As you probably have seen, Kieran Healy has done “some amazing work”:http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/19/lewis-and-the-women/ extracting and presenting data about the citation patterns in _Philosophical Review_, _Mind_, _Nous_ and _Journal of Philosophy_ over the past 20 years. The point of this post is to pull out the data about work published in the last 11 years, and make a few brief comments on that work.
Here are the journal articles since 2002 that have 10 or more citations in some combination of _Philosophical Review_, _Mind_, _Nous_ and _Journal of Philosophy_. They are presented in reverse chronological order:
“The Limits of Self-Awareness”, M. G. F. Martin, Philosophical Studies, 2004 (14 cites)
“The Silence of the Senses”, Charles Travis, Mind, 2004 (12 cites)
“What Conditional Probabilities Could Not Be”, Alan Hajek, Synthese, 2003 (12 cites)
“Some problems for conditionalization and reflection”, Frank Arntzenius, Journal of Philosophy, 2003 (10 cites)
“Color Realism and Color Science”, Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Behavior and Brain Sciences, 2003 (13 cites)
“Assertion, Knowledge and Context”, Keith DeRose, Philosophical Review, 2002 (15 cites)
“Evidence, Pragmatics and Justification”, Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath, Philosophical Review, 2002 (15 cites)
“The Transparency of Experience”, M. G. F. Martin, Mind, 2002 (14 cites)
“Basic Knowledge and the Problem of Easy Knowledge”, Stewart Cohen, PPR, 2002 (10 cites)
“(Anti-)Sceptics Simple and Subtle: G.E. Moore and John McDowell”, Crispin Wright, PPR, 2002 (10 cites)
And then there’s several more articles once we start going back to 12 or more years ago.
Here are the recent-ish books that have appeared more than 10 times in these four journals.
_A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge_, by Ernest Sosa, 2007 (12 cites).
_The Philosophy of Philosophy_, by Timothy Williamson, 2007 (11 cites)
_Knowledge and Practical Interests_, by Jason Stanley, 2005 (26 cites)
_Insensitive Semantics_, by Herman Cappelen and Ernest LePore, 2005 (11 cites)
_Knowledge and Lotteries_, by John Hawthorne, 2004 (36 cites)
_Action and Perception_, by Alva Noe, 2004 (15 cites)
_The Realm of Reason_, by Christopher Peacocke, 2004 (13 cites)
_Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology_, by Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, 2004 (10 cites)
_The Things We Mean_, by Stephen Schiffer, 2003 (17 cites)
_Making Things Happen_, by James Woodward, 2003 (16 cites)
_A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals_, by Jonathan Bennett, 2003 (15 cites)
_Thinking How to Live_, by Allan Gibbard, 2003 (14 cites)
_Reference and Consciousness_, by John Campbell, 2002 (18 cites)
_Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity_, by Scott Soames (10 cites)
A few quick reflections on these lists.
All the entries are by men. I don’t think the best, or even the most influential, books and articles over this time period have all been by men. So this is more evidence in favour of the thesis that there is something wrong with our citation practices as a profession.
I believe that at least three of the papers (Martin 2004, Cohen and Wright) are from conference proceedings, not the usual blind submission to a journal. That’s a little bit fluky – none of the 11 papers on the list from 2000-2001 are conference proceedings. (Though 2 of them were from the special J Phil issue on causation.) Still, it’s striking that in the last 11 years, only 7 papers that were sent to blind review have made it onto this list of most cited entries. It takes a long time to get this kind of recognition.
There are no metaphysics papers. The only metaphysics book is James Woodward’s 2003 _Making Things Happen_, and you could just as easily classify that as philosophy of science as metaphysics. There is nothing from the material that you see most discussed at recent metaphysics conferences: existence, grounding, meta-ontology, indeterminacy, etc. From 2001 and further back, there are plenty of metaphysics books and papers on the list. The Healy data makes it look like metaphysics is much less central to philosophy than it was in, say, 2000. (This is a reason why I don’t like talking about ‘core’ parts of philosophy; the core changes rapidly.)
There are also no papers in ethics, political philosophy or history of philosopy. If you look at books, you get just one, Gibbard’s _Thinking How to Live_. If you go further back than 2002, you do start getting more ethics books – including books in normative ethics, not meta-ethics. But the most recent ethics paper I see on the list is David Widerker’s 1995 piece on Frankfurt cases (assuming free will is in ethics, broadly construed, not metaphysics). And I’m not sure I see any others after 1990. In part I think this reflects different subdisciplinary norms; value theorists write books more than, say, epistemologists do. And in part it reflects that the four journals we’re looking at don’t really represent philosophy as a whole. There is so much more ethics and history in the Philosophical Review than in the others, for instance, and even it has less ethics and history than many might like.
The 10 papers also don’t really match up with my internal feel for what’s being central to philosophy over that time, but that’s probably because my ‘feel’ isn’t perfectly reliable. (Although I have seen a few open searches recently, so I have some feel for what grad students are working on.)
The four epistemology papers towards the end of the list have been important, and widely discussed. The Arntzenius paper I believe gets there because one of its key examples, the Shangri La example, is so nice, and so widely discussed.
But the Hajek paper is I think a good example of why citation counts don’t necessarily correlate with what’s being talked about. Al’s paper is great. It is completely convincing, and I often cite it, both in papers and in conversation. But it’s not because I’m talking about that subject. It’s because it points out a common mistake, and it’s a mistake people keep making, and rather than explain why it’s a mistake I simply say “Don’t make that mistake, and read Hajek (2003) on why it’s a mistake.” But it’s not like there’s a rolling conversation about the nature of conditional probability that this represents.
The four philosophy of mind papers seem even less connected to what the bulk of people I see are talking about – though that’s perhaps less true of the Byrne and Hilbert paper, which is obviously central to active ongoing debates about color.
I saw several hundred job applications last year. Not that many of them were in philosophy of mind, despite UM specifically encouraging people with cog sci interests to apply. Those that were in mind typically were doing very different, much more empirical, work than Martin or Travis. That’s in part a selection effect due to our ad. But I didn’t see many of the people in the Leiter hiring thread who were doing this kind of philosophy of mind either. So I don’t really think the fact that the Martin and Travis papers are that often cited is that good a guide to what people are talking about; it might simply reflect how good those papers are, or something about the journals that cite them.
As well as the omissions mentioned above (women, metaphysics, ethics), there are two other surprising omissions from this list.
One is that there aren’t any book chapters represented. I don’t know whether that’s in part because the citations of those are a mess, and they don’t always turn up cleanly in databased, or simply that people aren’t citing them as much as I would have guessed. But given the explosion in edited volumes there seems to have been in recent years, I’m a little surprised that journal articles and books exhaust the list.
The other surprise is that there’s nothing about relativism, or at least nothing pro-relativism. (Relativism is a target, though not the primary target in two of the books shown.) “John MacFarlane’s 1580 Google cites”:http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bT7ooIEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao aren’t enough to get him into this company. That will change soon enough, especially when he publishes a book, but it’s one striking omission. And a quick search by hand through the Google Scholar citations of the widely cited relativism papers suggests that none of them are near 10 references in these four journals. Relatedly, there are no philosophy of language papers on the list, though there are four books.
The point is that it is a little simple to say that these four journals over emphasize language and epistemology relative to the rest of the profession. They do, but not all language and epistemology is created equal. To a first approximation, what’s widely cited in these four journals is something of a lagging indicator of what people are talking about. And that’s true even if we look at recent work that’s widely cited.
One final omission that perhaps isn’t that surprising: young people. None of these philosophers got their undergraduate degrees in the last 20 years. Only a handful (Cappelen, Fantl, McGrath and Stanley if I’m counting correctly) got theirs in the last 25. (Though there are several others who got degrees between 1988 and 1992 on the list if we include papers published before 2002: Pryor, Paul, Rysiew, Huemer and perhaps some others.) It takes a long time to get this kind of recognition.
Links
Updates: June 25, 1:07 PM
- Be sure to read Jennifer Nagel’s excellent comment below, using Google Scholar to track down some interesting citation patterns.
- Via Twitter, Mark Eli Kalderon argued that my points about the Martin/Travis papers weren’t particularly strong, and I think he’s right. I started with the thought “This data doesn’t match my priors.” When that happens, the two things to do should be to either investigate further, or adjust credences. Really, what I should have stressed was just this mismatch. And the simplest explanation of that is that I have a partial view of the field (as everyone does.
- In fact by a number of measures, the Martin and Travis papers have been talked about a lot. Jennifer Nagel’s comment discusses their Google Scholar counts. By web of knowledge they also have a lot of citations for articles in the last 10 years. I’m looking more into this, and hopefully have more to report soon, but for now I wanted to walk back a little what I said about Martin and Travis.
- For more data relating to gender and citations, see the Gendered Citation Campaign database “here”:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtwL-Rlbp_t4dDkyRVZuRUM4ZUplYlhOOG5RTFdhZXc#gid=0.