People with Unusual, Minority, Culturally Atypical, or Historically Underrepresented Experiences and Worldviews Should be Overrepresented in Philosophy, Rather than Underrepresented

Saturday's post finding that only 16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women brought out the misogynist bros on Twitter, but also some remarks from well-meaning people along the lines of "maybe women (ethnic minorities, etc.) just aren't that interested in philosophy".

I expressed my rejection of this perspective in a post for the Blog of the APA in 2020. Perhaps it warrants reposting:

There is nothing about philosophy, as a type of inquiry into fundamental facts about our world, that should make it more attractive to White men than to Black women. Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, and social groups. If our discipline and society were in a healthy, egalitarian condition, we should, in fact, expect people from minority groups to be overrepresented in academic philosophy, rather than underrepresented. Academic philosophy should celebrate diversity of opinion, encourage challenges to orthodoxy, and reward fresh perspectives that come from inhabiting cultures and having life experiences different from the mainstream. We should be eager, not reluctant, to hear from a wide range of voices. We should especially welcome, rather than create an inhospitable or cool environment for, people with unusual or minority or culturally atypical or historically underrepresented experiences and worldviews. The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference.

16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women

In some ways, the gender situation has been improving in philosophy. Women now constitute about 40% of graduating majors in philosophy in the U.S., up from about 32% in the 1980s-2010s. There is, I think, substantially more awareness of gender issues and the desirability of gender diversity than there was fifteen years ago. And yet, at the highest levels of impact and prestige, philosophy remains overwhelmingly male.

One measure of this is authorship in elite philosophy journals. For this post, I examined the past two years' tables of contents of Philosophical Review, Mind, Journal of Philosophy, and Nous -- widely considered to be the most elite general philosophy journals in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. (Some rankings put Philosophy & Phenomenological Research alongside these four.) I estimated the gender of each author of each article, commentary, or response (excluding book reviews and editorial prefaces), based gender-typical name, gender-typical photo, pronoun use, and/or personal knowledge, generally using at least two criteria. Of 291 included authors, there were only two who were either non-binary or defied classification -- in both cases, based on an expressed preference for they/them pronouns. There's always a risk of mistake, but for the most part I expect that my gender classifications accurately reflect how the authors identify and are perceived, with at most a 1-2% error rate.

Overall, I found:

Authorship Rates In Four
Elite Philosophy Journals
(Past Two Years):
Women: 46 authorships
Men: 243 authorships
Nonbinary/unclassified: 2 authorships

Percent women: 16%

Women now earn about 30% of PhDs in the U.S. and constitute almost 30% of American Philosophical Association members who report their gender -- so authorship in these journals is substantially more skewed than faculty in the United States. Of course, many authors are neither located nor received their PhD in the U.S., so these percentages aren't strictly comparable. However, PhD and faculty percentages are broadly similar in the U.K. and, impressionistically, in other high-income Anglophone countries. (I'm less sure outside the English-speaking world, but researchers in non-Anglophone countries author only a small percentage of articles in elite Anglophone journals; see here for an analysis of the insularity of Anglophone philosophy.)

Now, one possible explanation of this skew is that women are more likely to specialize in ethics than in other areas of philosophy (see these ten-year-old data), and these four journals publish relatively little ethics. To explore this possibility, I did two things:

First, I coded each article in the big four journals as either "ethics" or "non-ethics", based on the title or the abstract if the title was ambiguous. I included political philosophy, social philosophy, metaethics, and history of ethics as ethics. (Of course, there were some gray-area cases and judgment calls.)

Second, I added two journals to my list: Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs, generally considered the two most elite ethics journals (though after the editorial turmoil at PPA last year, it's not clear whether this will remain true of PPA).

In the big four, I classifed 60/291 (21%) authorships as ethics. (Perhaps this is a slight underrepresentation of ethics in these journals, relative to the proportion of research faculty in the Anglophone world who specialize in ethics?) In these journals, I found that indeed women have a higher percentage of ethics authorships than non-ethics authorships:

Authorship by Gender
in Big 4 Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 17/60 (28%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p = .005]

If we juice up the sample size by adding in Ethics and PPA, we get the following:

Authorship by Gender
in 6 Elite Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 40/142 (29%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p < .001]

[corrected Apr 27]

Strikingly, women appear to be more than twice as likely to author ethics articles than non-ethics articles.

Ten years ago, I did some similar analyses, comparing ethics vs. non-ethics authorships in two-year bins every 20 years from 1955 to 2015. In those samples, too, I found women to author only a small percentage of articles in elite journals overall (13% in 2014-2015) and to be more likely to author in ethics, so the trends are historically consistent.

ETA April 28: To be clear, all four journals normally use double-anonymous refereeing.

Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be. It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor.

[image source]

The Metaphysics of Dao

In the intended sense -- inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism, but adapted for a 21st century Anglophone context -- the "Dao" the world as a whole. However, it is not the world conceptualized as a collection of objects, but rather as a system of processes and patterns. The Dao is the spinning of Earth; the rise and fall of mountains and species; the rise and fall of cities and nations; human birth, childhood, adulthood, and death; people discovering and losing love; the way strangers greet each other; the growth of your fingernails; the falling of a leaf.

The Axiology of Dao

Some strands in the Daoist tradition hold that all manifestations of the Dao are equally good. But the more dominant strand holds that things can go better or worse. And certainly the Confucians, who also sought harmony with the Dao, held that things could go better or worse.

What constitutes things going better? I favor value pluralism: More than one type of thing has fundamental value. Happiness is valuable, of course. But so also is knowledge (even when it doesn't lead to happiness), beauty, human relationships, and even (I'd argue) the existence of stones.

One way to clarify our thoughts about value is the "distant planet thought experiment". Consider a planet on the far side of the galaxy, forever blocked by the galactic core, with which we will never interact. What would you hope for, for the sake of this planet? Most of us would not hope for a sterile rock, but rather for a planet rich with life -- and not just microbes, not just jungles of plants and animals, but a diverse range of entities capable of forming societies, capable of love and cooperation, art and science, engineering and sports, entities capable of generations-long endeavors and of philosophical wonder as they gaze up at the stars or down through their microscopes.

We might say that a planet, or a region of spacetime, is flourishing when it instantiates, or is on the path toward instantiating, such excellent patterns.

Conceptual Frameworks

Philosophers typically ask two questions when I propose harmonizing with the Dao as an ethical ideal. First, how does it differ from the more familiar (to them) ethics of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics? Second, what specifically does it recommend?

To the first question: Unlike consequentialism, there is no single good or bundle of goods that you should maximize; unlike deontology, there is no one rule or set of rules you should follow (unless we interpret "harmonize with the Dao" as the rule); unlike virtue ethics, there is no canonical set of virtues the cultivation and instantiation of which is the foremost imperative. Instead, the animating idea is to flow harmoniously along with the Dao and participate in, rather than strain against, its flourishing.

That's vague, of course. What specifically should you do, if your aim is to harmonize with the Dao?

I have some thoughts. But first, notice that consequentialism as a general ethical perspective is compatible with a wide range of possible concrete actions, depending on how it is developed and on the details of your situation. So also can deontological and virtue ethical perspectives be made compatible with a wide range of specific actions. What these broad ethical perspectives offer, primarily, is not specific advice but rather conceptual frameworks for ethical thinking -- in terms of consequences and expectations, or in terms of rules of different types, or in terms of a range of virtues and vices. So let's consider what broad concepts an ethics of harmony might employ, with the specific advice as an illustration of how those concepts might work.

Harmony and Disharmony, Illustrated in a University Context

Harmonizing with the flourishing patterns of the Dao involves participating in those patterns, enriching them, and enabling others to participate in and enrich those patterns. Suppose you think that one of the great processes worth preserving in the world is university education. You can participate in that process by being a good teacher, by being an administrator who helps things run smoothly, by being a custodian who helps keep the grounds clean, and so on. You can enrich it by helping to make it even more awesome than it already is -- for example by being an unusually inspiring teacher or by being not just an ordinary custodian but one who adds a bright smile to a student's day. You can enable others to participate in and enrich those patterns by helping hire a terrific teacher or custodian or by providing the type of environment that brings out the best in others.

We can see the university as a place where many lives converge either briefly or for decades. This convergence is valuable not just for what it yields but in itself. The processes constituting university life also participate in and enable other valuable processes, whether those are individual human lives, or other institutions that partly overlap with or depend on the university, or projects and events that happen within the university, or simply the natural and architectural beauty of an appealing campus.

Compare this way of thinking about the ethics of participation in a university with consequentialism (emphasizing the various goods that university education is expected to deliver), deontology (emphasizing the rules one ought to follow within a university), or virtue ethics (emphasizing the manifestation and cultivation of virtues such as curiosity and compassion). While I don't object to any of those ways of thinking about the ethics of university life, the Daoist perspective is, I hope, a valuable alternative lens.

Disharmony could involve cutting short, or attempting to cut short, an axiologically valuable pattern (rather than letting it come to its natural end), working against that pattern, or preventing others from harmonizing. Continuing the university example, cutting funding for valuable research, firing an excellent teacher, disrupting classes, littering, or flying a noisy helicopter overhead might all count as disharmonious. Other examples can include preventing access or undermining the conditions that allow students, faculty, or staff to flourish in their roles.

Comparisons with Music

You are not the melody-maker. "Harmony" suggests a contrast with "melody". You are not the melody-maker, the director, the first violinist, the lead singer, the lead guitarist -- at least not usually. Your typical role is to support an already-happening good thing.

Diversity and pluralism. There is more than one way to harmonize. A piece is richer when not everyone plays the same note.

Improvisation. Zhuangzi emphasized flowing along with things in an improvisational manner, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Often, the best music has improvisational elements, or at least room to allow one's mood of the moment to influence how one plays the notes. Spontaneous improvisation manifests harmony within the improviser, among the various unarticulated inclinations that arise without explicit cognitive control.

Aesthetic value. The boundary between aesthetic and ethical value (and other types of value) might not be as sharp as philosophers often suppose.

Conflicts of Harmony

A tree is a wondrous thing. Cutting it down cuts short an axiologically valuable pattern, and is normally out of harmony with the tree, the forest, and the lives it supports. But if the tree becomes lumber for a beautiful home, then that act belongs to another axiologically valuable pattern and is in harmony with the Dao of human cultural life.

Your wife wants one thing from you; your mother, another. Harmony with one might involve dissonance with the other. You might consider how sharp the dissonance is in each case. You might consider what patterns are being enacted in these relationships, and which are the more valuable patterns to sustain.

Like any ethical approach, harmonizing with the Dao must allow for conflicts and tradeoffs. The world makes competing demands and offers incompatible opportunities. There needn't be a formula for how to deal with all such cases. In some cases, creative thinking might allow one to support or integrate multiple patterns or integrate them into a whole: Removing a tree is sometimes overall good for a forest; occasional tension with a spouse may sustain a healthier relationship than shallow peace.

Sometimes the conflict is the harmony. Chess masters seek incompatible goals as part of the larger pattern of a competition. Predators consume prey in a healthy ecosystem. Law and politics require adversaries in a (hopefully) well-functioning social system.

My main overall thought is that we can build a fruitful framework for ethical thinking by taking the root project to be one of harmonizing with the awesome patterns and processes of the world.

New Paper in Draft: Superficialism about Belief, and How We Will Decide That Robots Believe

Comments welcome, as always, by email, as comments on this blog post, or through social media. This is intended as a submission to a special issue of Semiotic Studies on Krzysztof Poslajko's recent book Unreal Beliefs.

Superficialism about property X treats the possession, or not, of property X as determined entirely by superficial as opposed to deep facts. Belief should be understood superficially, as determined entirely by facts about actual and potential behavior, conscious experience, and transitional cognitive states ultimately understood in terms of actual and potential behavior and conscious experience. On both intuitive and pragmatic grounds, superficialism about belief is superior to accounts of belief in terms of deep cognitive or neural architecture, and it is not systematically inferior on scientific grounds. Behaviorist and interpretativist superficialism suggests that robots and Large Language Models already do, or will soon, believe. If consciousness is also essential to belief, the issue might soon become unclear for some of the most advanced systems. However, it will at least be practical to attribute some such systems belief* -- belief shorn of commitment to any conscious aspect -- and it will be forgivable if people forget to pronounce the asterisk. Krzysztof Poslajko should welcome this manner of thinking, though it needn't be as "antirealist" as Poslajko suggests.

Draft available here

Further Reflections on the Most-Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Underranked Works and Concentration Percentage

A couple of weeks ago, I published a list of the 253 most-cited works since 1900 in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (The SEP had 1778 main-page entries as of my scrape last summer, and many of those entries have long reference lists.) Citation in the SEP is plausibly a better measure of impact in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than other bibliometric measures like Google Scholar and SCOPUS, which include citations by non-philosophical sources (which can dominate citations within philosophy, since philosophy is overall a relatively low-citation field) and which mix citation by sociologically elite venues with citation by less elite venues (and those citation patterns can be very different).

I think informed readers will tend to agree that the works near the top of the list (Rawls' Theory of Justice, Kripke's Naming and Necessity, etc.) are indeed among the most influential works in the mainstream Anglophone tradition -- more influential in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than, say, Foucault's Discipline and Punish or Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, despite Foucault's and Popper's higher citation overall across all disciplines and sources.

(What do I mean by "mainstream Anglophone philosophy"? I mean philosophy as practiced by professors in departments highly ranked in the Philosophical Gourmet Report, as published in journals that are highly ranked in Brian Leiter's polls (e.g., here), and -- though this would be circular for present purposes -- as recognized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Even readers who dislike the philosophy of this tradition, or who see it as troublingly narrow, can I think recognize the sociological phenomenon of influence in these related ecologies, reasonably called "mainstream" in Anglophone academia.)

Underranked Works

Although SEP citation rates are, I think, a better measure of impact in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than any other existing bibliometric measure, that doesn't mean they are perfect. Works with a huge impact on a subdiscipline, or on a particular topic, will plausibly be underranked compared to works with substantial impact across a range of areas. The SEP will have only a limited number of entries for each subdiscipline or topic, and no matter how important the work is to that subdiscipline or topic, it can appear only once in each entry's bibliography.

This explains, I think, the relatively weak showings of some of the best-known articles in the field. For example:

119th (tied), 21 citations: Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

192nd (tied), 17 citations: Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958, Modern Moral Philosophy

unranked, 14 citations: Searle, John R, 1980, Minds, Brains, and Programs

unranked, 12 citations: Singer, Peter, 1972, Famine, Affluence, and Morality

unranked, 9 citations: Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1971, A Defense of Abortion

This isn't intended as any kind of exhaustive or representative list of underranked works -- just a few examples that struck me as conspicuously underranked relative to their influence. Gettier's 1963 article is possibly the most influential work of 20th century epistemology (in mainstream Anglophone circles). Anscombe's 1958 article is often seen as a landmark in the resurgence of virtue ethics. Searle's 1980 "Chinese room" argument is perhaps the most influential work on philosophy of computation and artificial intelligence after Turing. Likewise, Singer's 1972 article on charitable donation (with its famous example of rescuing a drowning child in a nearby pond at the expense of your clothes) and Thomson's defense of abortion (with its violinist example) are known to virtually all mainstream Anglophone philosophers.

Works might also be underranked if the SEP has relatively few entries in their field or subfield. For example, I'd venture that epistemology has relatively few entries relative to its overall influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. And although feminism has probably been somewhat more influential in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than philosophy of race, SEP features many more entries on the former than the latter, possibly explaining why some important feminist works appear on the list (e.g., Butler's Gender Trouble at rank #61), while philosophy of race is poorly represented.

Influential authors and ideas might also fail to appear on this list, if the influence is spread among several works. For example, here are the ten most-cited authors who have no individual works represented among the top 253:

John Hawthorne (97 total citations)
Jonathan Bennett (83)
William Alston (77)
Judith Jarvis Thomson (72)
William G. Lycan (71)
Nicholas Rescher (71)
Peter Singer (71)
Ernest Sosa (69)
Jeremy Waldron (68)
Joel Feinberg (67)
Amartya Sen (67)

All of the above are among the top 86 most-cited authors born since 1900. So of course no negative inference about the importance of any individual author is justified by the absence that author's individual works from the works list.

What Percentage of an Author's Citations Are to Their Most-Cited Work?

By comparing my most-cited authors list with my most-cited works list, we can get a rough measure of how much an author's impact is concentrated in a single work vs. spread across multiple works. (Note that the lists are not quite comparable, since the authors list includes only authors born 1900 or later while the works list includes all works published 1900 or later, including works by authors born before 1900.)

Consider, for example, Thomas Kuhn. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most influential works of philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. Fittingly, it appears 9th on my list of most influential works. But Kuhn himself appears relatively low on the list of most influential authors: 63rd. Looking at the raw numbers, we can see that 58 entries cite Structure and 71 entries cite any work by Kuhn. Thus, 82% of the Kuhn-citing entries cite Structure.

Contrast this with, say, David Lewis, who is the #1 most-cited contemporary author overall (with 307 entries citing his work) and whose most-cited work, On The Plurality of Worlds, ranks #6 (70 citing entries). For Lewis, 23% (70/307) of the entries that cite him cite his most-cited work.

I can't seem to think of a good name for this number, so I'll have to settle with a bad name: the concentration percentage. Here are the concentration percentages of the ten most-cited contemporary authors in the SEP:

1. Lewis, David K.: 23% (70/307)
2. Quine, Willard van Orman: 32% (69/213)
3. Putnam, Hilary: 24% (45/190)
4. Rawls, John: 76% (127/168)
5. Kripke, Saul A.: 58% (92/159)
6. Williamson, Timothy: 32% (48/152)
7. Davidson, Donald: 21% (31/151)
8. Williams, Bernard: 22% (32/146)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C.: 19% (26/140)
10. Nagel, Thomas: 24% (33/137)

Thus, we can see two clusters: A couple of authors had most of their citation impact through a single work: Rawls (via A Theory of Justice) and Kripke (via Naming and Necessity). The remaining authors had about a third to a fifth of their citation impact through a single work.

Among the top hundred authors, the ten most concentrated are:

Kuhn, Thomas S. (82%: Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
Rawls, John (76%: A Theory of Justice)
Parfit, Derek (71%: Reasons and Persons)
Scanlon, Thomas M. (66%: What We Owe to Each Other)
Kaplan, David (65%: Demonstratives)
Ryle, Gilbert (61%: The Concept of Mind)
Kripke, Saul A. (58%: Naming and Necessity)
Ayer, Alfred J. (54%: Language, Truth, and Logic)
Nozick, Robert (53%: Anarchy, State, and Utopia)
Evans, Gareth (53%: Varieties of Reference)

I confess to being surprised that some of these percentages aren't even higher. For example, I'd have guessed Ryle's impact was more than 61% concentrated on The Concept of Mind.

The ten least concentrated are:

Bennett, Jonathan (16%)
Pettit, Philip (16%)
Harman, Gilbert H. (16%)
Hawthorne, John (15%)
Thomson, Judith Jarvis (15%)
Lowe, E. J. (15%)
Waldron, Jeremy (15%)
Feinberg, Joel (13%)
Yablo, Stephen (13%)
Rescher, Nicholas (6%)

I'll venture a prediction. According to the phenomenon I've labeled "The Winnowing of Greats", the greater your distance from a group that varies in eminence, the greater the difference seems between the most eminent members of that group and the less eminent members. (This is to some extent because you have zero knowledge of most members below a certain level of eminence and to some extent because you overrely on second-hand summaries that highlight a few of the most eminent examples.) If this winnowing phenomenon applies to works as well as to authors, then as time creates distance from our era, all but the most influential works will largely be forgotten -- which will disproportionately favor highly concentrated authors in the historical memory.

[click image to enlarge and clarify]