The aim of Snippets is to publish specific remarks that motivate research or that make theoretical points germane to current work. The ideal contribution is the ideal footnote: a side remark that taken on its own is not worth lengthy development but that needs to be said. One encounters many short comments of this kind in the literature of the seventies. We feel that there no longer is a forum for them. We want Snippets to help fill that gap.

Philosophy could do with such a journal. If it has one, I don’t know of it…

Quickly, though, the remedy that I mean to suggest wasn’t necessarily more official printed journals, but rather fora that have some journal-like virtues, such as some approximation to blind review (or some other appropriate filtering and de-personalizing mechanism), but some blog-like virtues, like relative informality, speed, etc. Also, for those of us in the very early parts of our career, it’s nice to get things on the C.V., which (so far as I know-please correct if I’m wrong here-) still can’t be done by posting to blogs. Something like an edited online journal might grant otherwise identical discussion pieces a veneer of respectability not possessed by blog posts.

But I don’t think we’re in any real disagreement here, anyway, at least as to policy- it looks like the kind of thing these considerations suggest would be similar to the proposed Analysis competitor.

It’s true that top journals like Mind and the Review have a wide enough readership that anything they publish will get widely read.

But that’s not what is at issue here. We’re talking about small, response-only, papers. They won’t get read just because they’re published. They’ll get read by people who think that they look interesting. And I don’t think they’ll look that much more interesting in a journal than on a blog. More the point, that stage isn’t blindly refereed.

Having said all that, the barriers to entry to blogs aren’t that high. Lots of people post to Certain Doubts and PEA Soup, and they get widely read. There have been various grad student blogs that were widely read. (Fake Barn Country was particularly successful while it was going.) It’s still a pretty easy field to get noticed in, a lot easier than journals I’d say.

So to the extent that the profession relies on blogs exclusively for these kind of response pieces (a view that I’m not, of course, attributing to you here), it makes it much easier for established philosophers to have their work widely distributed, and more difficult for those who are less well known. And that, I take it, is one of the things that the practice of blind-review is supposed to prevent or at least ameliorate.