Journal Editorial Practices and an Anecdote

I was interested to read the recent Daily Nous conversation about journal editorial practices. Much of the discussion there focused on whether double-anonymous refereeing (where the authors and referees are ignorant of each others' identities) was good enough, or whether triple-anonymous methods (where the editors are also unaware of the authors' identities) are necessary for a fair system.

I was interested to see many journals' editors describing their methods, and how they try to avoid bias. One question I didn't see addressed, however, concerns oversight. Is there any system in place to confirm whether journals are actually run the way they're said to? I would consider this a somewhat paranoid question, except that I know firsthand of at least one high-profile journal which at least sometimes, at the discretion of the editor, suspends its official policy of double-anonymous refereeing.

My experience happened shortly after I finished my PhD, when I was a postdoc. I knew at the time it was a problematic situation, but I decided it probably wasn't prudent to make a fuss at that stage in my career. I'd been intending to wait until I was tenured, but I think that given the conversations happening in the discipline at the moment, now is an appropriate time for the story to come to light. This is the story of "Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism," one of my first papers defending contextualism, which was eventually published in Philosophical Studies.

I apologize for the length of the narrative. I'd make more of a point of being concise, but I want to make sure that I explain exactly what happened, without editorial summarizing. (I'll express some opinions after telling the story.)

So here's the story.

After defending my PhD in 2008, and beginning work as a postdoc in St Andrews the same year, I started to develop some of the ideas from my dissertation into publishable papers. I submitted one of them, a defence of contextualism, to Philosophical Studies in March of 2009. That journal uses an online program for submissions where an author can watch the progress of his submission as it goes through various stages—'editor assigned', 'reviewer assigned', 'review completed', etc. I noticed in July that four months had passed and it still just said 'editor assigned'. (I knew from a previous paper that it ought to be progressing through other stages.) So I submitted a query through the online submission, asking whether my paper might have fallen through the cracks.

I received a response to that question in the form of a personal email from Stewart Cohen, the editor of the journal. Cohen wrote that "the reason your paper is listed as editor assigned, is that I'm going to review it myself." He said he hoped to get a chance to review it soon, and invited me to email him directly if I had any further questions. This happened in July. (Potentially relevant background not everyone might know: Cohen wrote several influential papers in defence of contextualism in the 1980s and 1990s; he is one of the prominent figures in this subfield of epistemology.)

In September 2009, Cohen was hired as a part-time professorial fellow at Arché, the same institution where I was working.

In October, Cohen came to St Andrews in connection with his new job. He spoke briefly with me about my submission then, saying that he generally liked it, but had some particular concerns. He sent me a lengthy email detailing them, and we had a rather involved back-and-forth exchange on various of the substantive philosophical questions. At the conclusion of this exchange, after I'd agreed to make various changes to the paper, we'd gotten down to just one major remaining point of disagreement. In my paper, I argued that my neo-Lewisian form of contextualism avoids a challenge that Cohen himself had leveled against Lewis, concerning his ability to handle both Gettier cases and lottery cases. Cohen had argued, in a 1998 paper, that Lewis can't have it both ways; but I suggested in my submission that the issue could be avoided. Cohen was unconvinced by my treatment of this part of the paper, but invited me to work on it further. He wrote to me in an email:

Let's call it a conditional acceptance. I'm not sure you've made any advance in applying the RA view to Gettier cases and so I don't want to commit to publishing that part of the paper. You may convince me that I'm wrong, but even if you don't, you can always just cut that part. So unless you think you'll refuse to cut it, even if I'm not satisfied, you can list it as forthcoming.

In November 2009, I submitted (via direct email to Cohen) a revised version of the paper. We corresponded briefly about it in January when Cohen was visiting Arché again, but he didn't read and respond to my new draft until April 2010, when he wrote back, saying that he was still unconvinced by my treatment of lotteries and Gettier cases. We had another email exchange, which continued until his next visit to Arché in May. On May 24, we met over coffee about whether the section in question ought to be published. By the end of that meeting, he did agree to publish it, and on May 25 I received an official acceptance from the journal, and an invitation to upload my final version. The paper did end up being published, including the revised version of the section defending Lewis from Cohen.

Ok, those were 'just the facts'. From here on out, I'm editorializing. These seem to me the important problematic points to emphasize:

• The editor of Philosophical Studies seems to be treating submissions in his own area of research interest very differently from the way he treats other submissions, sometimes deciding to referee papers himself. As far as I know, Cohen was the sole referee for my submission.
• At least sometimes, refereeing at Philosophical Studies isn't even double-anonymous. (Indeed, in this case it wasn't even single-anonymous.) I spent two hours sitting with my referee over coffee, arguing about whether his concern about my paper was correct. (This is at odds with their explicit policy of a "double-blind review procedure".)
• There is lots of research showing the potential for various sorts of bias to come into play when one isn't making these decisions via anonymous review. But this is an extremely clear instance in which privilege worked to my advantage. I was a Rutgers PhD, with a job at a prestigious research institution, where my colleague literally down the hall (well, down the hall and around several corners) was the editor, who was also the referee. I was also the kind of person willing to be bold enough to argue with a senior figure who was repeatedly suggesting that my idea wasn't suitable for publication. (It helped that I was already on a first-name basis with him before the story began.) These factors, which had nothing to do with the quality of my submission, played a huge role in getting this early publication. And even with the advantages I had, I was still a fresh PhD without a tenure-track position—my desperation for a publication, combined with the strange relationship I was in with a powerful figure, was disconcerting to say the least. I very much doubt that Cohen understood how awkward my position was, or how uncomfortable it made me.
• In addition to worries about anonymous review, I think it's also potentially problematic that Cohen's biggest concerns about my paper had to do with the particular section where I engaged critically with his own work. I don't think for a minute that he was motivated by a desire not to have critiques of his work published. (And I'm not also totally sure that his worries were unfounded—I think my paper probably improved when I took his worries more seriously.) But I do think that it's easy to be biased in favour of our own views, and that this is something a journal should be very careful to avoid. It wouldn't be practical or particularly desirable, I think, to prohibit referees who are being criticized in submissions—but I do think that this is a situation that calls for an editor (who is not the referee!) to observe particularly carefully, and take the referee's advice in the appropriate context. I don't know to what degree my experience represents a pattern, but I think it would be a very poor feature of a journal if submissions criticizing the ideas of the editor were quite likely to (a) be refereed by the editor himself, and (b) be scrutinized particularly critically. There is a very nearby possible world where I simply deleted the section of my paper critical of Cohen. 

On the whole I'm very confident in asserting that in at least one instance, Philosophical Studies engaged in seriously problematic editorial procedures. I don't know how atypical my story is.

I also want to explicitly note that this story occurred five years ago. I see that Jennifer Lackey and Wayne Davis were both added as Associate Editors of Philosophical Studies in 2011, after my paper was accepted in its final form. (Cohen is still the editor-in-chief.) I don't know how much change that represents. For all I know, it may be that a system is now in place such that stories like mine couldn't occur again. But I'd like to know. I'd like to call for a statement from Philosophical Studies about its editorial practices. (Phil Studies was not one of the journals whose practices were described in the Daily Nous post linked above.) In particular, does the editor still have the discretion to decide to referee a paper himself, with full knowledge of the author? Does the journal sanction the kind of back-and-forth discussion between editor–referee and author I describe? If not, are there procedures in place that prevent it from happening?

I'm not an anonymous-review absolutist; if a journal prefers not to have an anonymous refereeing system, I'm OK with that. But transparency is important; if Philosophical Studies is not a journal run with a commitment to anonymous review, then the philosophical community should probably be thinking of that journal in a very different way than it does.

Knowledge and Modals in Consequents of Conditionals

Modals interact in a characteristic way with conditionals. Suppose it’s next Wednesday morning, and I haven’t checked the news in a while. Consider:

1. Obama probably won the election.
2. If Romney won Ohio, Obama probably won the election.

Assuming that the last time I looked at the polls, they looked roughly as they do now, (1) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning, and (2) is false. When I say (1), I say something like, ‘most of the epistemically nearest worlds are worlds in which Obama won’. When I say (2), I restrict the worlds I’m looking at: paying attention only to those worlds in which Romney won Ohio, most of the epistemically nearest of them are Obama-winning worlds. I knew going in that the winner of Ohio is likely to win overall, whichever candidate that is. (But I know it’ll probably be Obama.) So (3) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning:

3. If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.

Let’s suppose that as a matter of fact, Romney did win Ohio, contrary to my evidence. Still, since I haven’t gotten the bad news yet, my evidence still favors Obama’s having won the election. So when I say (1), it’s true. So is (3). If we look naively, this will appear puzzling. It looks like a counterexample to modus ponens, for the following are all true (not assertable by me Wednesday morning, but true):

• Romney won Ohio.
• If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.
• Obama probably won the election.

Call the inference from X and a sentence of the form "if X, Y" to Y, naive modus ponens. Naive modus ponens leads us wrong in this case.

The solution to this puzzle, of course, is that modals and conditionals interact in a subtler way than is recorded in the surface grammar of (3). The ‘probably’ modal takes wide scope; “if p, probably q” says that, restricting attention to the p worlds, q is probable. Relatedly, I can’t perform naive modus tollens on my probability conditional: Obama probably won; if Romney won, then Obama probably didn’t win; therefore, Romney didn’t win.

The same goes for ‘might’ and ‘must’. Suppose I have seen election results for every state except Ohio, and I know for certain that the winner of Ohio won the election. Then I may truly say:

4. If Romney won Ohio, Romney must have won the election.
5. If Obama won Ohio, Obama must have won the election.

It doesn’t follow from the fact that Romney did win Ohio that I’d express a truth if I said “Romney must have won the election”. Indeed, it’s false—for all I know, Obama might have won. Sentence (4) says that, of all the Romney-winning-Ohio worlds, he wins the election in them.

This is all very different from the way that conditionals interact with non-modal claims. Suppose I truly say to myself:

6. If the carpenter was here today, the picture is on the wall.

Suppose also that the carpenter was there then (the place and time where I said (6)). This entails that the picture was on the wall. Or if the picture is not on the wall, the truth of (6) entails that the carpenter wasn’t there. In other words, with non-modal consequents, you can perform naive modus ponens and modus tollens on conditionals.

Knowledge patterns with the modals. Suppose you’re trying to decide whether to trust someone. I might truly say:

7. If he’s lying, you know he’ll just deny everything later.

This can be true even though (a) he is lying, and (b) you don’t know that he’ll deny everything later. For all you know, he’s honest, and will confirm everything. Indeed, you know that you don’t know he’ll deny everything later. But you can’t reason from this known fact and (7) to the conclusion that he isn’t lying. So naive modus ponens and modus tollens are mistakes here, just as in the cases of the obvious modals like might, must, and probably.

I think this is pretty decent evidence in favor of views like mine that treat ‘knows’ as either something a lot like a modal or a literal instance of a modal. I say, broadly with David Lewis, that ‘knows p’ is an evidential quantifier: it says of a given set of worlds that one’s evidence eliminates all the not-p worlds. When it appears in the consequent of a conditional, it’s very natural to restrict the set with the antecedent. So “If X, S knows p” says, first restrict your attention only to the X worlds; S’s evidence eliminates the not-p worlds that remain.

Presupposition and 'Knows' Contextualism

In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of 'knows' contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis's particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, which is that one can model 'knows' in a way similar to context-sensitive quantifier domains, and that maybe he should have just rested happily with the latter, rather than trying to articulate all the relevant rules. Blome-Tillmann agrees with me that Lewis's particular rules are inessential to his broader project, but, unlike me, he goes on to attempt the ambitious task of articulating rules that will do the relevant work. So rather than rest content with the main contextualist point, as I do, Blome-Tillmann argues for a different solution than Lewis's to Lewis's original, more ambitious project. The suggestion is to replace the Lewisean 'Rule of Attention' with a 'Rule of Presupposition':

(RP) If w is compatible with the speakers' pragmatic presuppositions in C, then w cannot be properly ignored in C.

Pragmatic presuppositions here are meant to be understood in the Stalnakerian way. The basic idea is that there are different ways to attend to skeptical possibilities; if you just listen to a presentation of them but continue to presuppose them not to obtain, then you can still 'properly ignore' them. But if our common ground shifts so as to include those possibilities, then they are no longer properly ignored.

It may well be that the Rule of Presupposition does a better job with cases than does the original Rule of Attention on the whole. But it does worse in at least some cases. Consider some expression PHI, used to pick out an individual, whose felicity requires that some p be presupposed. For example, the expression "the man sitting at the table" requires it to be common ground that there is a uniquely salient man sitting at a uniquely salient table. Now consider a sentence of the form "PHI does not know q", where p obviously entails q--e.g., "the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table."

Intuitively (once we've bought into contextualism), some such sentences can both be felicitous and vary in truth from context to context, even when discussing the same subject and proposition. For example, someone in a skeptical context might say "the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table" truly, even as, in another, nonskeptical context, someone might say "the man sitting at the table does know that there is a table" and speak truly. This is the sort of result contextualists want to capture. But I don't think Blome-Tillmann can capture it. Anybody who utters that sentence felicitously is in a context in which it is presupposed that there is a table. (The previous paragraph gave a recipe for coming up with lots of similar examples.) Blome-Tillman's Rule of Presupposition, then, cannot explain the difference between the skeptical context and the nonskeptical one with respect to whether non-table-including possibilities are properly ignored. And none of Lewis's other rules, besides the Attention one that Blome-Tillman rejects, looks well-suited to do the job either.

So I don't think that presupposition can do the work Blome-Tillman wants it to do in articulating what possibilities are properly ignored. I still think it's best not to get too worked up about these details, and rest content with the contextualist insight.

Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism

Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism, Version of 25 May, 2010. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal generalizations provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and the Gettier problem. I respond to influential objections to Lewis’s account.