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Recent philosophy-related news.*
1. A new journal, Passion: the Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions, has just published its inaugural issue. The journal is a peer-reviewed (double blind), open-access, biannual publication. Its editors-in-chief are Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Heidi Maibom (University of the Basque Country, University of Cincinnati). The first issue is here.
2. The popular nationally-syndicated radio program Philosophy Talk, co-hosted by Ray Briggs and Josh Landy (Stanford University), has been awarded a media production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create “Wise Women,” a 16-episode series about women philosophers through the ages. The series, which will feature different guest scholars in conversation with the show’s hosts, begins on July 23rd with an episode on Hypatia.
3. Butler University just wrapped up its first ever philosophy camp for high school students. You can learn more about it here.
4. PhilVideos (previously), a project from researchers at the University of Genoa that aims to sift through the abundance of philosophy videos online and present an expert-curated and searchable selection of them, is now online (in beta). You can try it out here and read more about its features (including a more specific search interface) here. If you’re interested in becoming a reviewer for the site, you can find out about doing so here.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
The Philosophy Journal Insight Project (PJIP) “aims to provide philosophy researchers with practical insights on potential venues for publication.”
Its main offering is a spreadsheet that provides information about journals’ subject matter, word limits, type of peer review, open access status, rankings, impact information, acceptance rates, review times, reviewing quality, and so on.
Put together by Sam Andrews, a philosophy PhD student at the University of Birmingham, the site, which he says is a work in progress, currently has information about 47 journals.
You can check it out here.
The post New Site Collects and Standardizes Philosophy Journal Information first appeared on Daily Nous.
“If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review.”
In the following post, Toby Handfield, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and Kevin Zollman, Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, explain why they believe the common practice of using journal rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality is bad.
This is the second in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Mel Bochner, “Counting Alternatives: The Wittgenstein Illustrations” (selections)]
Ask any philosopher about the state of publishing in academic philosophy and they will complain. Near the top of the list will be the quality of reviews (they’re poor) and rejection rates (they’re high). Indeed, philosophy does have extremely high rejection rates relative to other fields. It’s extremely hard to understand why we have such high rejection rates. Perhaps there is simply more low-quality work in philosophy than other fields. Or, perhaps, rejection rates are themselves something that philosophy journals strive to maintain. Many journals strive to publish only the very best work within their purview, and perhaps they use their rejection rates to show themselves that they are succeeding.
Like many fields, philosophy also has an implicit hierarchy of journals. Of course, people disagree at the margins, but there seems to be widespread agreement among anglophone philosophers (at least) about what counts as a top 5 or top 10 journal. Looking at some (noisy) data about rejection rates, it does appear that the most highly regarded journals have high rejection rates. So, while we complain about rejection rates, we also seem to—directly or indirectly—reward journals that reject often.
It is quite natural to use rejection rates as a kind of proxy for the quality of the journal, especially in a field like philosophy where other qualitative and quantitative measures of quality are somewhat unreliable. We think it is quite common for philosophers to use the rejection rates of journals as a proxy for paper quality when thinking about hiring, promotion, and tenure. It’s impressive when a graduate student has published in The Philosophical Review, in large part because The Philosophical Review rejects so many papers. Rejection rates featured prominently—among many other things—in the recent controversy surrounding the Journal of Political Philosophy.
We, along with co-author Julian García, argue that this might be a dangerous mistake. (This paper is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science—a journal that, we feel obligated to point out, has a high rejection rate.) Our basic argument is that as journals become implicitly or explicitly judged by their rejection rates, the quality of peer review will go down, thus making journals worse. We do so by using a formal model, but the basic idea is not hard to understand.
We start by asking a very basic question: what is it that a journal is striving to achieve? We consider two alternatives: (1) that the journal is trying to maximize the average quality of its published papers or (2) that the journal is trying to maximize its rejection rate. The journal must decide both what threshold counts as good enough for their journal and also how much effort to invest in peer review. They can always make peer review better, but it comes at a cost (something that is all too familiar).
This already shows why judging journals by rejection rates can potentially be quite harmful. If a journal is merely striving to maximize its rejection rate, it doesn’t much care who it rejects. So, it has less incentive to invest in high quality peer review than does a journal that is judged by the average quality of papers in the journal. After all, if a journal only cares about rejection rates, it doesn’t much matter if a rejected paper was good or bad.
This already is probably sufficient to give one pause, but it actually gets much worse. In that quick argument, we implicitly assumed that there was a fixed population of authors who mindlessly submitted to the journal, hoping to get lucky. However, in the real world, authors might be aware of their chance of acceptance and choose not to submit if they regard the effort as not worth the cost.
A journal editor who wants to maintain a high rejection rate now has a problem. If they are too selective, authors of bad papers might opt not to submit, and a paper that isn’t submitted can’t be rejected. If a journal very predictably rejects papers below a given standard, their rejection rates will go down because authors of less good papers will know they don’t stand a chance of being accepted. A journal editor who cares about their journal’s rejection rate will then be motivated to tolerate more error in its peer review process in order to give authors a fighting chance to be accepted. They use their unreliable peer review as a carrot to encourage authors to submit, which in turn allows the journal to keep their rejection rates high.
We consider several variations on our model to demonstrate how this result is robust to different ways that authors might be incentivized to publish in different journals. We would encourage the interested reader to look at the details in the paper.
Of course, our method is to use simplified models, and in doing so we run the risk that a simplification might be driving the results. Most concerning, in our mind, is that our model features a world with only one journal. Philosophy has multiple journals, although in some fields of philosophy a single journal might dominate the area as the premier outlet for work in that area. Future work would need to determine if this is a critical assumption, although our guess is that it is not.
Although we don’t investigate this in our paper, we think that the process we identify might also exist in other selection processes like college and graduate school admission or hiring. In the US, colleges often advertise the selectivity of their admissions process, and we suspect that they face the same perverse incentives we identify.
Whether you share our intuition about this or not, we think the process we identify is concerning. If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review. We think it is potentially problematic that journals sometimes advertise their rejection rates, lest it contribute to rejection rates being a sought after mark of prestige. Furthermore, we think it’s important that philosophy as a discipline walk back its use of rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality. To the extent that we are doing that now, it may actually serve to undermine the very thing we are hoping to achieve.
The post Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
During the summer slow-down, many news items will be consolidated in occasional “philosophy news” summary posts. This is the first.
Discussion welcome.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
Robert Harington talks to Annie Callanan, Chief Executive of Taylor & Francis, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Robert Harington talks to Ziyad Marar, President of Global Publishing at SAGE, and author of "Happiness Paradox" and "Intimacy", and most recently “Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood"
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Ziyad Marar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
In 1831, at the age of 22, Charles Darwin learned to keep notebooks by emulating Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle.
From Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind:
Darwin had never kept a journal before coming aboard the Beagle, for example, but he began to do so under the influence of FitzRoy, whose naval training had taught him to keep a precise record of every happening aboard the ship and every detail of its oceangoing environment. Each day, Darwin and FitzRoy ate lunch together; following the meal, FitzRoy settled down to writing, bringing both the formal ship’s log and his personal journal up to date. Darwin followed suit, keeping current his own set of papers: his field notebooks, in which he recorded his immediate observations, often in the form of drawings and sketches; his scientific journal, which combined observations from his field notebooks with more integrative and theoretical musings; and his personal diary. Even when Darwin disembarked from the ship for a time, traveling by land through South America, he endeavored to maintain the nautical custom of noting down every incident, every striking sight he encountered.
As I understand it, Darwin would take a pencil and a notebook off the ship, and then when he was back on board, he would use pen and ink. (He also switched in between notebooks a lot.)
He wrote, “Let the collector’s motto be, ‘Trust nothing to the memory;’ for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.”
And:
[A naturalist] ought to acquire the habit of writing very copious notes, not all for publication, but as a guide for himself. He ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and no follower of science has greater need of taking precautions to attain accuracy; for the imagination is apt to run riot when dealing with masses of vast dimensions and with time during almost infinity.
I’m reminded that another great journalizer, Henry David Thoreau, started keeping his journal at the age of 20, in 1837, because an older man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, asked him whether he kept a journal.
And I’m also thinking about what the relationship of journaling is to pirates and farmers. A captain’s log is kept to keep track of where you’ve been in space and what happened over time. Thoreau’s log is a record of where he’d been in (mostly) the same place and the changes and what happened there over time…
“It can involve an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of work, and an unreasonably uphill struggle to obtain retractions of philosophy publications, no matter how blatant the plagiarism discovered and how indisputable the documentation.”
In the following guest post, Pernille Harsting and Michael V. Dougherty (Ohio Dominican University) recount their efforts to get a plagiarizing philosophy article retracted, discuss the challenges to getting such articles retracted, and comment on the responsibilities journal editors and publishers have in regard to retractions for plagiarism.
[Elmyr de Hory, “Woman at Table” (c.1975), a forgery in the style of Henri Matisse]
It’s all too hard to get plagiarizing philosophy publications retracted.
Here’s a case in point:
In December 2022, the editors of Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion published a retraction statement—both online and in the printed version of the journal’s 2022 issue (vol. 77, p. 465)—for this article:
M. W. F. Stone, “Adrian of Utrecht and the University of Louvain: Theology and the Discussion of Moral Problems in the Late Fifteenth Century”, Traditio 61 (2006), pp. 247-287.
Although the extensive plagiarism by Stone in the Traditio article had been publicly flagged since 2010, it took 11 years, a new publisher, a new editor-in-chief, and a complete mark-up with highlighting of all the plagiarizing passages to obtain the retraction of this 41-page article.
The plagiarism was initially documented in our co-researched dossier on 40 of the plagiarizing publications that had appeared under the former KULeuven philosophy professor’s name in the period 1998-2009, “40 Cases of Plagiarism” (by M.V. Dougherty, P. Harsting and R. L. Friedman, in Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 51/2009, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, pp. 350-391).
As the 2010 dossier showed (“Case 28 (2006)”, p. 378), the main part of the Traditio article is a translation from German into English of passages from Chapter 4—“4. Adrian Florensz (Hadrian VI)”; “4.1 Biographische Einführung”; “4.2 Metaethische Analyse”—of this book:
Rudolf Branko Hein,“Gewissen” bei Adrian von Utrecht (Hadrian VI.), Erasmus von Rotterdam und Thomas More: Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Analyse des Gewissensbegriffs in der katholischen nordeuropäischen Renaissance (Studien der Moraltheologie 10; Münster: LIT Verlag, 1999).
We first contacted the editors of Traditio in October 2011 with a request for retraction of the article on account of plagiarism. At that point, the journal, which is still based at Fordham University, was published by Fordham University Press. In the email to Traditio we enclosed a copy of the “40 Cases of Plagiarism” dossier, which details, page for page, the overlap between the 2006 article and the previously published German source, and offers a representative example of the translation plagiarism.
The editor-in-chief didn’t reply to the email request; nor did we hear back from any other member of the journal’s editorial board.
In February 2012, Dougherty sent a follow-up email to the editors with a repeat request for retraction of the plagiarizing article. On 6 March 2012, the editor-in-chief replied that “the matter will be treated at the next meeting of the Board”, which was to take place “in March or April”. This sounded promising, but the email—and apparently also the discussion—was closed as follows:
“I also need to tell you, however, that the situation was already known to us. The vice rector for research at the K. U. Leuven wrote to us in March of 2010 providing details about the situation and leaving a decision about the status of the publication up to us. The matter is best handled, I believe, between the K. U. Leuven and Traditio. Sincerely […]”
A further follow-up email of 9 April 2015 from Dougherty to the editor-in-chief went unanswered. And still nothing happened—until six years later, in May 2021, when Harsting marked up all the plagiarizing passages in a PDF copy of the 41-page Traditio article and sent this 1:1 documentary material to the journal with yet another request for retraction. Among the co-signers of this renewed request was the author, Rudolf Branko Hein, whose 1999 book had been plagiarized in the Traditio article and whose own email complaints, addressed and sent to a member of the journal’s editorial board in the beginning of 2010, had been disregarded.
In the meantime, the publication of Traditio had been taken over by Cambridge University Press, and a new editor-in-chief had been appointed to head the journal and its editorial board (which, in 2021, still counted among its members some of those copied on our emails of 2011, 2012, and 2015, including the former editor-in-chief).
Finally things started to move: In the late autumn of 2021, the online version of the plagiarizing article was retracted and watermarked as such on the Cambridge University Press website. And in December 2022, this was followed up by the publication of the editors’ official retraction statement.
Obviously, we cannot know what motivated the former editor-in-chief’s inaction with regard to the problem of the plagiarizing Traditio article. But it is a fact that to many editors of journals, handbooks, conference proceedings, book series, etc., in philosophy and other humanities fields, receiving a request for retraction of one of their published items is ”a first”, and often they haven’t put guidelines and procedures in place to deal properly with such a request.
Unfortunately, it also seems to be the case that, to some editors (as well as their publishers), preserving the image of a faultless and “scandal-free” publishing practice is more important than contributing actively to the upholding of good research standards by unambiguously retracting plagiarizing and other fraudulent publications.
Whatever the reason for editors to ignore complaints about documented findings of plagiarism in the publications they are responsible for, this laxity has consequences beyond the harm it causes to the reputation of the journals, book series, etc.—and to their publishers. Most importantly, while editors are looking the other way or dragging their feet, the plagiarizing publications are still treated as if they were original contributions to scholarship.
Thus, for 15 years—from 2006, when the Traditio article was published, until the late autumn of 2021, when it was watermarked as retracted on Cambridge University Press’ online platform—readers have been misled about the article’s authorship and originality, first by the author-of-record and then, since 2010, by the inaction of the journal editors.
During the 11-year period from early 2010, when the editors first learned about the plagiarism problem, until late 2021, when the retraction for plagiarism was finally issued, scholarly writers have kept crediting the author-of-record for the findings and wordings he had stolen from Hein’s previously published work. There is no doubt that at least some of the positive downstream citations and quotations of the plagiarizing Traditio article could have been avoided, had the retraction been issued without delay.
To mention but a few recent examples of the continued positive citation:
In 2019, the Traditio article was commended in these publications:
From 15 May 2016 until 11 October 2020, the Wikipedia entry for “Pope Adrian VI” contained a reference to the plagiarizing Traditio article. The reference was removed by an anonymous Wikipedia editor, who pointed out two PubPeer postings from early 2018 (1, 2) that discussed the plagiarism and authorship problems of the Traditio article.
Unfortunately, as of March 2023, the Traditio article still hasn’t been registered as retracted on such much-used platforms as JSTOR and Project Muse.
The continued quoting from and citing of plagiarizing publications is troubling, for several reasons. First of all, and most obviously, plagiarism is an act of theft—of authorship, of research material, of research results—and stolen goods should be returned to the proper owner and not be further “handled”.
Furthermore, despite all their copying efforts, plagiarists are not necessarily good copyists. Nor are they necessarily good translators. In fact, not a few errors have occurred during the clandestine transfer of material from the original German-language source into the English-language Traditio text: errors have been inserted in the copied Latin quotations; in the copied page references; in the copied dates; in the copied names of authors of secondary literature; and other errors are the result of misunderstandings and mis-translations of the original German text (and the Latin words and sources quoted there).
In short: the Traditio article is in no way reliable and should not be further quoted or cited. Readers interested in the subject matter should consult Rudolf Branko Hein’s original German book as well as his English-language article, “Conscience: Dictator or Guide?—Meta-Ethical and Biographical Reflections in the Light of a Humanist Concept of Conscience”, in Bernard Hoose, Julie Clague and Gerard Mannion (eds.), Moral Theology for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Celebration of Kevin Kelly (London, T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 34-50.
The saga of the plagiarizing Traditio article ended with an unambiguous retraction. We are grateful to the new editor-in-chief and the new publisher of the journal for issuing the much-needed retraction. According to Retraction Watch Database, the Traditio retraction is number 15—in addition to three “expressions of concern”—for the author-of-record. For a time, the retraction count even earned him an ignominious listing on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.
But the Traditio case also demonstrates that it can involve an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of work, and an unreasonably uphill struggle to obtain retractions of philosophy publications, no matter how blatant the plagiarism discovered and how indisputable the documentation. While there has been an increase, since 2010, in the discovery of cases of extensive (”serial”) plagiarism in the field, it has in the same period become increasingly hard to obtain retractions for plagiarizing philosophy publications. Incredibly enough, there are yet other plagiarizing items by the Traditio article’s author-of-record that still need to be retracted.
In our experience it is typically very difficult to secure retractions for plagiarizing publications from some of the most dominant commercial publishers of research literature: appeals to these big players to regard retractions as an act of accountability and a meaningful contribution to the upholding of academic integrity too often have no effect whatsoever. This means that some academic editors are left very much on their own, without support from their publisher, when confronted with requests for retraction of publications for which they as editors are ultimately responsible.
In philosophy, as in academia in general, we have entrusted journal and book editors with a key function: we have made them the major gatekeepers in the joint endeavor of ensuring and upholding the reliability and quality of published research. Accordingly, we must be able to rely on academic editors to respond with integrity to the trust placed in them—and we must be able to expect that these entrusted editors will not ignore, tolerate, or gloss over plagiarism and other results of academic misdoing that may be discovered in the publications for which they have ethical and legal responsibility.
It is a positive development that many of the traditional academic publishers have begun to set up research and publication ethics committees and have issued ethics guidelines for their publishing practice. When applied in practice, such measures improve the quality of publications, and they facilitate the work of academic journal and book editors who will know precisely what to do when presented with well-documented requests for retraction of publications on account of plagiarism or other academic fraud.
As integrity-based publishing standards are being implemented, it’s therefore to be hoped that philosophy (and other academic) editors will be more inclined to deal with well-founded complaints about plagiarism in their edited publications—and that more editors will see the issuance of timely retractions as a duty and as a service to their field.
Related: Plagiarism in Philosophy: How Publishers Respond
Robert Harington and Alison Mudditt, CEO of PLOS, in conversation in this series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – – Alison Mudditt appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Robert Harington talks to Antonia Seymour, CEO of IOP Publishing, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Antonia Seymour appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
An interview with Mark Robertson about the CAST/STM report on open access and China.
The post China and Open Access appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This post is just to remind readers about the American Philosophical Association’s Journal Survey site.
The site solicits information from authors about their experiences with journals, and lists the reported acceptance rates, response times, and ratings of reviewer comments and editorial experience. If you haven’t supplied data for it in a while, consider doing so. Check it out here.
Some background on the project is here.
Rick Anderson interviews Nick Lindsay of MIT Press about the press's new shift+OPEN program for subscription journals that want to go OA.
The post Digging into shift+OPEN: A Conversation with MIT Press appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science just awarded its 2022 Referee of the Year award to Kenneth Aizawa (Rutgers Newark).
The editorial team writes, “Across 2022, one person rose above some stiff competition to win our referee of the year award. Kenneth Aizawa consistently demonstrated great generosity with his expertise, providing our editors with speedy and judicious advice and our authors with the sort of insight that brings out the best in their projects. We are tremendously grateful to Ken for his invaluable contribution to our discipline.” The award includes a lifetime honorary membership in the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
When I last posted about this award, back in 2020, I asked whether other journals had such awards. At the time, none did. Have any been instituted since then? Or any other mechanisms for rewarding referee work?
Editors of academic philosophy journals whose content is largely behind paywalls may be interested in applying to a new program from MIT Press that will “cover the expenses of transitioning a journal to open access model for a three-year term, provide the Press’s full suite of publishing services, and support the development of a sustainable funding model for the future.”
Dubbed “shift+Open”, the program is intended for journals that have been publishing for at least three years using a subscription model. There are no other restrictions on eligibility, so the fact that your journal is currently produced by another publisher is not an obstacle to applying, and journals based anywhere in the world are welcome to apply.
The aim is to convert journals to “diamond”-level open access, that is, no fees for authors to submit or publish their work and no fees for readers to access content.
They note: “we anticipate publishing only in a digital format but will consider submissions that have a print component.”
The project is funded by the Arcadia Fund.
You can learn more about shift+Open here.
What should our norms be regarding the publishing of philosophical work created with the help of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or other forms of artificial intelligence?
[Manipulation of M.C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands” by J. Weinberg]
First, no LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research paper. That is because any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility.
Second, researchers using LLM tools should document this use in the methods or acknowledgements sections. If a paper does not include these sections, the introduction or another appropriate section can be used to document the use of the LLM.
A few comments about these:
a. It makes sense to not ban use of the technology. Doing so would be ineffective, would incentivize hiding its use, and would stand in opposition to the development of new effective and ethical uses of the technology in research.
b. The requirement to document how the LLMs were used in the research and writing is reasonable but vague. Perhaps it should be supplemented with more specific guidelines, or with examples of the variety of ways in which an LLM might be used, and the proper way to acknowledge these uses.
c. The requirements say nothing about conflict of interest. The creators of LLMs are themselves corporations with their own interests to pursue. (OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, for example, has been bankrolled by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and other individuals, along with companies like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and others.) Further, LLMs are hardly “neutral” tools. It’s not just that they learn from and echo existing biases in the materials on which they’re trained, but their creators can incorporate constraints and tendencies into their functions, affecting the outputs they produce. Just as we would expect a researcher to disclose any funding that has an appearance of conflict of interest, ought we expect researchers to disclose any apparent conflicts of interest concerning the owners of the LLMs or AI they use?
Readers are of course welcome to share their thoughts.
One question to take up, of course, is what publishing norms philosophy journals should adopt in light of the continued development of LLMs and AI tools. Are there distinctive concerns for philosophical work? Would some variation on Nature‘s approach be sufficient?
Discussion welcome.
December 2022 saw the publication of the first two issues of the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (JHWP).
JHWP “is the world’s first journal dedicated to restoring and discussing the history of the texts written by and about women philosophers. The Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists seeks to integrate women’s intellectual heritage into the canon of philosophy, the humanities, and the natural and social sciences… The time period investigated by articles in the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists ranges from 2200 BCE to the 20th century CE in both the Western and non-Western world.”
Its founders and editors are Ruth Edith Hagengruber (Paderborn) and Mary Ellen Waithe (Cleveland State, emerita).
The journal, which makes use of double-anonymous peer review, publishes two issues per year, with each issue focusing on a particular theme so that “each issue is a collected anthology of continuing interest.”
While the journal is not entirely open-access, several pieces are unpaywalled, and the publisher is providing individuals with free access to all of the journal’s content through the end of 2024 with the use of a token (explained here).
In their foreword to Issue 1, Volume 1, Professors Hagengruber and Waithe write:
Anyone who studied philosophy with open eyes could not fail to notice that from the very beginning, women philosophers have had an important function in the history of philosophy. How could we philosophize without starting with Plato and Socrates, and ignoring Socrates’ female teachers? And yet this has been the reality in the institutions of philosophy teaching, in universities, schools and academies, worldwide.
Philosophy and its traditions have been taught only in part. It was as if Newton had only measured every other planet to determine the dynamics of dependencies. How was it possible that so many famous names were mentioned but not taught? Theano, Diotima, Aspasia, Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Margaret Cavendish, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Émilie Du Châtelet, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harriet Taylor Mill never completely disappeared, even though they had been eradicated from the patriarchal canon of institutional teaching. Early in the 1980s Mary Ellen Waithe started to bring these ideas and their authors together in a four-volume set, compiling much of the knowledge that was accessible before the creation of the internet. Waithe documented the biased philosophical approach to philosophy’s history. While many great philosophers did not care to name the women by whom they had been influenced, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Mill did name them, yet even today, some ignore that reality. Not all philosophers are right. The history of philosophy itself needs to be critically examined. One of the most important factors contributing to rewriting the history of philosophy in a more reliable way is to bring in women’s ideas. That will demonstrate the epistemological gain of works that have long been suppressed or ignored. No loss of knowledge is good.
While the ideas of women have been presented separately and cut off from the canon for many decades, now is the time to bring it together, to rewrite a history of philosophy that is more complete than it has been up to now. Working together for now and the future, we participate in the creation of anthologies, translations, encyclopedias, conferences, symposia, research programs and curricula devoted to reclaiming, restoring and reconsidering what women’s contributions have been to our discipline.
Philosophy is the mother of all theoretical academic disciplines. Accordingly, the net we cast through this, the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, is necessarily broad. We welcome contributions on the whole history of philosophy, from antiquity to the present day, and we also welcome discussions on women philosophers who do not belong to the Western tradition of philosophy.
The field of philosophical disciplines here at stake includes all traditional fields that belong to the field of philosophical discipline practiced today, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, mathematics, philosophy of religion, and so forth. Here, however, we stretch even further. Precisely because women have often and for so long been excluded from academic philosophy, and consequently have published in and were contributors to related sciences, their texts and analyses find their space here. The Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists provides a scholarly venue for discussing works by women who have made significant contributions to what is now the academic discipline of philosophy as well as to the theoretical foundations of other disciplines, including the physical sciences, mathematics, social sciences, medicine, economics, religion, and so forth. We are the venue for examining the ideas of scientists such as Ada Lovelace or Grete Henry-Hermann, and theories developed by theorists from Mary Sommerville to Florence Nightingale, from Hildegard of Bingen to Oliva Sabuco, from Hazel Kirk to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. We welcome also articles on philosophy of religion ranging from Rabiy’a al ad’Wadia to Julian of Norwich, and from ‘A’isha al-Ba’uniyyah to Teresa of Avila. We also welcome articles about women’s contributions to philosophy of law and jurisprudence. Articles about aesthetic theory as articulated by women in the fine arts and performing arts are likewise desired. Although pedagogical material does not fit the framework of this journal, articles about educational theories developed by women, for example, the educational theories of Maria Montessori and Mary Everest Boole are within our scope.
You can learn more about the journal here.
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