that you obviously didn’t mean what I said above.
I do think it was not ideally phrased, but thanks! And LOL.
I found his arguments a lot more attractive than I would have if I were the one in power.
Well Said, Nicolas.
Or, you know, Case 0. Aka what actually happens in such cases:
The editor desk-rejects the paper or book for obviously being without merit, and that’s the end of it.
Here’s a real example that might fit the scenario. (Or maybe you’d not agree with that – that’s also interesting to know.) Some time ago I refereed an article for a journal (I forget which one now – I referee a lot!) that argued that family based migration rights should be extended to polygamous marriages when the people in question were from countries that allow such marriages. I noted in my comments that it seemed to me that the argument as set out would also justify or even require recognizing child marriages in cases where those were recognized by the country the people came from, and said that the author should either show why this wasn’t so, or explain why we should bite the bullet on this point. But, I thought the article was otherwise good (even though I disagreed with the conclusion) and so wanted the author to get to address the point. The editor, however, said that he or she agreed with me that the argument would extend to child marriage, and that because this was obviously immoral, the paper should be rejected. That seemed wrong to me. Do you think something like that was wrong? Or does this not fit the cases you’re interested in.
I’m not sure why I am attributed the view that work with bad moral consequences ought not be published. If so, I should deem most of ethics to be unpublishable.
I’ve advocated that work with the bad moral consequences requires, for that reason, additional scrutiny. And this scrutiny extends to the question of whether the author is making a serious philosophical argument in good faith. (As opposed to making a bad-faith argument towards political ends that are external to philosophy.) I cannot guess what the outcome of this would be in your particular case.
To stress, I am not accusing Byrne of anything. I highlighted in my initial post that the moral circumstances of this case license the application of such scrutiny, and that if his book (which none of us have read) failed the scrutiny, it would explain all his complaints.
I took this statement to mean that there were some positions you thought were obviously morally wrong, or perhaps would have such bad consequences, and so should be rejected for that reason:
I suppose, then, that you do not agree that certain theses are beyond the pale. Everything is fair game. You’d be willing to give a fair shot to a well-argued book in favor of slavery, I take it.
I’m not old-fashioned enough for this.
I’m sorry if I’d misread you on that, but I guess I’m not completely sure what position you’re arguing for. I agree that, if we think someone is making a bad faith argument, that might be reason to reject it, but I think there won’t be that many clear cases of this.
I think I just gave you the position I am arguing for. Morally fraught work must pass special scrutiny, including an assessment of seriousness and good faith. GC work faces an uphill battle to pass such scrutiny, for reasons I gave multiple times, but am happy to repeat: an overt alliance with the aggressor-side in a violent culture war, a history of not even acknowledging the moral fraughtness of their work, and the refusal to acknowledge the objective, lived reality of trans people.
As for where you quote me: I believe we are on the save side if we give a blanket assessment of bad faith to any work that advocates for the reinstitution of slavery.
If someone sincerely and seriously, motivated by a ~* sheer love of truth and the desire to see where an argument leads them *~, wants to get their pro-slavery arguments published — well, then I hope we can all agree that they need to do a lot of additional work to convince us of their good faith. And I am not entirely sure they ever could.
I’d guess that my position is that certain views are going to be very hard to argue for, given the assumptions I’d be willing to make. (I have in mind here things like supposed biblical or theological justifications for slavery, or claims about “rights of conquest” or the like.) Of course, some libertarians have argued that some forms of slavery can be justified, but it seems to me that the problem is that those areguments are not very good, not that they are made in bad faith or are wicked. (And, they would not plausibly justify slavery as was practiced in the US, either.) These considerations seem to me to solve most of the issues we might have here, without having to place special burdens on people to establish good faith or the like.
I mean, I also think that most GC work is rather shoddily argued, so I would be delighted if we could rely on the general standards of peer review to sort this out. Unfortunately, I think this is rather naive.
For one, because our peer review practices aren’t very reliable. For two, because there’s many avenues to publication that are subject to typically even less rigorous examination (invited contributions to collections, proceedings, or special issues; monographs).
I don’t think it is a coincidence that most “gender critical” work appears in such venues; nor that the present case concerns such venues. I won’t engage in any argument whether this is due to unfair anti-GC bias in the journal system, or due to the lacking quality of GC work; you know my opinion, and this isn’t the space for a substantive debate on the merits of GC arguments. My point is that regardless of the merit of GC arguments, their moral fraughtness merits special scrutiny, because moral fraughtness in general merits special scrutiny.
For, given the unreliability of peer review, I think it is reckless to ignore the possibility of bad faith. We can easily imagine a bad actor publishing a superficially well written but in substance poorly argued paper in favor of the reintroduction of slavery, with callous disregard for the people who may not appreciate having their human dignity being the subject of a public debate; with callous disregard for the members of the profession who may be alienated by their peers arguing that their human dignity ought to be up for discussion on grounds of academic freedom; and indeed with callous disregard for how this whole affair will blight our entire profession in the process.
For slavery this might seem borderline absurd. But for matters that are just slightly less abhorrent, it is easily possible and sometimes has in fact happened. We owe it to ourselves, our profession, its members, and society at large to have proper wards against this.
Indeed, if in the actual case you earlier relayed to me, the editor had a reasonable suspicion that something like this might be the case here, I’m with the editor. But I can’t know the details.
Before someone gets mad, I am not saying that GC arguments are morally on a par with arguing for the reintroduction of slavery.
Indeed, if in the actual case you earlier relayed to me, the editor had a reasonable suspicion that something like this might be the case here, I’m with the editor. But I can’t know the details.
You think that we should worry that, even maybe, someone wrote a paper on polygamy and family marriage so as to make a back-door argument, that wasn’t at all made, in favor of immigration benefits for child marriage? I mean, do you think that’s something that an editor should consider? I ask because it seems absurd to me. I am not sure why you are as confident about the “bad faith” of various people as you seem to be, but I want to suggest that this might be something you should re-think.
The way you describe your case, it does sound quite milquetoast indeed, and it’s very possible the editor overshot the goal. But, again, I don’t know it, and I have to take your word for it.
Regardless, I think I have made the case that moral fraughtness merits additional scrutiny.
“If I’d see my view and work being used to support policies that hurt and marginalize a group of vulnerable people, I’d be VERY concerned.” First, pretty much any work can be so used…Second, depends on whether or not you care about people who are marginalized, no? Plenty of groups feel and claim to be marginalized by pro trans/woke ideology,.but I have not seen anyone give a damn about that from those group – in fact, the reply is “even better”. So it’s a bit hard to sympathize, esp. when the ideology is now the power that be in most academic circles…
If “the ideology” (whatever it is) is presently “the power that be in most academic circles”, the situation is quite the opposite in many US state legislatures. Hundreds of anti-trans bills were introduced in 2023 and many will become law. Many parents will have to decide whether they can or should move to another state to protect their child. In Missouri and Florida, among others, trans adults may not be able to live there and continue to receive health care. The same legislators supporting these restrictions are supporting restrictions on what educators can teach. A conversation about broader attacks on academic freedom should take this context into account as well. “GC” views, and the essays in popular newspapers or periodicals that cite them, are in turn cited by these legislators and their political allies.
This is in no way an argument for censoring views, nor an evaluation of which ones are better. The point is that we should not assume forces opposing academic freedom exist only on one side of this issue, and we should take seriously that the loss of basic rights Is the present context of discussion.
“If I’d see my view and work being used to support policies that hurt and marginalize a group of vulnerable people, I’d be VERY concerned.”
I am glad that you are concerned about the consequences your view has for women.
I am. And I can say with absolute certainty that my work has never been used to rile up a moral panic that has resulted in violence against gender-nonconforming people (cis and trans); bomb threats against hospitals; legislation to abridge healthcare; subjected intersex athletes to abuse and invasive exams; or given succor to anti-abortionist movements.
Can you?
I have no control over whether a violent maniac making a bomb threat writes some kind of manifesto that cites my research. Or to take a less extreme case, nor do I have direct control over whether a Republican legislator cites my research. I’m pretty sure that there is nothing in my research that–if rationally interpreted–would be justify the actions of a violent maniac or even a Republican legislator, but research can always be misinterpreted. Or perhaps one day I will publish an article that says that males should compete on the men’s sports teams, and a Republican will read it. That would be fine with me.
I do have control over whether I am directly arguing for policies that harm women. If I argue that males who are convicted of violent crimes should be housed in female prisons, then I am responsible for making that argument, and I should be careful that I am not arguing for something that is morally wrong.
So you are not concerned about the consequences of your work, gotcha
One consequence of the view that trans women are female is the conclusion that trans women ought to compete on the female sports team. I am concerned about consequences of views like that.
I am also concerned about what happens when people’s views are misinterpreted, but that kind of consequence is not something we can control. The possibility that one’s view can be misinterpreted, twisted, or misused by bad actors is not a strong reason to refrain from stating the view.
As a matter of fact, I think that prisons and sports teams are paradigmatic cases where a policy debate can be had in good faith.
Women’s sports already impose restrictions related to hormone levels also on cis women. Trans women are naturally subject to the same restrictions. We could be looking into whether given the new situation (that is, trans women who are competing) these restrictions are in need of revision.
Prisons are a good case where, on a case by case basis, something more than self-id might be called for.
But it is plain to me that GC people are unwilling to have these policy debates in good faith. This has become VERY clear when trans women in prisons were discussed in Scotland earlier this year. There was already a case-by-case determination system in place, but instead of looking for improvements to that system, the GC position was entirely destructive.
I wrote a reply to this, but I guess it wasn’t approved, and I’m happy to just be quiet now. But I wasn’t ignoring you.
Let me make just one more clarification. I work in applied ethics, so I have a habit of using modus tollens to test out various moral principles–I tend to think that if a moral principle or theory logically implies something immoral, this is some evidence that that view is false. That’s the main sense in which I am concerned about the logical consequences of various views.
That’s different from arguing that if a view has certain practical consequences, it should be censored. That is not the argument I am making. I am opposed to censoring a view on the grounds that bad actors could appeal to the view to justify their bad actions.
So my point is not actually that relevant to the present discussion, since the discussion is about whether certain views should be censored, and not about whether the views in question are true.
It’s funny you should mention bomb threats. At Pitt we just this evening had a controversial event involving a debate about trans rights. There was a big protest crowd, which is fine, but also someone seems to have set off an incendiary device outside the building it was happening, which is not.
I don’t blame the peaceful academic critics of trans-critical thinkers. I don’t even blame the protestors. But it’s false to say that one side in this debate has a monopoly on “allies” who go beyond their peacefully-expressed views into violence.
I agree that this is unacceptable of course, and have often urged my own students to *peaceful* protest.
But I don’t see major queer scholars supporting violence. I do see major GC “scholars” actively and explicitly supporting the alt-right pundits who are whipping up the moral panic.
“I agree that this is unacceptable of course“.
To be clear, I would never have thought that you believed otherwise.
I don’t normally debate the first-order issues of trans politics here (as opposed to the academic-freedom issues) but the incendiary device this evening was a bit shocking.
Understandable. It is shocking that such things are happening now.
Without meaning to accord blame, it is a stark reminder that it is not *just* academic freedom that is at stake, but that there are real-world implications and consequences of what we are doing.
On your view, should anti-gender-critical scholarship be rejected on the grounds that some people have or might again set off incendiary devices at protests? I think this would be a strange thing to propose, and I would strongly oppose any measures to limit academic freedom on these grounds, but it seems to be entailed by what you’ve said about gender-critical views.
Somewhere long up this comment chain I responded to your point about “guilt by association”. I believe this wasn’t about publication per se, but about the moral character of the people involved.
I am, personally, very disturbed by the ends-justify-the-means attitude of major GC figures. They openly and explicitly give support to major alt-right personalities stoking the culture war. Abortion rights, public safety of gender non-conforming people, both cis and trans people’s access to care, all are acceptable collateral damages of the project to “morally mandate trans people out of existence” or whatever the polite phrase is these days.
Any critique of this is met with wails of “guilt by association”, as if this was the issue — and not guilt by overt support.
I have not, ever, seen a trans positive feminist display similar callousness.
It is very clear who is waging a war on whom here (alt right on queer people). It is also clear who is supporting the aggressor.
If you want to make this about publication ethics then, sure, I think this means that it is incumbent on GC people, more than trans positive scholars, to exercise particular scrutiny regarding the consequences of their scholarship; and incumbent on editors to likewise exercise such scrutiny.
I think I now better understand On the Market’s position. You don’t want to restrict the academic freedom of GCs because you think having their ideas in print is dangerous. You agree that it is silly to worry about the dangers of Matt Walsh reading Philosophical Studies.
Instead, you want to restrict the academic freedom of GCs because adding a new publication to one’s CV increases a person’s prestige. You are worried that if the profession confers more prestige or status onto GCs, then GCs will gain more power. Is that the view?
I am puzzled by this “better understanding”. If you go back up to what I originally said, you’ll find the following:
First, the observation that we have professional norms about serious and good-faith engagement, and that if an editor finds these norms violated, this merits intervention of just the type we are seeing here, without constituting a violation of academic freedom.
So, as far as I am concerned, there is no evidence that anything went wrong here at all. But apparently the very thought is anathema to some people here.
Sure, I don’t know whether this is the case for Byrne’s book, it is speculation. But everyone else here is speculating; David Wallace is so confident in his speculation that leads him to conclude the opposite (that something did go wrong), he sent an email to the editor!
Second, the claim that GC scholars need to take action to demonstrate seriousness and good-faith because their research is suspect in virtue of their own peers actions. The vast, vast majority of philosophy, I suppose, can be published under a presumption of good faith. But GCs have lost the privilege of being presumed to act in good faith.
That led us down to this whole “guilt by association” rabbit hole, which for the record, is a smokescreen. The charge isn’t coincidental association, but active and willing support. As I said, my conscience is clear, but I can’t absolve you of yours.
I any case, at no point did I say that morally fraught work ought not to be published, or that anyone’s academic freedom is to be restricted.
I said that morally fraught work deserves special scrutiny. That scrutiny, by itself, is not in contradiction to academic freedom, but in fact a vital norm that allows us to uphold academic freedom. Because this freedom is a privilege we can only retain if we use it responsibly.
For someone who goes on and on about “the well being poisoned,” this line above is just risible. We better get the pyres going and throw Marx on there, since no doubt he riled up a good many massacres. Bible and Quran have to go of course for all their violence-promoting. Better update our index librorum prohibitorum with the new texts that blaspheme against the gender nonconforming religion.
Is there any evidence that these heretical academic texts by Byrne et al have directly led to bomb threats and violence? Are shooters walking around with dog-eared copies of Philosophical Studies? Here’s an alternative just-so story: in fact, it’s the the work that Byrne et al are responding to that is actually responsible for violence; for you see, the views in “non gender critical” papers percolate down to disturbed people who find these new views strange and upsetting and it leads them to respond in aggressive ways. The work of Byrne et al actually serves to mediate this aggressive response by providing people with a sense of familiarity, which quiets their need to respond with aggression. And the more the views of Byrne et al are suppressed and snidely ignored, the worse the aggression gets.
What? You don’t find that a well-supported theory? I’d say it’s as well as supported as the notion that Byrne’s work is leading to bomb threats.
Three weeks ago, students at a protest at Purdue hung a big banner for all to see that said “Transphonic? Kill yourself.” But you are sure, with “absolute certainty,” exactly what work leads to disturbing behavior or violent outcomes. Right.
We would indeed merely be trading just-so stories, if it weren’t the case that many major GC people are in openly declared alliances with the right-wing pundits who are stoking the violent and incendiary culture war.
My story isn’t just-so, I’m afraid.
Has Byrne declared such an alliance?
Why do you ask?
Either it is obvious why I ask or I have not understood your point by mentioning the fact that what you call “GC people” are openly in an alliance with right-wing pundits.
Could you explain?
I am making a general point about the area to which Byrne contributes. The point stands regardless of his individual actions. Hence my confusion about why you ask about him personally.
I still don’t understand your point.
There are some bad-faith actors in this area, and therefore we should assume that Byrne is too, and treat him accordingly. And what follows from that, that we should make sure that his books are not published?
One reason for caution is that, if you are talking about a particular social group you don’t belong to, and almost all members of that group vehemently object to your claims, particularly those who are also researchers, with longer expertise on this topic, and offer arguments against them continually which you don’t adequately address, it’s possible you have failed to understand something.
But there wasn’t much concern from some researchers about this, and historically it led to some very poor research on women, Black people, indigenous people, LGBT people, etc. So yours is a very good point, and not unconnected to the quality of the research.
One can certainly question the point of particular research interests without it merely being a question of hostility to open discussion of controversial claims. There’s no way for this kind of controversial research to be entirely objective and neutral because no research is, entirely..
Research that cannot be ‘recalled’ by being disproven because it is useful to specific political factions seeking to depict groups in a way that is socially harmful or undermine various public policy is sometimes subject to heightened scrutiny. E.g., when people made claims about causes of autism or climate change, this had lasting effects. The research was bad, but once it was out there, showing it was bad didn’t make much of a dent on the effects.
So now people doing research which could have that impact face a higher bar for how good their research is because it is clearer what is at stake, and how that research can be used, no matter how bad it is.
Why shouldn’t research with potential for this impact be subject to a higher level of scrutiny, given its likely effects on people’s lives and the fact it is widely criticized by people who are more centrally in this area of study?
Gender Critical research is almost exclusively utilized by people opposed to various rights of transgender people. How is that irrelevant to how the research is received when the impact is lasting even if the research is later disproven?
For a while, research about transgender people wasn’t making a huge difference because there wasn’t a large political movement opposed to their rights–they already had some rights (which they have now lost in some places). They lost these rights partly as a result of the gender critical movement.
Now there are different stakes so people approach this research differently, subjecting it to more scrutiny.
This is normal though. It’s happened in many other fields such as medicine, anthropology, sociology and psychology for many different reasons. It wasn’t destructive of progress in those fields.
Perhaps Professor Byrne’s work is better than the other work which preceded it. Nevertheless, now that people know about its possible effects, they are more demanding of its quality.
It just seems quixotic to claim we should ignore the context wherein research is received, and treat all research the same.
This is exactly right. I actually cannot believe academic philosophers are still having this conversation in 2023, given everything that has happened over the past two years. A very vocal and very aggrieved set of academics want to use their publications to tell a small and threatened minority — the object of over 450 attempts at punitive legislation in the US — that they don’t exist, that their experiences aren’t real, that they have no right to make their claims on us, and that they are at best a quirky case to be thought-experimented upon. I have nothing but contempt for the “gender critical” academics and that is the attitude I would urge everyone else to adopt as well. Good riddance.
Could you please just quote the passage where Byrne tells the threatened minority that they don’t exist?
Thanks!
I have never seen any philosophers (of the ones usually mentioned in these discussions) make any of these claims. What are you talking about?
Wow. It’s one thing to abhor a view but to say you have contempt for the individuals is quite concerning. It also contributes to the “chill” and is part of the reason precarious philosophers don’t speak up. I know you won’t see that as a problem (since they are “contemptible”) but hopefully others will recognise the problem.
“There is a serious and good-faith way to engage with the question “what is gender identity?”. It beings with the empirical fact that people have one.”
(empirical) citation needed.
This is one of the basic things at issue. Why can “gender identity” not be transparent to “feeling drawn to a certain set of gendered expectations?” Many people testify to having no distinct sense of “gender identity” just as many people say it is the defining thing about them. It’s not “good faith” to ignore this disagreement.
The existence of gender identities is not seriously disputed in the empirical science that studies it, psychology.
If anyone else wants to dispute any other robust empirical result, we’d expect them to present very robust, very carefully gathered, empirical evidence.
If someone would try to, say, refute the Copernican model not by astronomical data, but by *conceptual analysis* of the word “sun”, we’d be flabbergasted at the audacity.
That is how flabbergasted I am at GC scholarship. Even more flabbergasted at how many are falling for it.
I’d be interested in how they define “gender identity” for the purpose of asking people if they have one.
I generally find the arrogant presumptiveness of some philosophers, that our skill at conceptual analysis gives us license to insert ourselves in any scholarly debate whatsoever, quite repulsive.
I’ve looked into this in some detail for my own research and I can tell you that conceptually it’s a disaster.
“The existence of gender identities is not seriously disputed in the empirical science that studies it, psychology.”
On The Market, are you aware of the intense pressures (including widespread public denunciations and shaming, calls (often successful) for firing, death threats, online attacks on vulnerable familiy members, etc.) faced by psychologists who have dared to question the new ‘consensus’? Are you not aware of the fact that many researchers in psychology and other relevant social scientists have lost or abandoned promising careers to avoid these attacks? What seems to be happening at OUP is just another, perhaps even milder manifestation of what is happening throughout the social sciences.
A wide number of books, like Helen Joyce’s _Trans_ and Alice Dreger’s _Galileo’s Middle Finger_, discuss in some depth the vicious attacks on figures like Michael Bailey (whose character was run down on the basis of terrible falsehoods about himself and his family) and many others.
A 2017 BBC documentary, _Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?_, discussed cases like the outsting of the eminent Canadian psychologist, Kenneth Zucker, from the leading gender identity clinic in that country when radical activists ascended to power and falsely smeared him in 2015. That program was not in fact aired on the BBC because transgender activists exerted pressure against the public’s seeing it and deciding the matter for themselves, but at least it was set to be aired in Canada, so that Canadian citizens could make an informed decision about this transformation — until the CBC caved in the face of radical activists there, too, and pulled the show. (You can watch it online if you’re interested).
I could go on about this with more and more instances… but here’s my point. Whether the new gender identity viewpoint is accurate or inaccurate, it’s very clear that the social sciences, including clinical psychology, are rife with terrible intimidation on this very point. Any reasonable scholar or practitioner who considers questioning what has suddenly become the mainstream view will be well aware of significant and probably permanent risks for doing so.
One might of course admit that this sort of intimidation is widespread, and yet take the position that that level of pressure is salutary for this or that reason, since anyone who raises any doubts about the radical gender identity view is wrong and dangerous. But I don’t see how any informed person could deny that the pressure _exists_, or that pressure of that sort makes it unreasonable to treat the ensuing consensus as good evidence of anything.
Thanks for bringing attention to this, Justin. Part of the reason I’m not inclined to speak up on these matters anymore is that I have friends in the social sciences who have been victimized by just these attacks (death threats, calls for cancellation of various forms, harrassment, etc.), and I have people in my university who are similarly intolerant. And let’s not mince words here: I’d argue that a social scientist friend of mine has done as much as anyone to advance the cause of trans people–and who without question knows all the arguments for the inclusive stance and is themselves on the inclusive side of that debate–and still that’s not enough for those who aim to take my friend down through destructive methods.
When it comes to silencing unapproved speech through drastic measures, it’s not just philosophy, we can all see that it’s not just philosophy, and it’s bad both inside and outside philosophy.
I’m glad you bring up Dreger on Bailey, it is actually a good case for the incredible credulousness with which claims of censorship are assessed here.
Dreger cried wolf about the supposed suppression of Bailey’s allegedly fine research, but have you actually looked at his book? It is *laughable*. Not just on moral grounds or on grounds of being anti-trans. It is just very, very bad. For a brief case in point, cf Christa’s reporting https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1617955358483550208
Someone published junk science, got criticized, someone wrote a misleading account of the criticism… all you all fell for it.
Helen Joyce’s “trans” makes anyone remotely familiar with the psychology or philosophy of gender want to put their head through a fucking table.
I don’t deny that that these publications face extreme pushback. I deny that these pressures are “purely ideological” rather than ON MERIT.
As someone employed by the university press in question, I thank you for articulating this so efficiently. This is not a question of academic freedom but rather one of academic integrity and recognizing that scholarly output can and does affect policy. It is irresponsible and transparent when those supporting GC beliefs claim otherwise. If the violent and horrific attacks against the trans and NB community aren’t convincing enough, try looking into the extremely high rates of suicide ideation and attempts by trans youth. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/
Putting aside the unsupported maligning of GC scholars by linking them to violence and suicide, this is, from a purely academic freedom perspective, probably the most concerning comment on this thread, given both the source (an employee of an academic press) and the substance.
The suggestion that the fact that “scholarly output can and does affect policy” should factor significantly in editorial decisions should send a chill down the spine of anyone working on topics that might have even indirect influence on important and disputed matters of public concern.
Moti, for real:
Do you or do you not think that a work that has foreseeable, likely consequences on policy or social life merits additional scrutiny, compared to a work that lacks such consequences?
Do you mean, for example, that critics of effective altruism — who, if they discouraged effective giving in their readers, would predictably and foreseeably result in many more people *literally dying* from malaria (amongst other grave harms) — should receive “additional scrutiny” before their objections to demanding conceptions of beneficence can be published?
Sure. But I also believe that in this particular case the standard of additional scrutiny is very easy to meet, since critics of effective altruism have not comported themselves in the public realm in such a manner that would defease a default assumption of seriousness and good faith.
Which work merits additional scrutiny? Work that has foreseeable likely negative consequences, or work that was plausibly not produced by serious people acting in good faith? These are very different principles. Do you hold both?
Work that has foreseeable likely negative consequences merits additional scrutiny, in particular regarding the seriousness and good faith of the ones doing it.
I’ve said this multiple times over now.
The very question of what counts as a “negative consequence” is one of the issues in dispute. Molly Gardner made this point above. Some people believe, for example, that replacing sex with gender identity will lead to negative consequences. Others believe that failing to replace sex with gender identity will lead to negative consequences. That you have taken a side on these issues does not mean they are not live issues, or that “additional levels of scrutiny” should be applied just to those arguing for the positions you oppose.
There are substantive conclusions that you seem to take for granted and you then argue that those who don’t take those conclusions for granted are “not serious” or are arguing “in bad faith.” This is a mistake. Consider the possibility that some people genuinely hold different views from your own, that they sincerely believe there are good reasons to hold the position they hold, etc.
I’m quite alright with having “negative consequence” be interpreted widely, encompassing issues over which there is moral disagreement, erring on the side of caution.
You still haven’t told me whether you think that moral fraughtness, however construed, should have any kind of impact on publication ethics.
I, generally, don’t doubt the sincerity of GC beliefs. I doubt that, at large, they are sincerely interested in subjecting these belief to rational argument. My evidence for this doubt is their comport in extra-academic venues. If serious GC scholars, supposedly like Byrne, have been caught up in this, that is very unfortunate. I suggested ways out of that unfortunate situation.
To pursue an inexact analogy: I generally believe that bigots sincerely hold their bigoted beliefs. And I simultaneously, consistently believe that whenever they try to concoct a rationalistic arguments to spread their bigotry, the very effort is unserious and in bad faith for it is just a smokescreen for the underlying bigotry.
No, I do not think “moral fraughtness” should have any kind of impact whatsoever on publication ethics, at least not in the academic domain, where the books are written and read not by children in a nursery but by adult academics. That a topic is morally fraught gives us more reason, not less, to write and read about it, to argue about it, to try to sort out the best way to think about it, the best way to form policies in response to the various considerations to which the problem gives rise, and so on. Of course I take a different view when it comes to children’s literature.
Very well. Then I shall continue to be appalled at either your naivety or callousness towards the real-world consequences of our work. And you shall continue to be appalled at my naivety or disregard towards academic freedom.
Sure. However, history of scholarship in almost every field of social science and throughout the history of natural sciences may mean that people actually take the views of humans that research is about more seriously –as a matter of scholarly integrity, and perhaps people are less willing to dismiss researchers from certain marginalized groups as experts when they possess the requisite credentials.
A lot of the science and social science that was done in a free and easy way without any thought about what it meant for the groups it was about was not only extremely harmful but also bad and dumb. So it’s not unrelated to the quality issue.
If the editor and referees have doubts about the quality of the research, how is this destructive of academic freedom?
I am not saying I know the reasons they thought it wasn’t good–merely the fact that ‘this is a view some scholars have, therefore it requires prestige publication’ isn’t very convincing on its own unless you presuppose those scholars don’t ever have to answer to other scholars–but that’s not how it works, generally. And there are good historical reasons to be cautious about that.
It’s not like the ideas won’t get out there. They just don’t have a certain imprimatur.
I’m not sure I understand you, but I think you are asking two different, unrelated questions. The first one is about the responsibility researchers have to the people they study. The second is about editorial norms.
On the first question, I think it’s a mistake to regard these debates about sex and gender as being about trans people. They aren’t. They are about sex and gender. There are implications for trans people, of course, but also for non-trans people. This research is not analogous to biomedical or social scientific research that seeks to learn about members of some group, how they behave, what health burdens they face, how they respond to this or that stimuli, or whatever. There, the “nothing about us without us” slogan has application. But that’s not anything like what gender critical scholars are doing.
On the publication issue, I’m not quite sure what you are asking. Of course editors and reviewers should assess the quality of the research. One of the main questions in this case is whether the unusual decision was made on the basis of legitimate scholarly assessment or rather if it was motivated by other considerations, e.g., of the sort that played a role in the treatment of Lawford-Smith’s book. If you are asking me if I think certain people are better positioned to assess the quality of scholarship about sex and gender because they are members of this or that group, then my answer is decidedly “no” for the reasons I gave above. This research is not about any particular group of people, unless we just mean the group of people that includes all people.
Well, actually: https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-of-dishonesty
But I just don’t see how details about the authors or their mental states are relevant to assessing the philosophical merits of a piece of work. As I understand it, academic assessment involves assessment of a text, not an attempt at predicting whether the author is a good or sincere person.
Whether a work is serious and in good faith is very much a quality of the work.
I’ve also not advocated for tracking down individual authors and including an assessment of their moral character in an editorial decision.
This isn’t a new professional norm.
Any editor knows to recognize a morally fraught work and knows to be extra careful with it.
The profession at large never had an issue with this. It only became an issue when certain people took the issue outside the profession because they think their work should be exempt from this norm.
🔥
Just a small remark. You say you
have not been successful in having such a good-faith debate with anyone who identifies as “gender critical”.”but the value of public debate, by way of published scholarship, does not always manifest in a feeling of personal satisfaction for the participants.
if the published record made it as transparently obvious as you take it to be that your opponents cannot argue in good faith, or produce compelling responses to criticism, or maintain theories which survive scrutiny, then there’s great value whether or not you emerge feeling victorious from such exchanges. The general philosophical education puts us all in a position to recognize bad arguments and bad positions, so having philosophers exposed on the public record will be instructive to a broader intellectual community. There’s a reason we should want these these debates playing out in venues with the highest standards for clarity and argumentation, because those conventions provide the conditions for easiest detection of fallacy or rhetorical manipulation.
It’s clear that most do not consider the scholarly debates conclusive so far, but that’s more a reason to encourage these exchanges to happen in philosophical literature rather than letting cheeky pundits do the heavy lifting. Believe it or not, many if not most people have an open mind about issues relating to sex and gender, and are relying on trained experts to duke things out in attempts to find better-defendable theories and eliminate weak untenable ones. If people get the impression that the debate is deemed inappropriate for vigorous back-and-forths regarding the vices and virtues of prima facie plausible theories, then, I at least would not conclude things are conclusively established to acceptable philosophical standards. I would rather conclude that these issues are unfit targets for serious philosophizing and take claims on the subject less seriously, which you might consider a harmful result — since the goal seems to be to establish certain popular ideas about sex and gender as established fact.
Just something to consider when you ponder the purpose of continued debate.
I think it is rather fallacious to claim that bad work should be published, so that its badness becomes wider known. Bad work simply does not get published, that is the norm.
We are all in a position to recognize bad arguments and bad positions, and initially we did recognize the “GC” (before they called themselves that) arguments as bad, and accordingly did not publish such work and did not engage with such arguments.
It was the GCs who took the extraordinary step of taking the matter whether their work merits publication or engagement out of the peer review process, and into the tabloids, press, blogs, political arena, effectively handing the reigns to the “cheeky pundits”.
This situation is exactly what I am decrying in this comment thread, and exactly the reason why I think the good faith of GC scholars is dubious.
Who is “we”? Because it is surely not the profession as a whole.
We, the profession collectively, and our collective actions regarding matters as what gets published where, what arguments get engaged with in publication.
If a particular type of work does not pass peer review, and is not discussed by peers in related areas, this is prima facie evidence that such work does not meet some standard of quality, enforced collectively and determined collectively by the profession.
I have not yet seen any evidence suggesting that peer review isn’t working here, that publication standards are misapplied.
If some work does not get published and you think this is due to a bias or conspiracy, it is up to you to prove that bias or conspiracy. Otherwise and all else being equal, I will continue assuming that the work was just shoddy.
And, once again, stirring up a storm in the extra-professional media is not how one would go about this.
We disagree on a lot. I want the best version of a bad theory to be formulated and defended as clearly and carefully as possible. That way, it’s somewhat conclusive when such projects fail. All the more when the “bad theory” is one that’s found pre-theoretically plausible, as in not totally ridiculous.
According to my philosophical methodology, there’s no more conclusive evidence that I’m right than that the very best version of the opposing view faces difficulties which will plague all weaker and weirder and wonkier versions of the theory. When I write, I tend to do a lot of work trying to find the best strongest most careful formulations of the theory I want to debunk, so that I don’t waste my time arguing against contingent features of the opposing view.
Is your view that there’s simply no possible way of making the views you dislike any more precise, or arguing for them in print any better than they’ve already been defended? If no, you should be encouraging opponents to try and develop more careful and compelling versions of the view you ultimately take to be false, right? And then thwarting attempts to do is counterintuitive in a multitude of ways.
If there is a good defense of a bad theory, I expect to see it in print and be subjected to discussion. Likely, this will help us to better understand the badness of the theory.
But what if the bad theory cannot be well defended in the first place? Do you recommend that we settle for publishing a bad defense of the bad theory? Or, perhaps, that the bad theory is not worth our attention in the first place.
So you answer yes to my question,
“there’s simply no possible way of making the views you dislike any more precise, or arguing for them in print any better than they’ve already been defended”?
No. I don’t think that an argument is publishable merely in virtue of being “more precise” or “any better than” a previous, worse argument.
If you think otherwise and are running a journal somewhere, let me know, so I can send you my very crappy but extremely precisely articulated argument for the Earth being flat. I promise it’s better than the stuff that has been put forward on youtube!
I can’t rule out, metaphysically, the possibility that there is a good defense of a hitherto not well-defended argument that merits publication and attention from the wider community. But there isn’t one until there is one. And I generally rely on the peer review process to do some pre-selection for me in this. The fact that some purportedly good argument for a view I find absurd has not appeared in print is not something that fazes me much.
There’s a great many views I “dislike”, as you so very charitably put it, in that I go by the default assumption that they cannot be well-defended: that the earth is flat; that slavery is moral; that God hates me. I’m keeping with my default until proven wrong. That there are people who claim to be able to prove me wrong, but cannot seem to get published in venues I respect really does not concern me much.
I don’t understand why you would conclude that I “should be encouraging opponents to try and develop more careful and compelling versions” of such views. I am very neutral about whether this is a worthwhile use of their time.
You must have had your mind changed somewhere above (I haven’t bothered to read all the threads).
I took you to be still arguing that access to venues you respect is and ought to be conditional on the
good faith” of the author. Now you’re saying publication is and ought to remain a meritocratic endeavor. My mistake.I consider seriousness and having been produced in good faith to be properties of the work itself, relevant to its merit. Happy to clear that up.
Esa Diaz-Leon argues that there is no general opposition to publishing works arguing for gender-critical views. When OUP published Holly Lawford-Smith’s book defending her gender-critical feminism, there were two letters sent to OUP, objecting in the strongest terms to the publishing of her book. One letter was from OUP authors, the other from OUP staff. The book was not yet published, so the criticism did not reflect thought about what was actually in the book. The opposition was simply to publishing a book defending gender-critical feminism. Diaz-Leon’s claim that there is no general opposition to publishing gender-critical books seems to imply that OUP has not in fact crumbled in the face of the earlier criticism. But we should note that Hannah Barnes’s book on the Tavistock Clinic in London was recently rejected by 12 publishers, some of whom explicitly cited objections from staff. Diaz-Leon has no good evidence that there is no widespread opposition to publishing works defending views opposed to what is now orthodoxy. And no good evidence that publishing decisions aren’t being determined by this kind of opposition. See especially the letter from “not worth it” about the obvious chilling effect on philosophical discussion, not limited to junior people.
“ And no good evidence that publishing decisions aren’t being determined by this kind of opposition”. Precisely my point is that we cannot tell either way just on the basis of an article by Alex Byrne. As “on the market” explains above, it is compatible with all the evidence we have, that the book was rejected because it did not satisfy the standards of the editors.
Also: Lawford-Smith’s book “sex matters” is forthcoming in OUP. So there is no general ban against books defending those views. Perhaps OUP wants to be extra careful. For the reasons “on the market” gives above, I think they should be.
Byrne writes, “according to the authors—as if no one had ever dreamed of denying it—Elliot Page is a man. Never mind whether this is correct; what was disappointing was the pretense that it is beyond dispute.” This is unfair. The authors explicitly decline to take a position on — or even to discuss — the semantics of English nouns like “man.” (See p. 2, end of second full paragraph).
I’ve always been concerned with academic freedom, but now I’m convinced I underestimated the threat.
My fellow faculty try to contort words into some argument to convince us that undeniably and absolutely extraordinary editorial or publisher action around controversial writings is just as likely quality-control-as-usual. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering. I’d respect (but vehemently disagree with) a colleague who transparently defended a philosophy of research which put social effects on par with (or above) truth or academic freedom. I’ve argued my whole career with those who deny even morality (and hence, human rights, individual dignity, moral equality, etc) exists. That’s philosophy for ya.
But I cannot abide my colleagues engaged in this ridiculous sophistry.
This is by far the most sensible comment in this thread. As it happens, I think that there are all sorts of cases where it might be justifiable to limit inquiry or speech on the basis of potential social harms. There’s a great discussion of this topic in Kitcher’s Science, Truth and Democracy book, which I think makes a good case. But I know that’s a controversial position in general. It’s also very unclear whether that argument would apply in the case of gender critical beliefs.
Still, it seems to me that these sorts of considerations are far more useful starting points than suggestions that Byrne’s work is simply sub-standard. I’m not an expert in his work but it would be a bit weird if someone ended up in his job while completely incompetent at meeting the norms of contemporary philosophy.
As a philosopher of language, who works on pronominal anaphora, the Byrne pronoun piece was, in my opinion, egregiously bad scholarship. No one in linguistics thinks that grammatical gender has much to do with actual gender or sex (e.g. just because elevator is feminine in some language or other doesn’t mean elevators somehow have feminine characteristics). Regardless of whether the paper’s arguments were harmful, the more immediate problem was that the paper showed a glaring lack of engagement with decades of work in philosophy of language and linguistics.
Just to be clear:
nobody in linguistics thinks that the gender of a personal pronoun used to refer to a human being has much to do with the actual gender or sex of the human being?
Well, grammatical gender has *something* to do with actual gender or sex, but the relationship is hardly very deep. Grammatical gender is primarily just an abstract feature used for purposes of tracking agreement in syntax. Hence, why “toaster” being masculine in language or other doesn’t have deep metaphysical implications about the relationship between toaster-hood and masculinity.
Katie Martin, a linguistics PhD student at MIT, has a nice writeup of some of the basic empirical issues with Byrne’s claims
https://medium.com/@katiedimartin/thinking-about-byrne-2022-on-pronouns-part-1-67f671316654
Yes, I understand the point about toasters and refrigerators. But I’m asking whether you are saying it’s the same with personal pronouns used to refer to a human being.
An example involving anaphora would be helpful, since that’s your specialty!
Sure! For example, if I don’t know the gender/sex of the reviewer, the following utterance is fine:
“_The reviewer_i found Byrne’s paper bad. _She_i recommended rejecting it.”
Many bound and anaphoric uses of the pronouns are impersonal uses, which seemingly undermines the view that they have any significant import into debates about sex/gender.
Sure, but someone who knows the reviewer is male can properly correct you:
“He, not she”.
So this seems to be an example in which the choice of personal pronoun does have a lot to do with the sex/gender of the person to whom it refers.
But, the point is, in bound and anaphoric uses, it really doesn’t matter. For example, if I say, “Every tenured professor in the department must send her CV,” I’m not saying every tenured professor in the department is a woman or only the women professors have to send their CVs!!!
So what is your explanation for why it is felicitous to correct the speaker by saying, “He, not she”, when you know that the subject is a man?
A good explanation is that the gender of the pronoun has a lot to do with the sex/gender of the person to whom it refers. (Or really, I see that the person in this subthread calling themself ‘grad student’ has put it clearer and more accurately: what Byrne is talking about is the presuppositional content of the choice of pronouns.)
But if that’s not the right explanation, I wonder what is.
If only someone told the feminists this back in the 90’s about “he”…
What arguments of theirs make you think they did not know this?
Jonathan, I’m having trouble understanding the view you’re defending in a way that doesn’t entail that it is in a certain sense silly for people to care about what pronouns they are called by.* Do you accept that implication?
*Of course, people care about silly things all the time: grown men playing games, etc.
I was going to ask this too. I can already imagine the next professor stirring the pot by deliberately misgendering their students, saying: “Look, I was just using ‘he’ as an abstract feature for purposes of tracking agreement in syntax; I wasn’t implying anything about his actual gender!”
The claim that “in bound or anaphoric uses it doesn’t really matter” seems incorrect, and was actually indirectly addressed in Byrne’s pronoun piece which you claim to be such bad scholarship. E.g., to modify one of his examples from early in his paper:
# That animal is not female, but she is in the field.
Also, Byrne rejected (in fn. 5) your point using a similar example: “Bound FM pronouns produce the same result: ‘If every cat washes herself, then we don’t need to bathe any cats’ commits the speaker to every contextually relevant cat being female.” I suppose a question then, much like Drier’s, is this: if you are right that such uses of bound uses of ‘her’ do not commit the speaker to the domain being (all) female, why is it relevant for someone to offer the correction or clarification: “Oh, but they aren’t all female”?
Why is it relevant? People say things like this all the time and it would seem superfluous to point out that not all cats are female, unless this feature is somehow relevant to understanding their bathing. Otherwise we would assume the claim was extended to all cats.
Laura: Byrne’s example isn’t about all (quantifier wide open) cats, but about the “contextually relevant” ones given that conditional with the embedded quantifier: a domain that could, in principle, include only female cats, or male and female both (or only male ones), depending on the context. Given that the context could be about any such set of cats, the use of “herself” when one could’ve easily instead said “itself” lends itself to the obvious interpretation that the speaker has committed themself to all those cats being female. The point is that even bound uses of “she/her/…” etc. do plausibly commit one to all of them (in the restricted domain quantified over in that context) being female, which is what Jonathan had denied atop this subthread. If Jonathan’s denial is correct, then (as he says) such uses don’t commit one to a particular sex at all… but if so then it’s quite unclear why they seem eligible for correction (about the restricted domain being discussed in the context).
This is not my area and so I can’t follow this particular discussion very well, but is the claim here that when X refers to a person using “her” or “him” X is never referring to sex? Obviously pronouns don’t always refer to sex (toasters or whatever). But is the claim that they never do? No need to respond, of course, to an amateur question–I’m just curious and trying to get a dumbed-down sense for what’s at issue.
Moti: Right. Apart from toasters etc., it seems like Jonathan’s point was that bounded or anaphoric constructions, “it doesn’t matter” even when it is clear that the context is about some cats or women (and not toasters)… which could be interpreted as “they don’t refer to sex” even in those constructions & contexts. And my only point has been that this seems wrong in that a bunch of the standard evidence (including the kind Byrne invoked in his pronouns draft) points the other way. (Clearly, I do work in philosophy of language, so I’m confused by Jonathan’s insistence in his earliest comments on this.)
Thanks, UmWhat.
Actually, one more question, if you don’t mind (and assuming you even see this, given the state of this thread.) I just want to make sure I understand the basic idea.
I go to a friend’s house. My friend greets me and says, “We got a new puppy! Come meet her, she’s in the back yard.”
From this (“her”, “she”) I infer that the puppy is female or, weaker, that my friend believes it’s female, or if something funny or sinister is going on, that my friend wants me to believe, for whatever reason, that it is female.
On the view you’re responding to, are these inferences unwarranted?
In French, “personne” is always feminine and “bébé” is always masculine, and pronouns anaphorically referring to these words should accord with them in grammatical gender.
Example. A parent is looking at their baby girl: “Mon bébé est si beau, mais il pleure trop.” (My baby is so beautiful, but she cries too much.) According to the grammar books, the correct pronoun to use is the masculine “il” even though the baby is female, because the word “bébé” is masculine. (One should also use the masculine “mon” instead of “ma” and the masculine “beau” instead of “belle”.)
There is a counter-argument here: while the grammar books tell you to use “il”, lots of actual francophones will use the feminine “elle” in conversation. I will now consult with my francophone friends on Facebook! Of course, this is a parochial fact about French: I don’t know how it works in other languages.
Great example, Phil.
I’d thought of basically the same example! (I thought of a woman doctor, and the noun “médecin”.) Since my linguistic intuitions about French are basically worthless, I asked a native speaker, who claimed to *always* use the pronoun whose gender matched the sex/gender of the person, rather than the gender of the antecedent noun. E.g.,
J’ai demandé au médecin et elle m’a dit de prendre du Tylenol.
But anyway, your info about what the grammar books say is quite germane. Thanks!
My five native language informants so far on FB all use “elle” in the baby case, despite the advice of the grammarians.
An amusing, notorious example from German: the diminutive suffixes ‘-chen’ and ‘-lein’ impose neuter gender; thus, the word for ‘girl’, ‘Mädchen’, is neuter, taking the neuter article ‘das’ and anaphor ‘es’.
But, cross-linguistically, grammatical gender is really pretty divorced from gender or sex. As Kirk-Giannini and Glanzberg point out in their article in the aforementioned handbook:
“Many languages show richer gender systems, and these systems also show important variety. Gender features, in contrast to number features and person features, typically carry contents related to personal gender, sex, animacy, humanness, or animalhood. We mention a few example, drawn from work of Kramer (2020). Her broad cross-linguistic survey notes, among many other data points, that Sochiapan Chinantec (Otomanguean: Chinantecan) assigns gender using animacy: animate nouns are assigned one gender, and inanimate nouns another. As she also notes, many Niger-Congo languages have one gender for human-denoting nouns and one for non-human-denoting ones. Some languages assign gender to nouns seemingly arbitrarily, at least outside of nouns with clearly gender-specific semantic content. Spanish is an example.”
This might be right (I have no idea, this isn’t my field) but there are established norms for peer review of invited contributions and (at least on Alex Byrne’s testimony) they were not followed here.
Are you saying that the established norms presumptively require publishing “egregiously bad scholarship”, or perhaps something less ridiculous?
They require serious, documented, argued-for, peer-review evidence that the paper isn’t publishable, in order to outweigh the prima facie expectation that an invitation is honored. That apparently didn’t happen here.
But, this exists! See Katie’s excellent take down of the piece. You seem to think that just because Byrne is a famous professor at a famous institution, he should be allowed to wade into something far beyond his own expertise and make patently absurd claims!
You misunderstand. So far as I know, Katie Martin was not the peer reviewer for Byrne’s piece; indeed, there appears to have been no such reviewer but only a Twitter hashtag. The issue isn’t whether there are scholarly deficiencies – even egregious ones – with that piece; it’s whether it was properly handled according to the norms for peer review of previously-invited collections. It is very clear (on Byrne’s testimony) that this was not the case. Indeed, the piece was not even handled in accordance with the more demanding norms for unsolicited submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
There is a perfectly reasonable conversation to be had about invited collections more generally and the appropriateness of their norms, but they are well established and they were clearly violated here. Everyone who has received such invitations knows it.
Do we know he even received an invitation to submit to this handbook article? Because, at this point, I see no reason to take that one faith alone.
Your response, to the claim that the manner of rejection was unprofessional, is that we might not really know whether Byrne was invited in the first place?
Oh, if Byrne is just lying, all bets are off. But I think it’s pretty unlikely, not least because it will clearly come out very quickly if it is. (Ernie Lepore is an obvious witness, for instance.)
To my mind, avoiding egregious scholarly deficiencies is more important than following established norms of peer review (which are only useful insofar as they result in us not publishing egregious scholarship!). But, to each their own, I suppose.
Quis custodes ipsos custodiet.
Right, but presumably—unless Byrne is patently lying—a takedown on medium is not what was presented to Byrne as a justification for reneging on agreement. It was far more perfunctory, and enflamed by an unprofessional tweet.
Byrne wasn’t discussing grammatical gender. He was discussing the presuppositional or implicated content of “he”/“she”, which it is taken for granted in the linguistics literature is “male”/“female”, respectively. One can find proof of this in almost any article in linguistics or the general philosophy of language which makes any claims at all about the semantics of “he”/“she”.
Yes, but the presuppositional content of “he”/”she” are tied to phi-features which track grammatical gender. This is, at its core, an argument that grammatical gender is supposed to have some deep philosophical import which is a joke. The fact is, this is lazy scholarship, which wouldn’t be taken seriously by an linguist.
I would be interested to know what you think of this paper, which seems to suggest that “grammatical gender is supposed to have some deep philosophical import”, unless you’re understanding the claim differently than I would have: https://danielwodak.weebly.com/uploads/4/7/4/8/47484749/routledgehandbooks-9781003164869-chapter22.pdf (I don’t have a strong opinion about whether the linked paper is good or not, but it seems to suggest that at least some smart people think this sort of thing. To my mind, what this suggests is that perhaps the question linguists are interested in is distinct from the ones some philosophers are interested in, and so the views of linguists might not settle the matter. But I would be interested to hear more on it.)
Yeah, I think this is also hogwash when coming from more “woke” people too. In general, the “philosophy of language meets political philosophy” literature is dominated by a lot of smart people who seem to not realize how tenuous these connections are; if we were speaking some non-Indo-European language in which grammatical gender tracked animacy or some such thing, these questions wouldn’t even arise. Most of these people seem to be lapsing into a kind of very lazy Whorfianism (a thesis which we know from decades of psycholinguistics research is tenuous at best).
Thanks for the reply. I am at least somewhat sympathetic, though (like Jamie Drier above) I think it’s important to see that this claim goes very strongly against a major trend in society (including much feminist though.) That doesn’t mean that its wrong. But again, I think that a clear implication is that the issue addressed by linguists is distinct from the one others are interested in, even if the linguists’ information has some relevance. Of course, that also doesn’t mean those other concerns are well founded, either.
Dembroff and Wodak’s paper is not primarily concerned with pronouns, and makes no claims about deep philosophical import. More specifically, nothing about the paper turns at all on questions about whether gender are sex are distinct. The paper is solely concerned with the question of whether we should have terms in language which mark gender and/or sex.
In Alex’s discussion, the conventional implicatures/presuppositions of ‘he’/’she’ are of dialectical significance because of their bearing on this question:
(Q) When someone uses the sentence ‘he is F’ (deictic ‘he’, indicating a female human) with its ordinary meaning, in an assertion, do they thereby convey false information?
Alex contends that ‘he’ used deictically, indicating a human being, does indeed conventionally implicate/presuppose that the indicated human is male. The contention certainly does appear to bear on (Q). Further on in the dialectic, (Q) is argued to bear on the merits of certain claims about the ethics of pronoun-usage. Perhaps those latter claims have “deep philosophical import”. If so, and the intermediating dialectic is solid, then Alex’s line of argument may warrant less swift a dismissal than you seem to think.
If the linguistics literature you appeal to establishes that necessarily there is not a connection between grammatical gender and actual gender, then yes, perhaps your charge of “egregiously bad scholarship” may stick. But I suspect the literature shows at most that there is not necessarily a connection between grammatical gender and actual gender. Obviously much weaker, and equally obviously leaves room for Professor Byrne to make his arguments.
P.S. This is not the first time you have lobbed charges of egregiously bad scholarship at professional philosophers. It’s a serious one, and it’s best to be sure you’ve got airtight arguments if you’re going to make it. (I offer this suggestion sincerely and in good faith. I hope you take it that way)
I just want to heartly agree with this. The pronoun piece is very bad. The previously published piece on the meaning of ‘woman’ was also very bad. If the book was similar then rejection was entirely justified.
The previously published piece was not primarily on the meaning of ‘woman’ but on whether women are adult human females. I thought it was excellent but YMMV.
Regardless, OUP offered a book contract to Byrne with full knowledge of content of the Phil Studies piece (and other relevant material published in popular venues) so they cannot have thought it was “very bad.”
Make no mistake: conversations involving heterodox views and thinkers WILL happen. Those conversations might, however, move to another spot (in the same way that early modern philosophers and scientists turned to letters and stopped seeking the imprimatur of the then-reigning scholastic establishment). Legacy institutions like OUP should thus consider their stance very carefully if they want to avoid obsolescence… #bravoByrne
Exactly! Those of us who spent our teenage years under an idiotic commie regime in the 1980s somewhere in Eastern Europe know that information and debate cannot be controlled from above; there was samizdat culture, smuggled manuscripts, etc. Legacy institutions [the Party] will hopefully become irrelevant.
I just want to express a view that I think might not have shown up here. I believe that:
I don’t know if this is what happened here, but I think we’ve been seeing this problem since the Tuvel scandal and the solution is *not* to give editors more power. It is not fair to authors, and it is not fair to editors.
I think this assumes a can opener. How do we select the members of the independent ethics board and how do we manage problems with their judgement?
That’s easy: we just create an ethics board to determine whether the first ethics board was—oh my God…
This seems like an overall objection to having ethics boards for anything. Or are you thinking that there is something especially problematic about ethics boards for publications which does not show up for ethics boards on, say empirical research, or medical decisions?
Fair question. I’d say (1) in those cases there is a very well established and fairly widely agreed upon set of standards for what ‘harm’ is, that does not include the more indirect sorts of harm we’re discussing here, and (2) the ethics review process in empirical research and medicine has not exactly covered itself in glory in any case.
Re 1: It’s worth noting in this context that the US Federal Regulations specifically call out and exclude from consideration the “possible long-range effects of applying knowledge gained in the research (e.g., the possible effects of the research on public policy)” when describing the scope of IRB review. Presumably this is because IRBs lack the expertise to accurately estimate those downstream effect and, even if they could, would lack the authority to say whether they are good or bad.
The ethics review that human subjects research undergoes is focused on protecting human subjects from mostly uncontroversial harms, like being lied to by an investigator or poisoned by an investigational agent. Perhaps it is possible to create a broader ethics review process for scholarship which includes things like downstream social effects. But the existing system is not a clear model for that.
That’s very interesting; thank you.
For any area of philosophy where the publication of articles can have real-life effects, there should be a ethics-based vetting process on which papers get published.
I’m not sure how this would or could work. For one thing, you don’t have to take an especially broad view of “can have real-life effects” for this to cover huge amounts of work. For example, much of my work is on immigration and refugee policy. Does this potentially have “real-life effects”? Maybe! One of my papers was even cited by a court in a decision once (*), so pehaps my work even has had a small effect, even though it’s unlikely to have very much. Does it include things like _A Theory of Justice_? Ronald Dworkin’s writing on abortion? Jennifer Saul or Les Green writing on pornography? I think it would very quickly become unworkable, even leaving out any broader possible readings, and even assuming a good answer to the (significant) question David Wallace mentions. Would we need a panel that decides whether something must be submitted to the panel?
(*) This was nice for me, but it was very much a typical citation of scholarly work in a judicial opinion in that the court needed a citation for some proposition, and my paper provided such a citation, but it very well could have been lots of other people.
This proposal makes little sense in many areas of moral philosophy where the exact issue under discussion is what sorts of effects constitute harms (can fetuses be harmed?) and how conflicts (say between natal and trans women) ought to be balanced because the process imagined requires the board members to already know the answer.
This is a very interesting proposal. You should write a philosophy paper explaining why such a process should be established, and maybe see it have some real-life consequences!
Whilst you’re at it, you might also write a paper setting out how such independent ethics boards should evaluate academic journal articles and books that discuss, e.g., transgender matters. Then your criteria could be incorporated into the boards’ deliberations and again (tell your dean!) you might have some real-life impact.
And if the causal link between academic publications and real life harms to vulnerable groups becomes too nebulous and speculative, or, as some people might unfairly say, rectally retrieved, you could write a third paper explaining which views are ethically incorrect, and hence in principle harmful. And these theses could once again be incorporated as criteria. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom! Real-life consequence once more.
There’s no real danger here, as far as I can see. It’s not as if we might actually wish to read competing arguments in print before reaching any conclusions about which views on various, e.g., transgender matters are actually right.
That said, obviously your three papers would never see the light of day as any independent ethics board would regard them as far too dangerous to let loose. But that aside ..
Perhaps this is evidence for a foundational problem in applied ethics, broadly construed. Disciplinary norms, like academic freedom, will inevitably come into conflict with socio-political norms, like concern for the welfare of marginalized groups. The former seem to demand that we allow differing theoretical viewpoints in the usual venues, especially when those reflect the public controversies of the day. The latter seem to demand that, in some cases, those viewpoints ought not to be amplified (this becomes especially pressing if there really is a moral fact of the matter among those viewpoints). Whether or not trans issues count as one of these cases, it does seem to me that such cases arise. I would be extremely uncomfortable amplifying, e.g., pro-Nazi viewpoints, even if disciplinary norms strictly permitted them. A related version of this issue, I think, arises in the classroom. It wasn’t until embarrassingly recently that I realized that, although I strive for neutrality in (at least) ethics courses, my offhand examples (e.g., “obviously, nazism is bad”) were nevertheless partial to certain moral views. Of course, I still use those examples—and they seem harmless—but the obvious puzzle is where other examples might become harmfully non-neutral. Anyway, that’s just some speculative food for thought (which I’m sure others have covered much better than I have). The main point is just that maybe this has less to do with particular controversies, and more to do with deeper, methodological issues.
I am struck by the polite pretence in this thread that Byrne’s book might really have constituted egregiously bad scholarship. I suspect that I speak for many outside the philosophy of sex and gender echo chamber when I express my confidence that it did not.
After reading one of his papers on the subject, the one which makes arguments about animal husbandry language as if its terms do not reflect the categories humans chose for their own purposes, I can easily imagine it. More to the point, I can easily imagine the editors expecting one kind of article to be included in their anthology or handbook text, but finding themselves given another not suited to the purpose. The polite fiction that it must have been a good article which accomplished what was asked for by the editors strikes me as equally suspect. The assumption their decision could only have been based on unjust factors and amounts to pernicious censorship is even less well founded.
The view that Byrne’s article did not constitute “egregiously bad scholarship” is much weaker than the view that “it must have been a good article”.
We can see many examples of the latter view expressed in these comments. Even if we did not, please don’t forget the part about “accomplished what was asked for”. My point was that even a good article might not accomplish what was asked for. That’s not a violation of academic freedom.
Some of the way that this issue has been presented seems disingenuous to me. It is presented as though not receiving referee reports alongside a rejection is unheard of in philosophy. This is however simply not the case. There is likely not a single one of us that has not (often after months of waiting) received a rejection with no comments from the reviewers, not even the line that Prof Byrne does say he received about “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” This is more than I have received from a lot of publishers/journals over the years (including, interestingly enough, from Philosophical Studies which I see Prof. Byrne sits on the editorial board of).
Of course, someone will say that it is different for a book compared to a journal article. Perhaps. But we cannot assess this until Prof. Byrne releases the FULL conversation, and any comments on the manuscript that he received. This might be a particularly bad case of a common issue in current philosophy of getting a rejection with little/no comments. Does this hurt? Yes. Is Prof. Byrne the first to have this happen to them? No.
This is also before the fact that it is not uncommon for editors to receive comments from reviewers that they feel cannot be passed on to the author as they might be private/include identifying information/the reviewer might have asked for them not to be passed to the author. It is possible that this is what happened in this case. OUP might have got the manuscript reviewed. The reviewers might have not thought it a good book. OUP made their decision to therefore not publish it and they had reasons to not pass many/any comments to the author.
Contracts (even book contracts) have the line about the work being ‘fit for publication’ precisely to protect them from having to continue to publish work of poor quality. I can see why Prof. Byrne might be upset that his work was deemed to be of poor quality, but as it stands he has not given us any concrete evidence to show that anything unusual happened in this case. NOTE: I say ‘unusual’. It is not ‘unusual’ in philosophy to get rejections with little/no reasons for it. It maybe should not be like that, but that is another matter.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread as to how the academic review process works for books and invited collections. It is very different from journal submission and the reason is structural.
If you submit an article to a journal, the *first* point at which the article undergoes academic review is when the editor either desk-rejects it or sends it out to referees. And, absolutely, judgements can be short and summary at this stage. (But note that if you get back two quite enthusiastic referee reports and the journal invites you to revise and resubmit, *then* it would be unusual and weird for them to reject the resubmission summarily.)
With books and collection chapters, the equivalent point is when the work is *commissioned*. That’s especially clear for books. The way you publish with an academic press like OUP is: you contact the commissioning editor and ask if they would be interested in publishing a book on X. Often they just say no (that’s the equivalent of a desk reject). If they say yes, you send a proposal, which is a pretty extensive document usually comprising an explanation of why the book is important, a summary of its structure, a planned table of contents, and a sample chapter. That then goes out to external reviewers (that’s the equivalent of peer review, except that it’s usually compensated). Again, it would be perfectly normal for the press to decide not to proceed further on the basis of that peer review. But if they do decide to proceed, they sign a contract with the author and give them a timescale to deliver the manuscript. When the completed manuscript is turned in, it will then be sent out to reviewers, but that process is designed to offer detailed feedback on the manuscript, not to make an overall judgement call. It would be really, really exceptional for post-submission review to lead to a press declining to publish (it would have to be on the grounds that the manuscript fundamentally failed to deliver on what the proposal promised). It is completely unheard of in my experience (until these events at any rate) for the press to decline to publish without first entering into a dialog with the author on the reasons and how they could be addressed. After all, the press has *already carried out peer review* on the author’s basic conception of the book.
With collections, the collection editor first reaches out to the people they want to contribute. That’s the first step of academic judgement: the editor’s judgement that they think you would contribute a good article on the topic they want. Once they have enough authors signed up, they go to a press and propose the volume, and the proposal gets peer reviewed (and that review generally takes a lot of notice of the track record of the authors). If it’s approved, the authors get given a deadline and sometimes an explanation of the collection requirements, and then write their articles. Post-submission peer review is again then not ab initio, is aimed at detailed feedback rather than interrogation of the basic concept, and again it would be exceptional not to accept a commissioned article, and unheard-of to do so without discussion with the author. (Note that quite often the only reason the author is writing that specific article is because they were contracted to.)
Most people on this thread are (understandably) anonymous, so I can’t tell their career stage, but judging from pseudonyms they are often quite junior, and these are aspects of academic publishing that one tends more to encounter later in a research career. Beyond the rationales I give above I can only ask you to trust me (as someone who has published two books with OUP, has peer reviewed several dozen book proposals, has edited a collection, and has twenty articles in edited volumes) that this is how book and invited-collection publishing works, and that it really is extraordinary to have either a book manuscript or a collection submission just flatly rejected this way. If Alex Byrne had just complained that no-one invites him to contribute to collections on gender issues and that he couldn’t get OUP to consider his book proposal, it would not have caused anything like this reaction.
This has happened to me, not because the work was deemed substandard, but because the editors chose to go another direction with the content. If editors had an expectation about content that would fit the bill, and this content no longer worked and couldn’t easily be revised to suit the purpose, It doesn’t seem unusual it would not be included.
Just to elaborate a little on what David Wallace says, his description fits my experience, but I wanted to add that there are some good reasons that these processes may differ from journal publishing. Whether with an invitation to write a chapter or an advance contract for a book, these can guide how a scholar spends their effort. The decision to invest one’s time and effort in producing the chapter or book is made, in part, because there is some assurance the project will see the light of day. If publishing these were as chancy as a journal article, many would not undertake them. For chapters, one might prefer not to be tied to a volume’s theme of focus; for a book, the risk ratio is radically different than an article because of the far greater time investment. A book produced with a contract that then loses that contract is a pretty big deal. Respecting the norms about these agreements (i.e., not dropping agreed upon work without substantial effort to address troubles) protects all of us. Undermining these norms would be most damaging to anyone less mature in their career – from junior scholars to mid-career people – whose advancement depends on their time investments delivering what’s expected. E.g., that’s why people editing volumes and inviting junior people to contribute need to handle these very responsibly, not dropping authors without extensive effort to keep them and making sure the work as a whole proceeds in a timely manner so that early career publications aren’t held hostage. This kind of thing isn’t a worry for Byrne personally, but there are good reasons the norms here are different.
“Beyond the rationales I give above I can only ask you to trust me (as someone who has published two books with OUP, has peer reviewed several dozen book proposals, has edited a collection, and has twenty articles in edited volumes) that this is how book and invited-collection publishing works, and that it really is extraordinary to have either a book manuscript or a collection submission just flatly rejected this way”
But this is exactly the point. (Also, I have published books with OUP, reviewed numerous books, and edited volumes with them and other publishers. I am not ‘junior’ in any sense, so thanks for the patronising overview of how the system works).
My point ultimately was that without more information, we cannot say that it was ‘flatly rejected’. Byrne can release the communication if he wanted to but he has not. He has not evidenced his claim that it was ‘flatly rejected’.
I’d also note that it is not that uncommon for publishers, especially OUP, not to even give out contracts until they see a full draft of the manuscript, not just a proposal. For cases where a contract is given earlier, that again is why there is the line about ‘fit for publication’. It is there to allow publishers to withdraw. Do I think that should happen often? Of course not. That would be bad. But the line means that it can happen (and does – Byrne is not the first person that this has happened to). For this to be a special case, we need to see the actual evidence which we’ve not been given. Evidence that no reviews were done and it was ‘flatly rejected’ on non-academic grounds. Exceptional does not mean impossible, and the fact Byrne announced other work as ‘forthcoming’ before it was fully confirmed suggests that he thought that exceptional does mean impossible. This strikes me simply as special pleading. Pending actual evidence, what we can suppose is that, like some others, his work was rejected in a not very nice cursory way. I agree that should not happen, but it does. What makes Byrne’s case special here is only that he has more of a voice than others that this happens too (who tend to be more junior).
As we now know, referee reports were provided.
The public may have good reason to pay us to hunt for truth, but they have no good reason to pay us to promote our personal opinions. Public perception of the humanities is already at an astonishing low and conservatives are making moves to muzzle us.
Exactly. I suggest that a lot of philosophers would do well to go outside their small bubbles. Imagine going to a sports club and finding people who just do not cafe for trans issues. There are just not enough out there.
Thanks for these questions, Justin.
I’m not a prolific publisher, so have less experience than others, but it seems to me that:
1) sometimes, for a variety of reasons, a publisher offers an advanced contract and then ultimately decides not to move forward with a book once they have the full draft in hand.
2) sometimes, one co-editor messages an author “x”, but upon consultation with the second co-editor revises that initial messaging. For example, one co-editor might think “looks great!” while the other might think “red flags!” and if the first communicates without consulting the latter, there would likely need to be some backtracking.
In other words, are these really “unusual deviations from standard publishing protocols”?
Who cares if trans-exclusionary work gets pushed out of philosophy and into places like Quillette and “The Journal of Controversial Ideas”? Some discussions are not within the bounds of polite liberal discourse in the marketplace of ideas and should be forced into more extreme venues that reflect their (il)legitimacy.
Justin writes “If the institutions of philosophy prohibit the defense of trans-exclusionary views, what then? Do the views disappear? No. Rather, their best defenses go elsewhere, to less reliable, less seriously-vetted venues… where argumentative errors, rhetorical nudges, strategic omissions, and polemical sleights-of-hand are more likely.”
So what? I’d rather Byrne be forced to publish by “Polity” than by OUP. It’s reflective of his views being beyond the pale.
I was similarly puzzled by this remark of Justin’s.
You’d think that if the “best defenses” of trans-exclusionary views only appear in subpar venues, this is prima facie evidence that even the best defenses aren’t all that good.
One could only see an issue with this, if one argues from the presupposition that there are in fact good defenses of trans-exclusionary views and there’s some conspiracy to keep them out of the best venues. I don’t think this is what Justin believes.
“You’d think that if the “best defenses” of trans-exclusionary views only appear in subpar venues, this is prima facie evidence that even the best defenses aren’t all that good.”
Then it seems the exclusion of the best arguments for progressive causes like same-sex marriage from top journals 50 years ago would also have been “prima facie good evidence” that those arguments weren’t worth hearing back then.
It’s just so credulous of the gatekeepers to say that the fact of exclusion is significant evidence that the excluded party deserves to be excluded. What could be good evidence is a thorough referee report detailing Byrne’s supposed scholarly failings.
Exactly, Spencer.
If the standards advocated by the people defending OUP had always been upheld, we would not be having this conversation, because trans-issues would not be discussed at all—the discussion would have been nipped in the bud decades ago because the people who wielded power then would have thought that the arguments were subpar and harmful.
The same goes for any progressive cause, no matter how far back you go: sexual liberation, women’s rights, gay rights, even the abolition of slavery, etc, etc.
If the argument is “So what, they had power then, we have power now”, then I would say (a) that I don’t think this is what philosophy should be about and (b) conservatives are chomping at the bit for such arguments to gain traction so that they can themselves muzzle debate for their nefarious purposes. In some places they already have.
It’s difficult to convince people that they can’t do what you’ve been doing for years because you’re righteous and they’re evil.
I think I disagree slightly on one point. I don’t think that conservatives are mostly eager to do this. But I think that it’s easy to see how they might convince themselves that they are making a series of defensive moves that they’re forced to make. And it’s easy to see how their notion of what’s “defensive” might expand according to political expedience. And it’s easy to imagine that when they have the upper hand, they’ll discover that the ideal of ideological tolerance no longer has the shine it once did. They’ll think that it’s time to press the advantage, just like their opponents did. “But this time it will be for the good!” So it will happen by an unconscious slippery slope of motivated reasoning, and not any conscious design.
It sounds like your background assumption is a world where people have attempted for many years to silence conservatives, who met these attempts with even-handed tolerance but lately find it isn’t helping their cause. Perhaps now they’ll go on the defense. This may be an accurate picture of your world but it does not resemble my experience, particularly with respect to the issue of transgender rights.
I’d say that there’s a grain of truth to that victim complex when it comes to some conservatives in academia, especially the closeted ones. But it’s not an accurate picture of the whole country. Conservatives gleefully join in cancellation mobs of their own, of course. It’s just that the university isn’t a center of power they control. Republican politicians make a lot of noise about the evil of left academia, but I think that’s mostly grandstanding. I think many are happy to have woke academia there so they can rail against it at fundraisers.
Who is arguing that discourse should be muzzled by those who have power? If powerful editors are dismissing scholarship for purely political reasons, that’s terrible. The assumption that they had no legitimate reason in this case seems unjustified.
In reply to your last claim, I would say they did not wait for any flimsy veneer of justification like “arguments gaining traction”, where “they” means legislators who have restricted academic freedom and taken away basic rights.
I didn’t claim that anyone here was saying that. It was a conditional statement, anticipating an objection that I have heard before in less stark terms.
The conservatives banning speech and restricting academic freedom are doing it because they have successfully exploited the public perception that there is no academic freedom anyway.
They are successful in part because they can point to examples like we are discussing here. People outside of academia (who vote and thus wield political power) have a very low opinion of the humanities and intramural fights like we are having here are only hasting our demise, I’m afraid.
Fixed that for you: “successfully manufactured and then exploited the public perception”
And who has contributed to this manufacturing? Might it be the people who are taking scholarly debates into outside media to decry alleged censorship?
The comport of GC scholars is a way bigger threat to the humanities than any alleged censorship.
I find that hard to believe, given testimony from many, many people in this very thread who describe their experiences in engaging with these topics.
I care. And could you please stop misrepresenting the issue? Having different views about the use of pronouns/bathrooms/ participation in sports is not per se exclusionary. The vast majority of people involved here are liberal philosophers who will use your preferred pronouns even if they think it is bullshit. Exclusion would look very different.
Byrne’ s arguments are well-reasoned, certainly better and without rhetorical snide when compared to his philosophical opponents.
I’d rather have thousands of Byrnes in philosophy than navel-gazing people who with their sole attention to themselves and their perceived suffering restrict academic freedom.
I do think having “different views” about bathrooms is per se exclusionary when that view is literally “trans women shouldn’t use women’s bathrooms”. I’m not interested in having professional colleagues who think trans peoples’ pronouns are “bullshit”. I don’t care that this hurts the feelings of self-avowed liberal philosophers.
Regardless of whether you’re interested or not, many colleagues will think this.
Ah yes, the “silent majority”.
Happily, if this thread is any indication, the political climate is “too chilling” for them to air their views publicly. Unfortunately, the alleged chilly social reception to trans-exclusionary views doesn’t seem to have dissuaded half of the US political establishment from waging a war on trans people.
Wait, the chilling of speech in academia (and many other workplaces) HASN’T stopped the right wing outrage machine dead in its tracks? It has somehow… emboldened it? How is that even possible? I just don’t understand! There is just no way that the two things could possibly be… linked, could they? No, not at all. Surely it is best to just keep chilling the speech. Victory will surely come.
Labeling questions that people have, and want to ask, as outside “the bounds of polite liberal discourse” will only induce skepticism that we should be operating within the bounds of polite liberal discourse.
Polite liberal discourse should be robust to accommodate discussions between people who disagree with each other on social issues of even profound moral significance.
Lots of acrimony, but I think we can call agree on the following:
“If the institutions of philosophy prohibit the defense of trans-exclusionary views, what then? Do the views disappear? No. Rather, their best defenses go elsewhere, to less reliable, less seriously-vetted venues… where argumentative errors, rhetorical nudges, strategic omissions, and polemical sleights-of-hand are more likely”.
One way to begin to improve the current state of affairs is by addressing and overcoming this sort of professional conceit and recognizing that the institutions of philosophy are in fact rife with that for which the “less seriously-vetted venues” are looked down upon. Moreover, the discipline, like several others in the academy of late, is being hijacked by totalitarians.
I want to understand the limits of the principles of publication ethics some people in this thread are advocating.
Suppose that a scholar sends an academic press a proposal for a book defending a position on the metaphysics of race. The scholar is well-established in another field of philosophy but has published little on philosophy of race. Based on the book proposal, the reviewers and the editor expect the book to be provocative and controversial but not beyond the pale. The press offers the scholar a book contract. The completed manuscript turns out to be a thinly-veiled defense of 19th century “scientific racism.” The manuscript has a long bibliography, but most of the chapters present arguments of poor quality. Some chapters read like rants.
What should the press do with this manuscript? Must the reviewers reply to the author’s racist rants point-by-point? Must the press offer the author an opportunity to submit a revised manuscript? Is the press ethically required to publish what the author submits?
It’s obvious: you reject the manuscript in a short tweet.
As a mid-career ethicist, do you ever question the ethics of the way you rig/frame your hypotheticals?
I think that this really strikes at the heart of the issue. It does seem (to me at least) that there are some views for which “academic freedom” would and should be given up—a defense of slavery, for instance. At the same time, it also seems (to me) that there are views for which academic freedom would not and should not be given up, despite considerable moral disagreement with real world consequences—e.g., the issue of abortion.
Maybe, ultimately, Byrne’s case is more like the former than the latter. I don’t mean to foreclose any possibility. All I can do is register my uncertainty, my feeling that (e.g.) the question of applicable pronouns is less clear than that of (e.g.) slavery, at least to a good portion of the public consciousness; that although I can and will respect someone’s pronouns and rights, I will still internally remain unsure about the actual truth concerning the nature of sex and gender, how and to what extent a pluralistic society should accommodate others with whom they disagree, etc. This is mostly involuntary. No matter what I have learned so far about these issues, some of the central moral or metaphysical claims remain unclear to me.
That’s all to say: I agree that the issue is worth comparing to these more obvious cases.
I’m not persuaded that academic freedom is the relevant moral category here.
It’s difficult to imagine a defense of slavery getting past the proposal stage. Suppose an author promises a press a book making “a neo-Aristotelian argument for workplace hierarchy” and presents a sample chapter defending “wage slavery.” Then the author submits a manuscript including a defense of chattel slavery. The author’s defense of chattel slavery, like all defenses of chattel slavery, is transparently absurd, and it becomes clear to the reviewers that the flaws in this argument also infect the defense of “wage slavery.” Would it infringe academic freedom to turn down the manuscript on the grounds that it is not only offensive, but also poorly argued and unlikely to be substantially improved on revision?
If a press accepts a book proposal accurately outlining a (necessarily shoddy) defense of chattel slavery, and the press later turns down the manuscript, I suppose the author would have a valid complaint. I would understand the complaint in terms of a broken promise, a promise the press should not have made.
The answer here seems easier to me. The editor can certainly ask the author to revise the book in response to reviewer concerns and make clear that, while the author is not required to abandon their views, that it’s critically important that they respond to these arguments in the book itself.
In honesty, I’m having a hard time believing that an academic book publisher will publish an objectively shoddy (as opposed to controversial) defense of chattal slavery for the same reason I wouldn’t expect objectively shoddy scholarship in general. Given the diversity of ways of doing philosophy (Justin had a post on this earlier this week!), I think things would have to be really bad for something that shoddy to be published.
That being said, I’ve read lots of work I don’t consider to be good but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been published.
I would very much enjoy a well-argued case for slavery. A lot on counterintuitive positions are defended in metaphysics, why not also in moral philosophy? Are you the arbiter of moral truths? Why not attack Singer then for his views on disabled people?
I like good arguments for counterintuitive positions in moral and political philosophy, too. Some positions can’t be defended well.
No, I am certainly not the arbiter of moral truths, and I don’t think I suggested otherwise. What I did report, instead, is how a particular moral issue *seems to me*, and how it causes a kind of personal dilemma in my thinking about these matters. It’s really nothing more than recognizing that, on different moral issues, I might have similar reservations, and wondering how I should approach them (perhaps the best move is to pay them no mind, and to permit every view an institutional venue. I just don’t know.)
For what it’s worth, my sense of it would be that, first, an invitation for a chapter or a book contract should only be extended where there is reasonable confidence in the result (based on the author’s expertise, the quality of the work, and, in the case of a book, a detailed proposal). I.e., people inviting or contracting should have some basis for confidence about what they’ll get. So I doubt your hypothetical should or would ever get past that hurdle. But if the agreements and invitations were reasonably well-informed and the result is somehow judged a disaster, I’d expect editor, reviewers, and author to confer about why (through reports or whatnot), with the author having a chance to revise under clear guidance about what any problems are. Only after efforts at revision have failed or an impasse about what revision is justified should something be spiked. The responsibilities here are multiple: the author is responsible for communicating what sort of book/chapter she intends and what her background for it is; the editor is responsible to be aware of the author’s past work, idiom, and qualifications for the sort of work sought; and both are responsible to try to navigate mismatches between their respective expectations.
In this case, about which I don’t want to comment on substance, the issue would just be: is Byrne’s work consistent with his past work in this area and was this known before he was invited or given a contract? If so, then I think he (or any author) has a reasonable expectation that the work wouldn’t be spiked without an attempt to navigate the issues. That is, if the contracted work was foreseeable and predictable based on his scholarly profile, then it’s worrisome to bring in objections after the work’s completion that should have been addressed at the outset or prevented the invitation/contract in the first place.
What most confuses me about this conversation is that people seem simultaneously to be suggesting that the quality and nature of Byrne’s work is well known and that it ok to spike it after agreements because it is true to his prior form. You might complain that he got a contract and/or invitation in the first place – and object heartily to that. But if you ask a duck to write a piece, spiking it for quacking seems wrong. Don’t invite the duck if you don’t want the quack.
“Don’t invite the duck if you don’t want the quack” seems like a good principle.
It happens that male ducks generally don’t quack. You might assume that since you have invited in a duck it’s going to quack, but it might turn out to make other surprising noises.
I’m sorry, what sort of duck?
Mallards, for example. You can distinguish them because the drakes don’t quack like the hens in the way some might expect.
>What should the press do with this manuscript? Must the reviewers reply to the author’s racist rants point-by-point? Must the press offer the author an opportunity to submit a revised manuscript? Is the press ethically required to publish what the author submits?
My experience with book publishing is that book proposals typically include sample chapters (usually at least an introduction and one substantive chapter though publishers may ask for substantial drafts, sometimes entire versions, of manuscripts in the proposal). Editted collections, on the other hand, often do not include all of the essays in advance but, instead, a slate of committed authors who have yet to write anything.
It should be exceedingly rare, in other words, for the situation that you’re proposing, Mid-career, to happen for a single-author sort of book. For whatever reason, if it turns out that a publisher accepted a book proposal that didn’t include substantive chapters, then I think that’s the sort of risk that authors run with such a prospectus. However, I would expect such a publisher to have at least asked a few questions for the author to suss out these issues in advance.
With editted collections, I think things are more complicated. Editors can certainly choose not to publish chapters they solicited though I think this is both unusual (as David Wallace as noted) and can become unethical (perhaps Byrne’s experience could be such an example if the facts turn out as he says they do).
Without saying anything about the merits of any views or the censorship or cancellation or rejection or whatever of any views, I just want to wonder about the title of this post. It is not at all clear to me that Byrne’s views are “unpopular”. Outside of academic philosophy, I suspect they would be affirmed by at least a third of people – far more popular than some views on the metaphysics of gender that don’t get canceled. Even inside academic philosophy, if these comments and my personal experience are any guide, there are plenty of people with views like Byrne’s. The problem for Byrne is not that his views are “unpopular” but that they are unpopular with the sorts of people who – rightly or wrongly – try to censor views with which they disagree.
I meant the scope of “unpopular” to be current academic philosophy. No doubt I could have picked a better title.
Makes sense. Sorry if the comment was nitpicky!
Join any sports club in a working class area. The banter and politically incorrect jokes you hear in the changing room… And these people are still not evil.
I agree. And for another reason. Philosophers have views far less popular than Byrnes, but they are not marginaized for their views. e.g., Daivd Lewis and his modal realism. Byrne’s experiences is not solely due to his view’s unpopularness.
Almost 300 comments in and I still have not seen any evidence that anything untoward has happened here.
It seems perfectly likely to me that a press or an editor might consider a piece of work by a very smart person who is willing to lay down their best defense of a very contested view. What a scoop if they are successful! And it seems perfectly legitimate to then not publish it, if even that very smart person’s best defense just isn’t very good (cf. the comment of Mid Career Ethicist). “Unseriousness” is a way of not being good and, as I have argued up and down in here, it is a legitimate charge in principle. None of us are in the epistemic position (the manuscript not being available) to assess its legitimacy in this particular case.
But in such an epistemic position, and all else being equal, I’d presume that we proceed from the default assumption that our peer review practices are broadly robust. Sure, many bad papers get through, but if a particular type of view consistently and repeatedly appears, if at all, in venues on the margins of professional recognition, then I take this to be evidence against the view, not against the robustness of peer review.
If Professor Byrne, with his unquestionable intellect, has laid down the very best defense of this particular view, and still it did not pass OUPs process, why am I not to take this as evidence that even the very best defense of this view is just not very good? And if, as is the case, other people have failed at the same task, why should this impugn the review process, rather than, again, the view itself?
The matter is complicated by the fact that, reasonably, a defense of a very controversial position might have to meet a higher standard of quality than a defense of a rather milquetoast position. But this is just par for the course. And I expect the smartest person around giving us their best defense to be able to clear this bar, if the view is worth considering.
All the moral outrage in here, the hand-wringing about academic freedom, accusations of bias, institutional capture, and chilled discourse in the profession — they all proceed from the PRESUPPOSITION that the gender critical view is intrinsically deserving of publication in our highest venues.
If the presupposition fails, then nothing at all out of the ordinary has happened. Which is, by the way, what people with actual expertise in philosophy of gender have been saying from the start, and been repeating for years.
Moreover if this presupposition fails, and our professional norms are robustly working as they ought, then what is actually happening with the GC view is that there is a coup attempt. An attempt to use outside media, political means, and whipped up fears about academic freedom to accrue legitimacy for a philosophical view that would not otherwise stand on its own. Of course, we ought to resist such attempts and defend our norms. The value of a philosophical position is not to be adjudicated by the Daily Mail.
Thus, again, my answer to Justin’s request for constructive suggestions: convince the rest of us of your presupposition, or find a way to go about your argument without it. Demonstrate your good faith. Show it is not a coup.
The fact that some people sincerely hold GC views, or that such views were (allegedly; I strongly believe this is a misrepresentation of the history of feminism) widespread once won’t do. Examples ABOUND of philosophically valueless views that are sincerely held by some or, once, many. Do better.
I know it’s hard, but I’m hardly sorry that doing better is made so much more difficult by the reputations that some GC scholars have made for themselves over the years.
I’m bowing out at this point, cheers.
This is a fully general argument that if a view is blocked from being published, then that is (decisive?) evidence that it should not be published.
No one denies that there are philosophically valueless views. The question is just which views they are, and how we should handle these kinds of institutional conflicts given that reasonable people disagree about the issues (whether or not you agree with them). This is all made especially challenging by the fact that all of us are embedded in a context where matters are complicated and personal, some people are sincerely puzzled and others just want to oppress, and so on. Relatively recent (historically speaking) moral positions don’t simply get seen for what they are and adopted without confusion. There is almost always a struggle, and not everyone pushing back is doing so out of malice.
A historical analogue that (I believe) was not brought up in these 300 comments: when Karl Popper turned to political philosophy he had no reputation/credentials in the subfield. I happen to consider “The open society and its enemies” subpar intellectually speaking, but I wouldn’t dream of proposing that it shouldn’t have been published.
Almost 300 comments in and I still have not seen any evidence that anything untoward has happened here.
I wanted to be done with this discussion, but this bit keeps coming back to me, so I think it’s worth thinking about a bit more. Here’s what I (and I think some others) took as “evidence that [something] untoward has happened here.”
1) The testimony of Alex Byrne that matters were dealt with in, at least, an unusual and prefunctory way.
2) The highly unusual, and I’d say improper, way that his “pronouns” paper was dealt with by an editor over twitter, in light of a twitter backlash against it
3) The well-documented poor treatment of Holly Lawford-Smith, when writing on similar topics, both by OUP and by people outside the press who put pressure on the press. (These are noted by Byrne in his article.)
4) My general impression of how discussions of these topics have played out in the discipline.
This is hardly definitve evidence, though I do think it’s enough to establish a good prima facie case. And, all of it is rebuttable. (For example, testimony evidence is only valuable if it’s credible. Perhaps some people doubt Byrne’s credibility. I don’t have a lot of experience either way, but given that he’d suffer a signficant reputational harm if his claims were either made up or grossly distorting of what happened, I think there’s some reason to give them creedence. And, some people might understand what happened to Lawford-Smith’s books in a different way than I do. I would doubt that’s the right way to see the matter, but it’s perhaps not an obviously wrong one. Finally, of course, people may reasonably have a different impression of the general situation in the discipline in relation to these matters than I do.) We now also have some rebuttle testimony from Peter Momtchiloff at OUP. I’m not certain how we should balance the compeating testimony especially since, as is often the case, the accounts do not match up 1 to 1.
What conclusion we should draw from the above about the merits of the case are, I think, not completely certain, but I think it’s good to get some perspective on why people might believe one way or another, and why it’s not especially plausible to say that there is no evidence for the claim that something bad happened, even if that evidence isn’t fully convincing in the end.
Against my better judgement, briefly: yes, I can see why people think there’s evidence. I still can’t see any evidence.
4 and 2 are nothing, a mere feeling and a storm in a teacup, respectively.
1 and 3 are more interesting. They ane evidence if and only if you accept the presupposition I’ve noted.
I do think the presupposition is important and, really, at the heart of all of this, including the belief whether there’s evidence of wrongdoing here.
I think I might follow On The Market’s lead and step away from this conversation. It’s been interesting, but it is getting difficult to follow the thread, and increasingly tedious to be painstakingly defending from first principles claims about the way publishing in our profession works that everyone agreed upon five minutes ago (cf Justin’s comments in the original post) but which are now suddenly being denied. Anyway, I have a forthcoming paper in an edited collection that I need to finish writing.
As a quick closing comment: it is intellectually defensible to hold that there are no good arguments for view X, and that we know this because if there were, they would have got through peer review. It is also at least *intellectually* defensible to hold that view X is beyond the pale, that any argument that makes the key presuppositions of view X is ipso facto harmful, and that we should not tolerate view X appearing in our journals. It takes a certain mental agility to hold both concurrently.
“Anyway, I have a forthcoming paper in an edited collection that I need to finish writing.”
Check twitter, it may have been rejected.
#nah
Having reflected on almost 300 comments…
I am undoubtedly gender critical (hence the anonymous comment. Sigh).
Anyway, I have read all sorts of things that make me angry and offended qua woman. I’ve seen my view that sex is real and relevant been described as genocidal, and beyond the pale, and not worthy of philosophical discussion. It’s been dismissed as obviously wrong.
I’m left wondering what the hell is going on here. How have we got to the point where a basic belief like sex is relevant has become so beyond the pale that other philosophers are describing it as “contemptible” (sorry, he didn’t say the belief was. It’s the people who hold it who are contemptible). What the hell is going on ?! I have never seen this kind of reaction and gate keeping about ANY other issue ever.
If you ever tried publishing articles defending any conservative positions, you’d probably see other instances of gatekeeping! But it’s true, I think, that the efforts to discredit and silence GC feminists are especially intense because ideological rivals from the left are (probably correctly) perceived as being more threatening than those from the right.
As an administrator of an R1 university who is getting updates on this thread, we can’t but appreciate Richard Russo’s novel *Straight Man*. “Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?”
Ah, the art of the we-won’t-budge non-answer… OUP doing it’s best to damage it’s (inflated?) reputation and repel top talent…
Sorry I’m bit confused about the chronology in Momtchiloff’s reply to Wallace. Does Momtchiloff mean (a) Byrne’s manuscript was reviewed by five people (Momtchiloff included) and then rejected or (b) Byrne’s book was intially reviewed and then Byrne signed a contract with OUP and then the final manuscript was re-reviewed by five people and rejected? (a) is normal, (b) (highly) abnormal.
The contract was signed on the basis of a book proposal, as per Byrne’s own account. The actual completed manuscript was sent out for review, as is standard, and then Byrne reported… elliptically on the contents of the review, and Peter has described their extent but not their contents in slightly greater detail.
The timeline seems fairly standard.
I see, thank you for the clarification!
I would like to read (eventually) Byrne’s book and the comments he was given by the four reviewers and the editor (understanding that these comments need not amount to detailed and thorough responses to all arguments made in the manuscript). I don’t think there is much point discussing the im/propriety of this rejection, however unusual it may strike people, without having access to the book and the reviewers’ comments.
No doubt different people will eventually read these and come to different conclusions about whether OUP has bowed to political pressure or simply rejected a substandard work. But at least the disagreement will be informed by good evidence, and not powered by preconceptions and speculation.
I also think it’s quite important that the relevant comments are made public, otherwise this matter will inevitably become just another Rashomon moment in the contentious discussion of transgender matters in philosophy, compounding the hostility and animus that has very depressingly taken root here.
I hope Prof. Byrne does release the comments that were provided to him. I assume that the reviewers would not object, assuming that their anonymity is maintained. If I were one of those reviewers and had recommended rejection on the basis of a substantive critique of the manuscript, I would be somewhat chagrined to read Prof. Byrne’s description and happy to see the truth come to light. And if I were one of those reviewers but had recommended rejection in the dismissive fashion mentioned in the description, then I would have no standing to object at all.
“Apparently, all that the four expert readers and Peter Momtchiloff told Byrne is that “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” Is that logically possible? Sure. How likely is it? Isn’t the answer much closer to the “not likely” end of the spectrum?”
Another possibility seems to be that the reviewers had comments, but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with by revision. Then the book was rejected without the opportunity to revise, with the only reason given for the rejection being that it wasn’t sufficiently “serious and respectful” etc.
I don’t know whether that’s what actually happened, but I think it would be consistent with all reports so far.
I’ll drop back briefly into the thread to comment on Peter Momtchiloff’s reply to me.
I’ve corresponded privately with Alex Byrne about Momtchiloff’s reply. I believe Byrne is (properly) concerned about ensuring that confidences are respected, and so I’ll be circumspect: let me say only that on the basis of what I have been told I don’t think there is any inconsistency between Byrne’s account of what happened and Momtchiloff’s; nor am I at all inclined to revise my assessment of these events as a fairly dramatic, and almost certainly politically forced, deviation from the norms of academic publishing.
My own feeling is that there is a genuine issue of how to consider the confidentiality of referee reports, but that it would be regrettable if it were not possible to communicate more of the details here to the community. I hope that Alex Byrne will communicate further on these issues.
And here it is. We have direct evidence from OUP that the book WAS processed properly, and that Byrne DID get more comments than he claimed in his blogpost – from the OUP editor: ‘By way of clarification, let me assure you that the manuscript underwent peer review, and Alex was given comments on the manuscript from me and from four expert readers’.
Despite this, what happens know? We are told that we should again simply ‘trust’ somebody who has spoken to Byrne directly that this is not ‘inconsistent’ with Byrne’s account. The situation was still ‘almost certainly politically forced’.
I don’t whether to laugh or to cry. Clearly the two are inconsistent. Byrne at best was misleading, and at worst directly lied about what happened. What we have, yet again, is senior people defending another senior person who, for once, has tasted a little bit of the sometimes cruel nature of philosophy publication. I again recognise that what happened to Byrne will hurt, and cancelling a book contract is an extreme move. But OUP had grounds for it based on reviewer comments. This happens in philosophy! It is nothing new. Just a senior loud person trying to get sympathy that has happened to many people before, who just happen to be more junior normally.
Perhaps this is a version of a natural reaction in a way from Byrne. He’s simply embarrassed. He’s likely told people that he has a big important book coming out with OUP, and now he does not. Many of us have probably told people we got no comments with a rejection when in fact we got comments that pointed out how poor/underdeveloped our work was. Unlike others though, Byrne has decided to try to make some grander political statement about being ‘cancelled’ simply because he struggles to deal with a rejection.
(Again, before I get more patronising comments detailing how peer review works, I am a senior philosopher. I know how this works. Is this sort of case rare? Yes, but not as rare as other senior people seem to be believe. It just doesn’t normally happen to them. Senior people in philosophy need to get a grip on how publishing is NOW, and not how it was 30 years ago when they started)
30 years ago I was in high school.
(And I’m sorry you thought my previous post was patronizing. I think I was explicit that it was aimed at junior people, that I couldn’t tell which anonymous people were junior and which weren’t, but that lots of people were using pseudonyms that suggested they were. (You were not.) 48 people have liked it so it was obviously of some use.)
I suspect that you will not share my assessment that my predictions have been largely vindicated here, and of course, I have not privately corresponded with Byrne to be reassured that even though these four referee reports (including their constructive comments and criticisms) and the additional feedback and comments from Peter M. were entirely omitted from his original recounting of the narrative, it changes nothing of substance nor does it impact the degree of credence we should have about whether this is a case of ideological capture or funny business versus a case in which someone received an editorial decision that they dislike and disagree with, and are perhaps unable to see the same way as the person who made it because they are non-disinterested as to the quality of their own work (what I would call “the standard case” when one’s work is rejected via peer review). I think you should at least grant that, very obviously, many people defending Byrne prior to this update were assuming that he had not omitted salient details about the feedback he had been provided, such as whether there were four substantive referee reports, and whether the editor had provided more feedback on the decision than “this is not a serious book” or some such, and that had he written the initial narrative with these details in it, the discussion of this case would have unfolded at least somewhat differently, since it would much better resemble a fairly normal procedure, even if people would still be suspicious given the infrequency of contracted books being dropped (I have no idea how often this happens), or whatever.
Since against my better judgement I’ve overridden my “step away” instinct, let me make one more point about the issue of peer review and gatekeeping. I want to give a case study on an area that is totally removed from any issues of harm or morality.
As anyone here who knows my academic work will be aware, a large part of it is concerned with the Everett (many-worlds) interpretation of quantum theory. When I started working on this topic in the 2000s, it was not taken at all seriously. My first paper on this was submitted to the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science; it was rejected, and one of the referees literally said that they thought the many-worlds interpretation was unserious, clearly refuted, and that nothing should be published on it. Other people who tried to publish on Everett in the 1990s and early 2000s say similar things.
Things have moved on. The Everett interpretation is now quite widely acknowledged as a very serious option in interpreting quantum mechanics. But there was a quite extended period where there was a clear community hostility to the whole approach.
Don’t cry for me: I came in at the tail end of this attitude and have done very nicely, thank you, in defending and explicating the Everett interpretation. But don’t treat peer review as infallible. I think it does a reasonable job in difficult circumstances but it’s not a panacea.
I wonder whether you and your colleagues at the time thought the best amelioration of this situation was to rile up a mob to protest the “censorship” of your view.
Or perhaps, that you’d rather begin by defending the seriousness of your view first, slowly accrue legitimacy for it, and only then return to more grander applications.
If you chose the latter over the former, then you did what I suggested to the GCs that they do.
I promise to do my very best to leave it at that.
We had the decided advantage that our critics did not decide to parlay their transitory advantage into a moral norm.
I must admit, after an afternoon of talking about good faith in here, the update did elicit a wry chuckle.
Delightfully, the new GC spin is already being spun and I eagerly await the new party line: will it be the concoction of another alleged professional standard that has been violated here; or will we leave it at “the information is secret but trust me bro its bad”.
To be honest, this is a rather clear advantage of contributing clearly and consistently to blogs under my own name over a period of many years: I think readers of DN are in a good position to assess whether or not they can trust me when I make a claim that needs to be taken on trust.
(Notwithstanding which, I am hopeful that the actual reports, or something close to them, will be shareable soon.)
I trust almost no one, and I disagree with David on many issues. But despite that, I trust him to be careful and intellectually modest and honest. He is among the very, very best of the contributors to this blog.
By the way, I am the notorious “Jen.”
– thinks that these professional standards are merely “alleged”
– thinks that respect for privacy is nefarious
That checks out.
If philosophers are permitted to ask questions like, “Does morality exist at all?” “Should we commit suicide?” “Do animals feel pain?” then it’s plausible they should be permitted to ask questions like “What exactly is a woman?” “What is gender identity?”
Yes we can ask those questions, as shown by the extensive literature on precisely those topics. What we do not have the right to do is to publish in prestigious places our answers to those questions if those answers do not meet the expected standard within the debate as assessed by expert reviewers. In this case, Byrne’s work was deemed not good enough by those expert reviewers, and so his work was not accepted for publication. It really is quite simple – his work just got rejected, just as likely has happened to all of us, with comments that he did not agree with. Unlike others, he just decided to complain about it on the internet for sympathy and mislead others about what really happened. I would advise that Prof. Byrne needs to grow that ‘thick skin’ that senior academics often tell more junior people is needed.
I am not just talking about the Byrne case. I think philosophers should be allowed to discuss and disagree about the nature of womanhood without the the culture of hostility, threats, and shaming that currently exists.
Am I right in thinking that a single editor at a press like OUP usually has the power to veto a contracted book? If so, it seems strange that this is accepted by the profession, given the significance of these publications for authors (employability, influence) and readers (the range of visible debates and arguments). Perhaps panels of senior philosophers from across the whole discipline should vote (preferably non-anonymously) at the final stage.
Justin writes:
“Apparently, all that the four expert readers and Peter Momtchiloff told Byrne is that ‘the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.’ Is that logically possible? Sure. How likely is it? Isn’t the answer much closer to the ‘not likely’ end of the spectrum?
Perhaps Professor Byrne will share the comments he received on his book manuscript in their entirety.”
I can confirm that the answer to “How likely is it?” is “0% likely.” The expert readers told me various things. Nonetheless, OUP’s stated reason for rejecting my book without allowing me to respond to the reports was exactly what I said it was.
As to the possibility of sharing the comments, I do not think that readers’ reports solicited (and paid for) by a publisher are mine to share. Moreover, one reviewer simply supplied a pdf of the manuscript marked up with some (minor) helpful and constructive comments. Peter did likewise. (Most of those were incorporated in the version that will appear in print.) Another report consisted of Peter’s notes from a discussion with a reviewer. I have nothing to hide (apart from the manuscript, since I want you all to buy my book, if only to commit it to the flames). OUP has my permission to release whatever comments it likes.
I should point out that I received the contract after the usual procedure described by David Wallace upthread (book proposal, external reviews, etc.). As I said in the Quillette piece, the draft “conformed closely to the initial proposal, both in style and substance. Many sentences from the proposal had ended up in the book.”
On the invited pronouns chapter, everyone will soon be able to judge for themselves whether it should have been rejected without revision. The Journal of Controversial Ideas version is basically the same as the first draft, with some improvements, and cut down by about 2K words.
Finally, it’s worth remarking that all the focus has been on me rather than Holly Lawford-Smith, whose story was a big part of my Quillette article. I should remind Daily Nous readers that her book Sex Matters is only coming out with OUP because of an intervention by the Free Speech Union.
So two of the four reviewers provided substantive comments, and yet “No errors in the manuscript were identified”? Do you think those other two reviewers, the ones not mentioned in this comment, would agree with your characterization that “No errors in the manuscript were identified”?
One of the two reviewers would agree. The other would disagree. You can guess whom I agree with.
Okay, so, at least one reviewer, and the editor (seemingly), would assert that some errors were identified.
So presumably, those two individuals would also dispute your characterization that “the sole reason [that the book was rejected is] that ‘the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.’”, except insofar as those <things X which that one reviewer, but not you, would regard as mistakes> are evidence for “‘the book [] not treat[ing] the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.'” They would instead say that they identified mistakes, and that those mistakes (taken together), provide reason for rejecting the book.
And you dispute that those things identified were in fact mistakes, thus leaving the overall characterization of “[in]sufficiently serious and respectful” as unjustified. Does that sound accurate?
No
Would you care to clarify? Is there a better encapsulation? I’m trying to be even-handed here, to find a phrasing that both you and the reviewers would be likely to endorse, as a statement of facts.
“The expert readers told me various things [and the editor gave a brief summary of what they took away from those comments and then rejected] my book without allowing me to respond.”
That’s precisely how most rejection works in our field, in my experience! But I’m sure I will again be informed that things work differently once you reach a certain tier of, um, merit.
That’s how it often works for a submission of an article to a peer-reviewed journal, yes.
But is a such a rejection, without even a “revise and resubmit” option, typical for a book under contract? I don’t think so.
Correct. It’s not (directly) about reaching a ‘tier of merit’, it’s about precommissioned versus unsolicited writing. (It is absolutely true that better known people find it easier to get commissions in the first place.)
An honest question for you David, with genuine appreciation for your patience. (My snark above notwithstanding, I have genuinely learned something about disciplinary norms from you here.)
Byrne writes (over at Leiter) that “the book is not a scholarly monograph; it is aimed at a general audience interested in the topic of sex and gender. There’s not all that much “philosophy” in it anyway.”
Does that change your thinking here? It seems like the relevant considerations for publishing a trade book are quite different than for a scholarly monograph, such that a press may be justified in deviating from norms for handling monographs (even if those norms were rock-solid in the first place). Of course, if doing so would violate a contract, that would be bad—but by Byrne’s own admission OUP didn’t do that.
It’s a good question. I think if OUP had made a *commercial* decision not to publish the manuscript, it would put a somewhat different slant on things (albeit it would be an odd commercial decision: in the UK at the moment the book looks very well timed for success.) But Peter Momtchiloff seems clear that this was an academic decision. (And there would always have been the option to reclassify the book as academic rather than trade.)
It would be good to know whether OUP sent the MS to reviewers who are obviously dead set against the publication of views like yours. If so, some of the reviewers’ comments may have been excuses to reach a foregone conclusion. Or they may have held the book to standards not generally met by published work on gender. Knowing about the reviewers (not by name, but in terms of their biases) would shed light on whether this process was really just “business as usual” as a lot of people in the comments would have us believe or skewed toward rejecting the book.
Jean, if bias or political skew is the concern, I don’t see how your query to Alex could resolve it. It would seem we would need to be able to distinguish between “reviewers who are obviously set against the publication of [defenses of view x]” and “reviewers who are obviously set against the publication of what they sincerely and reasonably judge to be unacceptably bad defenses of view X.” Are you expecting Alex to be able to provide an unbiased or unskewed judgment here? Why? Certainly he has a rather strong interest in the reviewers being unacceptably biased against him. So why not think he is at just as much a risk, if not a greater risk, of being biased as the reviewers you’re concerned about?
I think you’re making this unnecessarily complicated. OUP gave him a contract, based on an initial set of positive reviews. It’s possible that they then realized the fuss over Lawford-Smith’s book is something they didn’t want to repeat. So they deliberately gave the revised MS to reviewers of the sort who won’t even be co-platformed with the likes of Alex Byrne. If that is the case, then the fact that there were reviewer comments does not at all show that this was “business as usual.” They were going to reject the book no matter what. if he knows who these people are, then there’s no reason to think he can’t tell whether they see him as toxic or not. There are facts about people avoiding being platformed with him or signing petitions trying to get books like his withdrawn or signing petitions trying to get articles like Rebecca Tuvel’s withdrawn, etc. etc. So it’s just not true that his biases would prevent him from answering my question. The only thing that might prevent him from answering it is simply not knowing who the reviewers are. Then again, it may be that the tone of their referee reports tells him something. If so, I’d like to know about it. How OUP chose referees is very relevant to the question whether they evaluated the MS in a normal or an aberrant way.
“No errors in the manuscript were identified”, yet at the same time “The expert readers told me various things” and “one reviewer simply supplied a pdf of the manuscript marked up with some (minor) helpful and constructive comments. Peter did likewise. (Most of those were incorporated in the version that will appear in print”.
First, it is not unusual for reviewers to return a marked up pdf, so one possible (but I’m not sure if intended) implication of ‘simply supplied’ is strange. ‘Simply supplied’ could be used to minimise that review, but it sounds perfectly normal to me.
Second, and more substantively, how can the quotes above be consistent at all? I’m sorry to keep on about this, but please Prof. Byrne tell us: was this an intentionally misleading suggestion or merely an accidental one when you said that ‘no errors were identified’? Clearly some were! You naturally do not think that they were sufficient to reject the manuscript, but this is not an uncommon view of many authors whose work has been rejected. Again, this happening to a book is rare, but it has always been a possibility, and as it stands it clearly feels to some like you have presented this in a deliberately misleading way.
The version of this comment at The Other Place contains the following:
“(N.B. the book is not a scholarly monograph; it is aimed at a general audience interested in the topic of sex and gender. There’s not all that much “philosophy” in it anyway.)”
That would seem to make it rather less mystifying as to why the philosophy division of a leading academic press might decline to publish it.
//Nonetheless, OUP’s stated reason for rejecting my book without allowing me to respond to the reports was exactly what I said it was.//
You can just provide a direct quote so we can see for ourselves that this occurred. As it is a mildly surprising claim (by your own framing even), about a controversial topic, means you understand a lot of us reasonably won’t just take your word on the aptness of your summary. So, just provide the actual words used! What prevents this?
One norm being bandied about in this discussion (by OUP’s defenders) is that defenses of “potentially harmful” philosophical views should simply not be published in reputable venues. A related but more moderate norm (and more plausible norm) is that such defenses should not be banned, but should instead face heightened editorial scrutiny, that is, should be held to higher argumentative standards than defenses of views that are not potentially harmful.
Ideally more specification of these norms is needed, e.g. what sorts of harms count? What level of indirectness-of-harm still should suffice to to trigger the norm? How much heightened scrutiny, exactly? And so on.
Rather than tackle those abstract questions, however, here are some concrete issues where I think getting things wrong could potentially cause harms, or at least aid and abet political forces who are causing harms.
** Arguments for the immorality of abortion risk curtailing women’s fundamental rights.
** Arguments for the legitimacy of stringent border controls risk an increase in deaths due to asylum denials.
** Arguments against affirmative action risk perpetuating unjust disparities in opportunity.
** Arguments for the legitimacy of the death penalty risk an increase in the number of innocent people executed.
** Arguments that drone warfare can be made consistent with just war theory risk an increase in innocent deaths from drone attacks.
** Arguments for the morality of suicide risk more suicides.
** Arguments for a right to own a gun risk more gun deaths.
And so on.
I have pretty standard center-left views on all of these issues, so I take very seriously the harms mentioned in the list above.
Wouldn’t the aforementioned norm about “potentially harmful positions” curtail scholarly, philosophical debate on all of these issues? Yet it seems to me to be an obvious mistake to curtail such debate on the issues. And while it is a less obvious mistake, it still seems a mistake to me to tilt the editorial scales in favor of one side, as the more moderate norm proposes.
For one thing, almost as a matter of definition, in substantive disputes over justice, one side’s position will be less just than the other’s side. And if it is an injustice to opt for less justice rather than more justice, then in substantive disputes over justice, one side will be arguing for injustice, in a manner of speaking, with potentially harmful results. A norm which calls for shunning, de-platforming, etc., those who argue for injustice can’t help but throw cold water on philosophical debates over justice much more generally.
Secondly, the norms in question risk their own harms. There are potential harms to the credibility of philosophy as a discipline, for instance, and to the credibility of academia more generally, namely, from being seen to put a thumb on the scales of one’s own side in a debate. Weakening the credibility of institutions of higher learning is not good for society. We are of course already seeing this happen in real-time. (I’m not saying that THIS harm trumps all other harms, just that it is a harm that merits consideration.)
Yes, I know there are counter-examples to my own list of sample topics above: should reputable venues publish Holocaust denials, defenses of scientific racism, anti-semitic conspiracy theories, creationism, etc.? No. Many in this thread who are defending OUP will liken the current debates over transgender justice to be more akin to these scurrilous “debates” rather than to the starred (**) debates listed above. I disagree, but this comment is long enough as it is so I won’t argue for that claim here, except to say that it seems presumptuous to me to think we have so quickly as a society already reached the point of “my side alone is the only reasonable position in this debate.”
Just a note: it seems to me that using first names only is perhaps worse than using anonymous names.
note also that there are other risks which must also be considered
** Arguments for the morality of abortion risk unjust killing of innocents.
** Arguments for the illegitimacy of stringent border controls risk depriving citizens on the lower end of the labor market of important bargaining power.
** Arguments for affirmative action risk depriving meritorious candidates of what they deserve and limiting their opportunity on racist grounds.
** Arguments for the illegitimacy of the death penalty risk a serious reduction in just punishment.
** Arguments that drone warfare cannot be made consistent with just war theory risk an increase in innocent deaths from standard warfare
** Arguments for the immorality of suicide risk pointless and prolonged suffering.
** Arguments against a right to own a gun risk more people deprived of their right of self-defense against aggression.
I tire of the continuous and egregious misrepresentation of a view I spent an entire afternoon yesterday explaining and elaborating.
Nobody has argued that potential consequences should prohibit publication, or that academic freedom should be abridged, or that we need moral censors. Neither has anyone argued that there should be a thumb on the scale towards any horn of a moral dilemma.
I have argued that potential negative consequences merit scrutiny, and in particular scrutiny of whether the work is in good faith. Scrutiny regarding good faith means that works with potentially negative consequences can well be published. The works remaining unpublished are those that are in bad faith (I suppose nobody wants to see these published) and those that haven’t sufficiently demonstrated good faith.
If GCs have set themselves up so that they now have to work harder to demonstrate good faith, that does not worry me at all.
It would likewise not worry me if the scholars in another debate had set themselves up similarly (through repeated bad public comport) and thus had a harder time making it to publication.
Why are all of you so afraid of an assessment regarding good faith? Are you not writing your papers in good faith?
I started to write a comment here, and then ended up with a 1600 word blog post at digressionsimpressions
https://open.substack.com/pub/digressionsimpressions/p/on-the-controversy-in-the-philosophical?r=988vi&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Eric’s post is very good. Go read it. Some excerpts:
“Nearly all the people crying ‘foul’ now are people that happily participate in a system that is opaque, riddled with systematic conflicts of interests, editorial unaccountability, and that usually apparently does not cause them any friction. For, when I read Byrne’s essay in Quillette, I was stunned by his surprise that he received ‘bizarre’ referee reports that do not substantiate their claims and that are uncivil. And that, after a life-time in the profession, he sincerely claims ‘a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict.'”
“[I]n each controversy, a very senior figure will gravely and shamelessly intone that other scholar are afraid to speak up because they fear for their careers. It somehow never registers that the structural, cultural, intellectual, and economic conditions that generate such — let’s stipulate — real fear (sometimes even co-produced by said senior figure) also existed in some shape or another in the lost golden age they cherish…”
“In our collective behavior we reveal that professional philosophy is, in part, a (modest-in-the-long-term-scheme-of-things) spoils system… but we never really risk changing the system and incentives — our role in a wider political economy of credentialing and knowledge production — that produce these kinds of controversies (and the many less noticed irregularities that they hint at) so frequently.”
Thanks for writing this blog post, Eric. It does a nice job of showing that Byrne’s experience is far from unique insofar as questionable or (in the case of some of your examples) outright bad behavior on the part of journals is concerned. I recall following some of the public cases you describe and being troubled at the time, as I am now in this particular case.
Just to be clear, though, what you say in your post is not only consistent with Byrne’s interpretation of events in his case, but also provides a sketch of an explanation, in general terms, for why his interpretation might be accurate, i.e., the human foibles, the biases, the cultural, structural, political etc. incentives plaguing the peer-review process.
What I can’t tell–genuinely–is whether your main thesis is supposed to show 1. that we shouldn’t worry about what Byrne has described/alleged because even if it’s true, it’s actually pretty common or 2. we should worry, but the focus of our concern should be broader, aimed at the system of incentives that explain a wider range of problems that ordinarily escape the notice of people who aren’t personally impacted by it.
I very much doubt you are claiming 1, and so 2 looks more likely. Of course, there could be a 3, 4, 5, etc.
For many years, I blogged in the hope that 2 we can reform the system as we encountered each new controversy. Now, I really blogged (3, alas) to explain why I think we never really tackle these systematic problems (see last paragraph of my post).
I blogged for a decade in the hope of achieving something like your 2. But my position has shifted (3) to trying to explain why we have selective attention to these problems and why nothing changes structurally.
Thanks. That makes sense.
I should say that of course egregious things happen in the publication process. I’ve been on the wrong end of some myself; who hasn’t? What I think is driving the intensity of concern here is that these are not just isolated failures but represent a general pattern of censorship of a certain class of ideas (and notice that many on this blog are actively defending the propriety of the referee process here, and/or the active appropriateness of censorship).
Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is enemy action.
I think one point of Eric’s post — or maybe I’m reading this into it — is that our recognition of a “pattern of censorship of a certain class of ideas” is itself selective, and sensitive to our background political commitments and biases, to what we know and think is important.
This point may not excuse any particular objectionable behavior, but it may be relevant to our overall understanding of the field’s biases and flaws.
Yes, Justin, that’s right.
I’m sure this is right, and the point is well taken. But there isn’t a view from nowhere. With the particular pattern of commitments and biases I have, this sequence of events looks egregious. If someone else thinks otherwise (or thinks something else is egregious when I think it’s innocuous), all I can do is engage on the first-order debate and try to be open-minded and attentive. Eric’s post implies, I think rightly, a need for reflection on our biases, something we should of course do anyway. But I don’t think it dissolves any first-order consequences.
Yes, that seems right on the substance, but I didn’t think that was the main point he wanted to make, mostly because it’s just so obviously true. Of course we are more likely to recognize patterns of censorship or other negative things when our own commitments or interests or values make those salient to us in a way they wouldn’t to people who don’t share our commitments, interests, values, etc.
Who is most likely to recognize patterns of anti-GC censorship? GC scholars. Who is most likely to recognize patterns of anti-atheist censorship? Atheists. Etc.
Another, stronger claim would have been that there is no anti-GC pattern, and that claims to the contrary are explained by bias or whatever. But that’s not what Eric was arguing.
You should look up how many papers disproving Godel Incompleteness are not published, to the vocal and substantial chagrin of their authors. Lots of enemy action in the logic camp.
I do not understand why the null hypothesis is not that OUP’s editorial procedures are working properly and as intended.
Many people in this thread decry “academic freedom” and insist that *this* particular topic is one in which there is little room for rational debate. On their view, you must accept a certain view of gender and transgender metaphysics. Not only are you forbidden from challenging it, but others are forbidden from publishing your challenges to it.
Why? Why is *this* issue the taboo one for which right-thinking is mandatory?
Consider a parallel case: Open borders (the left-wing position championed by libertarians) vs closed borders (the right-wing position championed by Rawls).
In my view, all of the following are true:
1. The harm of open borders is much greater in aggregate than the harm of intolerance or nonacceptance of trans people
2. On an individual one-on-one basis, the harm to would-be immigrants is usually greater too.
3. We have extremely good empirical work done over decades evaluating the effects of open borders. The work is done by a wide range of theorists from different backgrounds and ideologies, and it nevertheless tends to support the open border position or at least much more open borders.
4. Borders restrictions are dehumanizing in practice, as enforced, and in principle, even if enforced in an idealized way.
5. Border restrictions often involve forcing people to accept an identity they dispute or don’t want to accept.
6. Borders are social constructions and can be evaluated as good or bad.
7. The harms of closed borders fall disproportionately on the world’s worst off people, people who are far worse off that the typical trans person in the West.
8. Border restrictions violate people’s most fundamental rights, rights far more fundamental than the right to vote or own property.
9. Most people who support closed borders have not thought carefully about it; most arguments against are not very good.
10. Borders involve privileging the perspectives of the well-off.
11. Arguments defending closed borders often involve mistaken empirical claims or exaggerations of relatively minor harms or costs.
12. Many, if not all, defenders of closed borders are straightforward bigots.
13. Various selfishly-motivated interest groups lobby against opening borders as a way of securing economic rents.
I’m not joking. 1-13 are true. It’s much more obvious that something close to the open borders position is correct than it’s obvious that a woman is not, by definition, an adult human female. If I could choose between fixing border restrictions or fixing trans issues, I’d choose the former in a heartbeat and consider it absurd to choose the latter. It’s many of orders of magnitude less important, even though it’s important. (Don’t worry: I have the most enlightened view possible on transgender issues, so no need to cancel me here.)
If, as so many here think, we are not merely entitled but required to censor, scold, cancel, and ostracize people who have the wrong view of transgender issues, should I not, a fortiori, treat you immigration restrictionists as even greater moral monsters, with even more obscene views, even more backward and uninformed? How dare OUP publish Borjas if it won’t publish Byrne?
Who are the “many here” who think we are “required to censor, scold, cancel, and ostracize people who have the wrong view of transgender issues”? Can you link us to the relevant comments where they make any of those claims?
Lulz, no. I literally don’t believe that you don’t agree.
Should “open” in 1 read “closed”?
Yes, thanks
Jason:
1) do you think people who are in favor of treating trans exclusionary philosophers as “moral monsters” would have some complaint about you doing the same to people with the closed border views?
2) what exactly is this supposed to show about people advocating on behalf of trans people/advocating against trans-exclusionary philosophers?
3) have you ever heard of “whataboutism”? https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-its-such-a-popular-tactic-in-arguments-182911
What is it like to be a philosopher with the ‘wrong’ views on the political importance of sex? From my own experience, attempting to make contributions in this area has been unlike any other area in philosophy.
In my case, I have had senior and respected philosophers announcing to the world that they don’t think me (or my ilk) are arguing in good faith when I make the case for the political importance of sex, as well as anonymous trolls telling a colleague who agreed to
discuss issues around sex and gender with me publicly that engaging with me is like engaging with nazis. I have also had colleagues in the discipline, both senior and junior, reach out privately to thank me for my attempts to discuss these matters while confessing that they feel unable to do so themselves.
I see complaints in some of the comments here that ‘gender critical’ contributions are poorly argued and fail to engage with the extensive existing literature that takes an opposing view. I don’t think that this in general is true, but nevertheless it is certainly the case that many philosophers who have made interventions on the ‘gender critical’ side have, like myself, not had a track record of research in feminist or trans philosophy, so perhaps we are more likely to miss things that everyone in the discipline understands to be obvious and given, making our work seem naïve to those who know the field better. I have made forays outside of my core area of expertise before (e.g. in thinking about some issues in metaethics) and I have felt some trepidation about dipping my toe into an area with an immense literature most of which has been new to me. In that case though I have benefitted from being able to talk to colleagues working in that area, presenting my own early stage musings at workshops and conferences and having it gently – and constructively – pointed out where I might be missing things and where I might want to look to develop my ideas further. In my own forays into writing on sex and gender, with one notable exception (a MANCEPT workshop organized by Miriam Ronzoni in 2019), I have found it very difficult to find places to discuss this work sincerely with people who challenge the gender critical view, and indeed it has been increasingly difficult for gender critical work to be presented and discussed in public at all without attracting significant protest. As a result it has not been easy to benefit from the expertise of those already immersed in feminist philosophy or gender studies who might otherwise have been able to point to errors of understanding or omissions of crucial arguments made in the literature, as would I think be typical in other cases where someone new to a field is
attempting to make a contribution.
I have myself run two workshops at York where gender critical ideas have been presented, but both have unfortunately had to be private, closed affairs. The most recent, held last May, was originally conceived as a public facing event on gender critical philosophy and its critics (including, amongst other things, a panel on Holly Lawford Smith’s Gender Critical Feminism book). However, having approached a number of people who I thought might be willing to participate in such an event, I found no one on the ‘critics’ side who was willing to participate. In the end I gave up on that idea and instead ran a cross-disciplinary workshop called ‘Let’s talk about sex’ presenting perspectives from philosophy, law, sociology, and history on why it matters to continue to talk about sex as distinct from gender identity. It was a really productive event, bringing together some amazing speakers (both high profile and early career). But we decided that given that the programme was by necessity one-sided, it should be held as a closed, invitation-only workshop rather than the public facing event originally planned.
Coincidentally, on the same day as the workshop Julie Bindel was at the University of York, speaking at the invitation of the student Free Speech Union (an event that had had to be rearranged due to previous threats of protest). Julie’s talk attracted 120 protesters. Indeed, York’s own equality and diversity office sent an email around to staff and students inviting them to attend an event set to coincide with Julie’s talk, in solidarity with trans students, stating “Let’s be visible, let’s be colourful and let’s stand together!” Sadly this vindicated our decision to hold our discussions behind closed doors, rather than having the day derailed by angry protests. (I was glad to be able to invite Julie to join us at the workshop after her talk, and it was brilliant to have her speak at a panel discussing – and indeed criticizing – Holly’s book.)
I’m pleased that I have recently been able to publish a paper on some of these topics (originally written for the 2019 Mancept workshop). ‘Amelioration, Inclusion, and Legal Recognition: On Sex, Gender, and the UK’s Gender Recognition Act’ came out last month in the Journal of Political Philosophy. My own experience publishing this has been relatively unremarkable: two other high profile journals passed on it (in the second case via a quick response to say that they felt it was too focussed on the UK context, so not really their scope). So JPP was third time lucky, and thankfully they felt the paper was in scope (and timely – I was able to update it after the second rejection to take into account the Haldane judgement, which provided helpful legal clarity, and the Scottish parliament’s passing of their GRRB, both of which happened in December 2022) and sent it to referees who dealt with the paper quickly, offering constructive criticism which helped to clarify the argument.
I find it a bit irksome that the best some can say against apparent attempts to gatekeep the publication of gender critical work is that we should let it see the light of day so that everyone can point out how terrible it is. But there you have it – my paper is out and you can all tell me what’s wrong with it at your leisure! As to whether there is any genuine gatekeeping going on, as opposed to just normal practices of peer review weeding out poorly argued papers, I would draw your attention to sociologist Laura Favaro’s study of the gender wars in academia, as initially reported in an article for Times Higher. Dr Favaro interviewed 50 gender studies academics from a range of disciplines, of whom 14 self-described as ‘gender critical’, 20 as ‘trans inclusive/genderist’, and the rest on the fence. Her summary presents indications of gatekeeping on the ‘genderist’ side, self-censorship and fear in the ‘on the fence’ group, and multiple negative repercussions faced by those who had been open about their gender critical views. Depressingly – but not surprisingly – once the THE article had appeared, City University received complaints about Dr Favaro’s research ethics (which they investigated, finding no ethical wrongdoing). Nevertheless, Dr Favaro found herself ostracised by her own research centre (in Gender and Sexualities), denied access to her own research data, and ultimately was made redundant from her post (despite holding a ‘permanent’ contract). You can read more about the details in her crowdfunder for legal action here. Yes, this example involves gender studies/sociology rather than philosophy. I would hope that we can and are doing better in our discipline, but experiences such as Alex’s and Holly’s do make me wonder.
When these debates first kicked off, some of us did indeed try to engage on social media and elsewhere with philosophers who took the “gender critical” view. I even invited Holly Lawford-Smith to write something for Crooked Timber on the Tuvel affair (though I would not have invited the activist HLS has now become). One thing I tried to bring into those exchanges was a sense that trans people had genuine reason to resent some of the speech about them that people like Greer and Bindel engaged in. My saying this so enraged Kathleen Stock that she wrote her piece “When Bindels Speak” which finishes as follows “So here’s a task for any progressive males reading. Next time a natal woman expresses herself in a way you find unattractive, unseemly, unkind, or downright rude about trans people, then, assuming they aren’t “screaming it in a trans person’s face”: why not shut the fuck up and keep it to yourself.” So much for openness to genuine debate and exchange of ideas. I’m afraid the narrative that one side of this divide is abusive and other reasonable and open to discussion just doesn’t bear serious examination.
This largely matches my experience and my observations. Trans-inclusive scholars have been very patient and willing to engage, even on issues they may regard to have been settled for decades.
A common (to the point of typical) GC response is to react to this as if it were a personal attack, and take the matter to a venue outside the profession where they can their, and only their, side of the story, often including MAJOR misrepresentations of their critics. The goal seems to be to win a political race to get their favored narrative off the ground first.
GCs are not using scholarly methods to defend their view, they are using political methods, and not the nice ones. It is inexplicable to me how many people in the profession are in willful denial about this.
If, and I still don’t think this has been shown, this has lead to increased scrutiny of GC views in the profession, then I would see this as a healthy immune response to an outside threat to our professional norms.
Sincere GC scholars might not like the bed they are in, but their peers have made it.
Unfortunately this is written without any awareness of the political stakes. If you substitute racism or ableism for “gender critical” arguments, you will easily see why those working in embattled identity-based interdisciplines can’t simply be “included” in the apparently neutral space of a philosophical discussion. The political context is so strongly tilted against them that a space needs to be set up with awareness of that in order to be anything close to safe.
You apparently don’t realize that the political context is indeed tilted this way — just as those who argue for open debate over racist views don’t realize how saturated our culture is with white supremacism. I don’t think it’s not your individual fault that you don’t perceive the saturation of culture and society by racism and transphobia. It’s a problem with philosophy and the reason why philosophical (in the disciplinary sense) interventions in these debates are so often painful to read for those engaged in the more critically aware interdisciplines.
As if to prove Mary’s detailed and reasonable assessment of the terrible state of affairs we are in, she is subject to smear, condescension, and insinuation. As for Stock vs Bertram, as I recall, although I might have to check, Kathleen’s piece essentially objected to men policing women’s speech. Plus ça change.
Indeed you are proving the point that any attempt at engagement on matters of fact is construed as a personal attack.
So if a man objects to a woman’s grossly offensive characterization of trans people, we should dismiss that objection, a priori, as “policing women’s speech”, rather than assessing the argument on its merits? I mean, fine, but if you are going to make that move, please don’t give us lectures on the perils of “woke”.
I have made the following request to Oxford University under the UK Freedom of Information Act (OUP is legally a department of Oxford University, which is a public body within the meaning of the Act). Oxford is required by law to respond within 20 working days; I will keep people informed.
1) All correspondence held by Oxford University Press and pertaining to the commissioning, reviewing, and editorial decisions for Alex Byrne’s book Troubles with Gender, excluding the names and other identifying information of any external reviewer used by OUP and of any employee of OUP without editorial authority, and also excluding any correspondence of a purely logistical nature, e.g. concerning payments or publication schedules.
2) All correspondence held by Oxford University Press and pertaining to the commissioning, reviewing, and editorial decisions for Alex Byrne’s contributed chapter on pronouns to the Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language, excluding the names and other identifying information of any external reviewer used by OUP and of any employee of OUP without editorial authority, and also excluding any correspondence of a purely logistical nature, e.g. concerning payments or publication schedules.
3) All correspondence held by Oxford University Press and pertaining to the commissioning for publication, reviewing, and editorial decisions for Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender-Critical Feminism, excluding the names and other identifying information of any external reviewer used by OUP and of any employee of OUP without editorial authority, and also excluding any correspondence of a purely logistical nature, e.g. concerning payments or publication schedules, but specifically including any correspondence pertaining to the book’s reclassification as ‘academic’ rather than ‘trade’ and to making it available, or not, on Oxford Scholarship Online.
4) All correspondence held by Oxford University Press and pertaining to the commissioning, reviewing, and editorial decisions for Holly Lawford-Smith’s edited collection Sex Matters, excluding the names and other identifying information of any external reviewer used by OUP and of any employee of OUP without editorial authority, and also excluding any correspondence of a purely logistical nature, e.g. concerning payments or publication schedules, but specifically including any correspondence pertaining to OUP’s reversal of its original decision not to publish that volume.
5) All correspondence held by Oxford University Press and pertaining to the commissioning, reviewing, and editorial decisions for a proposed volume on women philosophers to be edited by Richard Marshall and commissioned in 2019 or thereabouts, excluding the names and other identifying information of any external reviewer used by OUP and of any employee of OUP without editorial authority, and also excluding any correspondence of a purely logistical nature, e.g. concerning payments or publication schedules.
This is going nuclear. It is like suing a university after an adverse tenure decision and trying to use the discovery process to obtain confidential letters.
Are you sure you want to do this?
I’m not sure I see the nuclear aspect. Alex Byrne is happy for OUP to release the information but feels he is not entitled to. Peter Momtchiloff feels that his hands are tied. In the meantime there are certainly tensions between the ways Byrne and Momtchiloff describe the events, and critics on this thread, and I’m sure elsewhere, are understandably reluctant just to take my or Alex Byrne’s word for it. This seems to be pretty much the sort of thing that the UK’s FOI act is for. (You will notice that I have rather explicitly not requested identifying details for any reviewer, even though they are probably not excluded from FOIA.)
I was at Oxford for a long time and my experience was that they take their responsibilities under FOIA seriously and carry them out professionally. There are a number of exclusions permissible under FOIA and it’s possible some or all of what I have requested will be deemed to fall under those exclusions. (In which case I’m obviously not going to take them to court.) But if it is possible to get a clearer picture of what is going on here, it seems helpful to do so. (And even if OUP deems literally everything excluded, there is the consolation prize that my making the request is at least some evidence of my sincerity in the assurances I gave up-thread.)
I haven’t reviewed for OUP, but I have reviewed manuscripts and proposals for other presses. I did not get the impression that the authors would have any obligation to keep the content of my reviews confidential.
Indeed, when I reviewed work by junior scholars, there was a strong expectation that my reviews would not be confidential; they would be shared with mentors.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to pressure Byrne or OUP to release the reviews or to compel a disclosure through FOIA.
I’m open to hearing a reason that it’s not appropriate; I haven’t heard one yet. (I note that Byrne says that is fine with the reviews being released, he just doesn’t feel that it’s his call.)
I don’t see any problem with the FOIA request and I also don’t see how Byrne seriously thinks he’s not allowed to make the call himself. There is no confidentiality assumed for referee reports.
I think it is obvious, in light of Byrne’s clarifications in the Leiter Reports thread (comments 13 and 17), that he is not, in fact, fine with the reviews being released.
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/04/alex-byrne-on-peter-momtchiloffs-response-to-david-wallace-and-related-matters.html#more
When he says, “OUP is welcome to release whatever they like,” I interpret this as a polite refusal to disclose more.
a. Suing a university after an adverse tenure decision when one has good grounds to suspect improper considerations is not “going nuclear.” It is a perfectly legitimate course of action, the prospect of which helps motivate universities to play by the rules in tenure decisions.
b. Submitting a FOI request about a publication decision when you have good grounds to suspect improper considerations is not like suing a university. This is because it alleges no wrongdoing on the part of the institution. Rather, it requests evidence that can be used to assess whether any such allegation would be cogent.
Those are fine sentiments. Has anyone ever obtained a tenure-track position in an American or Canadian philosophy department after suing their previous department for a denial of tenure?
Suppose that no one has. Does that make the suit unjustified? Or might one sue for different reasons, e.g., matters of principle?
I am not saying the suit would be morally unjustified. I am saying it would be imprudent.
Maybe a better analogy would be suing a university to get the letters for someone else’s tenure case disclosed.
I do not necessarily mean “morally justified.” But, in any case, my point was that you seemed to assume that prudential reasons were the only ones that matter here.
Just to check, you claim to be *defending* academic freedom?
Um, yes?
I think I’m missing an implication here. Trying to reverse engineer it, I assume you think that treating the editorial process as having sacrosanct confidentiality (even when the author is happy to waive that confidentiality) is essential for academic freedom? If so, I just don’t see it. I can at most see a mild defeasible case for confidentiality. (Anonymity is another matter.)
Is there actually something barring Alex from sharing the reports? I mean, I realize that he isn’t the most credible witness, since he really seems to have juked the narrative about this book situation so as to make it seem as though he didn’t get these reports or any substantive feedback, when in fact he did, and now the goalposts have moved so that everyone is assuming that they are not substantive, but in fact they are all ideologically warped, which everyone will maintain their prior commitments on anyway once they see them, along with all the internal correspondence you’re seeking. But, Alex could, in fact, release the reports himself. He’s merely choosing not to.
The norm that I think everyone would abide by, outside of the clause in Mind’s emails about your referee reports, is that the author has discretion to share the reports, but the journal/publishing house is rather more restrained.
In general, if I submitted a paper or book manuscript, I would not want the confidential referee reports on that to be something the publisher could release publicly. What if my peers were saying negative things about my work, candidly to the editor? That would be awful. I’m glad OUP’s hands are tied. But if Alex wants the reports to see the light of day, he’s full welcome to share them. They are anonymous reports about his work (other than the one authored by Peter, which is not anonymous).
But you are welcome to continue playing the game of pretending that these facts are not obvious. My concern about academic freedom is that this is an obvious and clear disruption to the ability for a press affiliated with a university to conduct business, because I am not very likely to offer my candid opinion via peer review if it turns out that senior scholars who are affronted by the fact that when they face the harsh reality of peer review after years of not having to do so can cry foul to the public and expose ask the entire correspondence chain (which may or may not reveal my identity, even when redacted) to the entire profession.
And as a journal editor, I am already hard pressed enough to find and secure referees. So thank you for your service.
I’m going to stop engaging substantively with you after this reply, since you are no longer assuming that I am arguing in good faith (‘playing the game of pretending’, etc) and I don’t see the point in engaging with people in that situation.
But to answer your initial question: Alex Byrne’s view (which he states up-thread) is that is happy for OUP to disclose the referee reports but he does not feel at liberty to disclose them since they were commissioned by OUP. Since also Peter Momtchiloff says that he is not at liberty to disclose them, a large part of my reason to file a FOIA was to get them public. (The other part is that I think it would be good to see if there were editorial discussions on this outside the normal reports-from-commissioned-experts framework, since that speaks to the question of whether or not there were external pressures on the process.)
Yes, I am suggesting that your stance, on which you take everything Alex Byrne is saying at complete face value, even though his story has shifted substantially, while doubting Peter’s explanation that he cannot release referee reports (which I would take to be the standard for a publisher in virtually all cases across the board), is at the very least, hard to take seriously.
There is only one journal I know who indicates that the recipient of the referee reports should keep them confidential, and that is Mind. I assume that most journals/publishers would prefer you not plaster them all over the internet, but I assume the would also prefer you not make a bunch of unsubstantiated claims that they are ideologically captured malefactors who are threatening academic freedom and chilling everyone’s freedom of speech, so, if we are just dealing with a question of what OUP prefers, it is irrelevant at this point, Alex seems to be at odds with their preferences. The question is: is there any actual reason to think that OUP’s referee reports are not something that he is at liberty to share himself. Because if he is free to share them, we really should ask why he is not doing so.
I am sure you’d like to see a bunch of emails between people working at OUP. But they also are entitled to privacy, generally. So, you have written books for OUP: is there anything in any of your contracts or communication requiring you not to disclose the contents of your referee reports? Could he share the referee reports with someone who is less partisan in order to quell concerns that he is wrong about their contents? Is the only solution to raid the inboxes of OUP’s employees?
Anyway, feel free not to engage with me, if you like.
In brief and against my own better judgement: I think we may disagree rather fundamentally about the point and value of freedom-of-information legislation. Public-sector employees are *supposed* to conduct professional correspondence under the assumption that in some circumstances it might be shared with the public. If they – we – are writing things that would look bad and damaging if made public, we shouldn’t be writing them in the first place. Encouraging professionalism in work communications is part of the *point* of FOI legislation.
You did not address my claim about whether in your view Alex is in fact correct to claim that he is not free to release the reports, which is the basis for your (an uninvolved third party) further entering the situation and escalating to FOIA requests.
On my view, Byrne has misrepresented the circumstances of his book being rejected, then when some of those details came to light, he shared some more details, which served to render the rejection more usual, rather than more suspicious, and is now reticent to share the evidence which could help support his claim to malfeasance on the part of the journal (I personally don’t care if they get shared; mostly people will entrench their opinions further, as evidenced by the fact that very few people seem to have been swayed by the revelation that Byrne misrepresented the nature of the editorial communications surrounding his book’s rejection). Byrne is citing an invented prohibition against an author sharing referee reports in order to justify keeping them private.
Please look at how your are responding from the perspective of someone who takes that to be the case, and who said as much yesterday before Peter’s reply was revealed?
It seems relevant that you keep citing Byrne’s belief that it is impermissible to share them, and not anything in OUP’s contracts or communications, or even some sort of understanding that this is a professional norm beyond Byrne’s invention/belief, since that is your basis for making a FOIA request. Byrne’s belief is only a barrier because Byrne says so.
If you just think there is independent reason to engage in FOIA requests towards OUP, irrespective of Byrne’s willingness to share the reports; because the chilling atmosphere is so icy, perhaps, that there must be something worth seeing in those employee inboxes, just say so? But don’t act like Byrne’s hands are tied. They aren’t.
You seem to be assuming that I am on Alex Byrne’s side.
I am strongly inclined to think on the basis of evidence so far that something is going badly wrong with OUP’s editorial process as regards sex and gender, and that Byrne has been wronged (as has Holly Lawford-Smith). And, on the basis of what Byrne has shared here and at Leiter’s blog (which by now I think covers most of what he shared confidentially with me), I don’t think his original statements are incompatible in any substantive way with Peter Momtchiloff’s post. But there is clearly a prima facie tension between their two accounts. And I remain open to the possibility that OUP has acted correctly here. Yet it is impossible to do more than speculate until and unless we actually have the evidence.
I am inclined to agree with you (and with Brian Leiter, and Justin Weinberg) that there is no bar to Byrne sharing his referee reports. But that is not Byrne’s own view. I happen to believe that he is sincere, but whether or not he is, I have no power to compel him to change his mind. (I can’t FOIA him!)
I think it is strongly in our community’s interest, and for that matter in OUP’s and Oxford University’s long-term interest, to have transparency here, which primarily means making the reports and the related editorial correspondence public. Alex Byrne says he is happy for this to be released, and I believe him – but I would be in favor of it being released even if Byrne himself didn’t want it released. (Any prima facie right of confidentiality he might assert is clearly annulled by his public discussion of the referee process in a magazine article.) Hence, the FOIA request.
For the record, I have never met Alex Byrne in my life and had not corresponded with him prior to yesterday. (I’ve never met nor corresponded with Holly Lawford-Smith, come to that.)
I think my assumption that you are “on his side” is borne out by the fact that you…followed that in the next sentence with the central assertion of his Quillette post/advertisement for his book (a book which, despite the threat to academic freedom is apparently forthcoming from an academic press).
For my part, I think it seems that you are overlooking the evidentiary value of Byrne’s invented refusal to share the referee reports, and the fairly ordinary explanation for what might happen when someone gets negative referee reports, and your escalation skips from people seeing these particular referee reports to changing the landscape of refereeing substantially, based on your confidence that something is awry.
So I don’t agree with the “changing the landscape of refereeing” comment. In the first place, I didn’t invent the Freedom of Information Act. In the second, we agree that referees’ reports are something an author could make public if they wanted to, and in normal circumstances a referee’s correspondence with a journal is pretty much exhausted by their report. If there is ‘editorial correspondence’ beyond the report (beyond innocuous chit-chat, which I’ve tried to exclude from my request but in any case don’t need to share further) then that seems salient to the issues here and worth knowing about.
I should add that it’s not just *my* confidence that something’s awry; if you look at the thread on Leiter Reports you will see a significant number of other philosophers, including very senior figures at Oxford, who share my concern. Even if we’re all badly mistaken, there seems to be significant professional value in reassuring us.
Setting aside any disagreement with the decision to send such a letter, I’d be curious to learn whether OUP doesn’t have an available exemption here under the law. Specifically, one of the prejudice-type exemptions (where ‘prejudice’ means a legal harm). For instance, one of the exemptions under Section 43.
I’m not sure if the strategizing and decision-making amounts to a trade secret under 43(1). But I wonder if 43(2) is more likely to apply, for it “exempts information whose disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any legal person (an individual, a company, the public authority itself or any other legal entity).” And a ‘commercial interest’ is explained as follows:
There’s a test for this under the law to see if the exemption applies. And there’s also the ability for the public interest to override even if it does.
I raise this as a point of consideration. I said above I was setting aside any disagreement with the decision to pursue an FOIA request, so I will hold to that.
I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t necessarily even object if they wanted to claim an exemption (and obviously I am not going to sue them if they claim one). I don’t see FOIA (and Oxford didn’t see FOIA) as a tool for lawyers, but for the public in general. If their legal team says I can’t have any of this information, so be it.
(It would not entirely surprise me if Oxford tried to claim that everything about OUP is exempt under one of these clauses given its commercial nature. I think that would be a rather aggressive interpretation of FOIA, but again, I’m not realistically going to challenge it in court.)
Yes, I see it as a tool for the public as well. Picking up my disagreement I’d left at the door, I am concerned that sending a FOIA request in such a matter as this–and without more facts on the table that more clearly implicate OUP as having acted badly–could undermine trust in the editorial process going forward. We need to be able to rely on the testimony of reviewers that a book is or is not worthy of publication. And if the editorial process itself is what we care about, then I am concerned requests such as these have the potential to chill the speech of reviewers and editors alike, and thereby undermine trust in the editorial process from another direction.
Note that this is not a wholesale defense of closed peer review nor a defense of the need for anonymous review, closed or not. (In fact, open peer review could have prevented much of this, even if it had remained anonymous.) Rather, I believe there’s a distinction, on the one hand, between Byrne or the reviewers themselves sharing the reviews, and on the other hand, the disclosure of such reviews under a FOIA request given what we know at this stage.
Instead, I wish we could let Byrne simply share the reviews if he is willing and so able. If he is able but not so willing, I think that is potentially troubling. The matter, in my opinion, is not so urgent that an FOIA request needed to be sent. And if we disagree over whether it should have been sent at all, perhaps we can agree on the sense of urgency as concerns the timing: this story has only been breaking over the past couple days.
I don’t agree with this but I don’t think it’s an outrageous view: it’s a judgement call, to be sure.
I don’t see a FOIA request to OUP as requiring clear evidence that they’ve acted badly; indeed, given what is already public I think it is in everyone’s interest, probably even including OUP’s, if we can have a reasonably clear and transparent disclosure of the relevant information.
Sure, I can see your perspective. I don’t agree with you, but I understand where you’re coming from.
Plus, my concern over undermining trust in the editorial process by way of FOIA requests would be stronger if a pattern were starting to emerge (i.e. a pattern of request-making regarding editorial processes, not a pattern of editorial worries emerging independently of requests).
One FOIA request on these grounds (though I disagree with their sufficiency) does not a pattern make. I will reserve my worry for the future and hope I needn’t worry at all.
Thanks for the engagement. Cheers.
Just to point out: if this request is granted, it could make it impossible for any state affiliated university press to get people to review projects.
I think that’s overstated: state universities have for decades warned that in certain circumstances letters of reference (signed, no less) might have to be disclosed, but they continue to get those letters. I actually think the case for confidentiality-even-in-extremis is better there than for peer-review reports, since in the former it is basically impossible to redact the author’s identity.
Ok. While we’re on the subject, though, I’m curious why you requested the peer reviewers’ names. It seems like you could’ve accomplished what you’ve said you’re trying to accomplish without doing that.
[Note: the author of this comment got in touch with me to acknowledge this was a misreading of the request; the site outage and subsequent closing of the comments interfered with him doing this himself in a separate comment.]
He specifically did not request their names.
Indeed, I specifically requested not to have their names. I also said I don’t want the names of any of OUP’s production staff (I’m concerned that some may have sent ill-judged emails and I don’t want them mobbed.) I think the case for anonymity here is massively stronger than the case for confidentiality.
Look again: DW explicitly *excludes* the peer reviewers’ names from the FOIA request.
400+ comments into this thread, I’d like to address the final part of Justin’s pre-updated post:
“Especially welcome, though, would be constructive suggestions for how to best think about, promote, and protect academic freedom in ways that adequately acknowledge its potential for tension with other values worth promoting and protecting, too.”
I hope we can discuss the suggestions t philosopher made in the following guest post, already linked by Justin above and summarized in section II (‘Some initial responses to t philosopher’): https://dailynous.com/2019/06/05/trans-women-philosophy-learning-recent-events/
As Justin points out, the sticking point is what constitutes “transphobia.” There are interesting and complex debates within trans communities (especially outside of academia) regarding what transphobia is, that cut across generational, racial, and national lines, and that are a testament to how diverse trans experiences are. How would readers of the Daily Nous define transphobia?
From what I’ve read in the comments to this thread, the OUP’s decision not to publish Byrne’s text is entirely above board if they’ve sent it along to a variety of persons in a position to comment upon a) whether it is transphobic, b) in what way(s) it is transphobic, and c) if those aspects of the text that are transphobic can be separated from its general argument, its many other good qualities, etc. This is provided that the OUP is interested in being a non-transphobic press, which I am pleased to see is the case. In my view, the rejection is stronger if they’ve *also* sent it along to persons who can comment upon this that are not part of the academic establishment, but are involved in politics, activism, education, and the like. This is standard practice in other publishing industries (ex., fiction), and can be done better or worse, depending on the care the press in question takes.
The bottom line is that the moving parts of our industry must be clear and forthright regarding what they (a publishing house, say) take to be transphobic, what the harms of what they take to be transphobia are, and what the potential (mis)applications of research published in this area might be. This could very well lead to the rejections of some well-written, otherwise intellectually rigorous manuscripts, but I’m not sure that we, as a profession, should mind. There will (clearly) always be another house or journal where academics can publish such papers. And I think it only makes our contributions that much greater to devote a not unsubstantial part of our research in certain subfields to concerns about their potential consequences for real, living people. Imagine the wonderful interdisciplinary conversations we could have in that regard, too.
I think this is important for reasons already mentioned elsewhere throughout the thread, but that I’ll sum up by saying that even our most theoretical, speculative research has real-world consequences for vulnerable people. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to do what a few commenters have done here, which is to painstakingly break down this view, in a variety of different ways, to an audience that is clearly not impressed by it (judging by the upvotes). I’ve read a lot about the “chilling effect” decisions like the one OUP has made have had on the profession, but the view that is purportedly being “chilled” is one that is held by most people, on the basis of scholarship and policy that has always been exclusionary in some measure, and that reflects the lived experiences and biases of most individuals with any stability in our line of work, who do not belong or bear any relation to the vulnerable population in question.
So, I think it is extremely reasonable to structure our discussion in terms of suggestions made by one of the few (ex-)members of our discipline who is trans, rather than to structure it around the comments of someone like Byrne (no disrespect to him if he’s reading this, and thanks to any Daily Nous readers who’ve made it this far into the thread).
Your comment suggests that OUP should solicit reviews from people who “are not part of the academic establishment, but are involved in politics, activism, education, and the like.”
This seems to me like a bad idea.
An academic press should publish books that meet academic standards, not the standards of activists or politicians.
Should CUP have asked for Kevin McCarthy’s take on A Defense of Abortion? Should Grover Norquist have been reviewer #2 on The Myth of Ownership?
No? Because they don’t have any academic credentials, and they’d just pick books to push their cause?
That’s what I’d say about asking trans activists (with no academic expertise) to review an OUP book on gender.
(You might reply: “We’d only defer to the *good* activists.” But who decides who’s good? You?)
When I made this suggestion, I had in mind people with a lot of knowledge about a certain subject who are, for myriad reasons, not academics. Such readers (in fiction, for example) can review books for how their content might strike different audiences, and are not responsible for reviewing every single aspect or merit of a book.
To put it another way, they’re not reading for academic rigor or for whether a book meets academic standards. They’re reading (in this case) for potential for harm.
This might be naive, but I think publishing houses can make intelligent decisions about persons who might possess the relevant knowledge for different topics, if the above is their goal. We’re in hot water otherwise!
RespectfuIly, I do think it’s naive to believe in a system where presses ask activists which books should be dropped due to “potential harm.”
What would pro-life activists say about the harms caused by pro-choice books? What would anti-gay activists say about publishing a defense of gay rights?
You know what they’d say.
I don’t think such activists — who have every incentive to exaggerate the harms of things they don’t like, while downplaying the harms of things they do like — are reliable guides to what’s harmful. Nor do I think there is some other group of superforecasters who can predict which books will cause which harms. The social world is a chaotic system. Academic publishing, even more so!
And note that so far this is all ideal theory: we’re assuming good faith on the part of the presses. But consider what would happen, realistically, if we let presses pick out activists for “harm review.” That would give editors an easy way to spike any book, however meritorious, whose politics they didn’t like. That’s going to encourage and empower unscrupulous editors.
I have a feeling you are interpreting my suggestion in the least charitable way possible, and in a vacuum where the kinds of (mis)moves you describe wouldn’t be immediately obvious to us. Presses like OUP have value statements. I believe in peoples’ abilities to judge published pieces that do and do not accord with a press’ stated values, and I would expect these values to suffuse the entire editorial process in a non-problematic way, because this is an industry that I (as an academic) am a part of maintaining, scrutinizing, etc. I repeat that I am not suggesting activists be the only party involved in reviewing books. My suggestion was that people with knowledge of a particular subject — a category that might well include activists, who work on the ground with vulnerable populations and are often part of these themselves — be part of a panel of experts that reviews books for which this knowledge is relevant and appropriate. I’m not working in ideal theory; I am describing an existing practice in other areas.
One more small point: I went back and reread the post I linked above in full, and Justin made many concrete suggestions loosely based off of the ones t philosopher made. They’re well worth discussing (again — though I don’t recall that post’s comment section making much of them, either). It seems where Justin and I diverge is in the importance we give to identifying what is and is not transphobic in our profession.
Byrne is fully free to share the reviews. That he sets up a rule does not make that rule legitimate. Indeed, it seem rather convenient in this case.
Good morning, it appears as if the GC party line on Byrne’s misrepresentation of relevant facts about the review process in this alleged case of censorship has over night settled on “that shouldn’t matter”. And we’re all asked to pretend as if this isn’t ridiculous.
Byrne writes on Leiter’s blog, “There’s not all that much ‘philosophy’ in it anyway.”
This sounds to me like admission that the press was correct in its judgment that “the book does not treat the subject in a sufficiently serious and respectful way.” Philosophy is Byrne’s area of expertise. If the book isn’t making a philosophical contribution, even by the author’s own lights, it’s unclear what serious contribution it could be making.
“Rather, their best defenses go elsewhere, to less reliable, less seriously-vetted venues… where argumentative errors, rhetorical nudges, strategic omissions, and polemical sleights-of-hand are more likely.”
I know this was written four years ago but just a quick point in response to this bit–the ideas will _always_ be elsewhere, in places where errors nudges and sleight of hand are likely. Accepting them as a topic for discussion in professional philosophy does not prevent that. And rejecting them as a topic for discussion in professional philosophy does not annull the effect of those other places at all.
Some things just can’t be taken seriously (can only be advocated for through unserious techniques like rhetorical nudges and sleight of hand) and so shouldn’t be discussed seriously in philosophical contexts.
“The earth is flat after all” can’t be taken seriously, and neither can “gender rests on a biological binary.”
Perhaps that is true, but it seems non-ideal to reject a paper *merely* on the grounds that its thesis can’t be taken seriously (and perhaps you aren’t suggesting otherwise). If someone produced a compelling argument for the conclusion that the earth is flat—absurd as that possibility might strike us—I would want to know about it, and I would want it to be hashed out in the appropriate academic venues.
Also: the theory that the Earth is round has been scientific consensus for about two thousand years. If no one manages to come up with any good arguments for a GC position between now and 4000 AD, I certainly think people should rethink their view on publishing them subsequently.
David Wallace thinks the length of time an idea has been consensus correlates with how seriously it should be taken.
Does anyone not? ‘Correlates with’, to be sure, not ‘logically determines’.
The prior probability that any paper defending the thesis that the earth is flat provides a compelling argument for the conclusion, is so low, that it’s probably not worth spending any time reading that paper to consider it for publication. With that said, I can imagine value in someone trawling through the reject pile looking for hidden gems if they enjoy doing so and yeah it’s never impossible they may find something.
Many claims about gender that occupy the conceptual region around “gender rests on a biological binary” are about as unserious as “the earth is flat,” the only difference being a far larger number of people haven’t understood that yet. (And to head off an objection, remember I’m defining “serious” as “able to be advocated for without rhetorical nudging and sleight of hand etc,” so whether a claim is unserious or not is fairly objective and doesn’t rest on the question of how many people got the memo that it’s unserious.)
I can understand the idea that some conclusions are beyond the pale, and thus should be off limits (I am not saying I agree, but I understand it). I have trouble understanding the idea that these ideas cannot even be taken seriously, though. As a profession we are happy to discuss whether we exist (maybe there are no medium-sized objects), whether the physical world as we know it does not exist (maybe we are brains in vats), or whether we could know anything at all. And yet these theses about gender are somehow not just more obvious, but so much more obvious that we cannot take their negations seriously?
I guess a lot depends on what is meant by ‘rests on’, but I think it seems pretty unlikely that a non sexually dimorphic species, like a race of intelligent amoebas, living on an isolated planet populated by species reproducing similarly, would have developed a concept of gender. It is certainly not equivalent to the Earth being flat, which one can see isn’t the case by standing on a tall hill.
To Justin:
I think that this discussion, uncomfortable as it might be for any side, is seriously worth continuing. That said, the sheer number of (sometimes deeply nested) comments is beginning to make it difficult to follow, to re-find one’s place, to avoid lag, etc. Would it be possible to start a second page of comments—for instance, by posting the updates as a separate blog post? If not, that’s totally understandable. (I might add that perhaps the readability issue arises primarily for the mobile format, which is all I can access right now.) Thanks either way!
Seconded. The thread is now so difficult to navigate and so slow to load that I think I need to give up on it (which to be honest is probably best for my productivity and sanity in any case, so maybe leave it as it is!)
I don’t think a priori methods are very illuminating on these issues, so here is the version of the chapter that Byrne pre-published. He has taken it down but I think it is fairly a matter of public record.