Publishing, Belief, and Self-Trust

Abstract

This paper offers a defense of ‘publishing without belief’ (PWB) – the view that authors are not required to believe what they publish. I address objections to the view ranging from outright denial and advocacy of a belief norm for publication, to a modified version that allows for some cases of PWB but not others. I reject these modifications. In doing so, I offer both an alternative story about the motivations for PWB and a diagnosis of the disagreement over its permissibility. The original defense focused on consequentialist reasons for allowing PWB, offering mostly defensive arguments against potential criticisms. But I argue that once we shift our focus to the reasons why authors might be prone to PWB, we see a difference in two types of motivation: whereas I imagine PWB as arising from underconfident agents, critics point to cagey or nefarious authorial practices, or authors’ failure to clarify their own degrees of belief. Underlying the debate over norms of philosophical publishing, we find two different conceptions of philosophy itself.

Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review

“…More generally, it would ensure that philosophers with lower standards for belief tend to be overrepresented in the literature, which would be bad on epistemic consequentialist grounds. In very recent work, she adds that it would also skew the field against agents who lack confidence in themselves, which (as she suggests) is unjust, given that a lack of self-confidence reflects a history of marginalization (Plakias, 2023).…”

“…It might be true that we are not rationally permitted to believe our ARCs in the face of peer disagreement, but since peer disagreements over whether arguments are worth taking seriously as contributions to philosophical debate are much rarer than peer disagreement over their conclusions, we are usually rationally permitted to believe that our argument is worth readers' time, regardless of the truth of conciliationism. However, the proposal still faces a serious worry: the worry Plakias (2023) emphasizes in her very recent contribution to the debate. Confidence is neither equally nor fairly distributed, and any norm on permissible publication risks heightening the unfairness.…”