Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. André Hampshire's avatar

    If one is genuinely uninterested in engaging with non-human interlocutors, it is unclear why one continues to do so—especially while…

  2. Steven Hales's avatar
  3. sahpa's avatar

    Essays as coursework has never been just about engaging the argument itself. Authorship matters because it matters that the argument…

  4. André Hampshire's avatar

    If anything, this exchange illustrates the problem: judgments are being made on stylistic impressions (“this sounds like AI”) rather than…

  5. Ted Bach's avatar

    The existential threat is not to higher-ed as such but a particular (and now common) higher-ed business model: the one…

  6. Steven Hales's avatar
  7. Collin Lucken's avatar

The Changing “Sociology” of the Philosophy Profession: Presentation Style, “Brilliant Loners” and Group Work, and the Empirical Facts (Leiter)

Brian Leiter
A senior philosopher wrote with
the following interesting observations about "the changing sociology of
the field," with particular regard to philosophy of language:
When
I was in graduate school [in the 1960s], papers delivered to philosophy departments
were almost always read out by the speaker from a typescript. This
practice reflected a conception of the field in which it was judged
important never to make a mistake—even if this was accomplished by
saying little and saying it unintelligibly. This is changing of course,
and some prominent younger philosophers are overturning this and other
established practices and established ideas of philosophy. This
generation is likely to see creativity and provocativeness as more
important than being anal about every little detail, and this goes
with publishing more and more flamboyantly rather than publishing
little and conservatively. Another interesting generational change: the
older generation had a myth of the brilliant loner producing insights
out of the blue, whereas the younger generation is more communitarian,
focusing more about projects that emerge out of group discussions.
Another change in philosophy of language in particular is that the
younger generation in philosophy of language thinks that philosophical
mileage can be gotten out of linguistic facts in a way alien to many
older philosophers. And in philosophy of mind and even ethics, there is
much more emphasis on empirical work. These developments are not
unconnected since practices in linguistics and psychology are much more
communitarian than has been the case in philosophy.

Comments are open for other perspectives on these changes, both the extent to which my correspondent has accurately captured them, and the extent to which we should view them as good developments.  As usual, non-anonymous comments are preferred, and comments may take awhile to appear, so post only once.

 

Leave a Reply to Robert Johnson Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

30 responses to “The Changing “Sociology” of the Philosophy Profession: Presentation Style, “Brilliant Loners” and Group Work, and the Empirical Facts (Leiter)”

  1. david velleman

    I think that the descriptive component of your correspondent's message is mostly correct; I'm not entirely in agreement with the evaluative component.

    To begin with, I don't think that reading from a typescript is necessarily a symptom of being "anal about every little detail". I have given talks in both of the now-standard formats — reading from a typescript and speaking extempore with PowerPoint slides. Recently I experimented with presenting the same paper in different formats on different occasions. As it turned out, the difference was not that I made fewer mistakes when reading; the difference was that I managed to say a lot more, to fill in more of the detail rather than summarize. And the result was that the discussion period could be devoted to questions that challenged the paper more and were more of a stretch to answer. When I gave the same paper as a PowerPoint talk, most of the questions were of the sort that could be answered with material from the paper that I hadn't managed to fit in to the PowerPointilistic summary.

    I agree with your correspondent that younger philosophers are "publishing more, and more flamboyantly, rather than publishing little and conservatively." But this pattern doesn't necessarily manifest a tendency to "see creativity and provocativeness as more important". The additional output is sometimes merely clever about relatively superficial puzzle-cases — including linguistic puzzle-cases, in keeping with the tendency to think "that philosophical mileage can be gotten out of linguistic facts". The creativity that's required to get to the bottom of large, fundamental issues is not often on display.

    Another result of "publishing more, and more flamboyantly" is the deterioration of aesthetic standards. The newest philosophy is just very badly written when compared with the beautifully crafted essays of the older generation, who wrote much less. Philosophy is less of a joy to read than it once was.

    Finally, I would say that the price of being "more communitarian" is a noticeable cliquishness — an emphasis on speaking to a close-knit group of favored interlocutors rather than speaking to the discipline at large. The "old boys'" network may be a thing of the past, but networking is clearly coming back with a vengeance.

    Reply
  2. Paul

    On the issue of reading papers vs. extempore presentation: I think the relevant distinction is "those who are attentive to the fact that they are giving a presentation" vs. "those who are not." If I am going to read a 30-page journal article on my own, I might spent anywhere between an afternoon and a week trying to understand it. It is unhelpful (and unpleasant) when that same paper is crammed into a quickly-read 1-hour presentation. I haven't been around long enough to know whether there is a trend one way or the other. But if there isn't a trend toward giving thought to the "presentation aspect" of a presentation, there certainly ought to be!

    Reply
  3. Aidan McGlynn

    Does the push away from conservative careful publishing mark a change in the attitudes held by philosophers, or is it rather a response to external pressures placed upon them by current system for advancing one's career in philosophy? (It's probably a bit of both, so I guess I'm really asking which people think has been predominant). Dummett noted in the intro to 'Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics' that Wittgenstein wouldn't have fared too well in the current climate, given his reluctance to publish anything he'd written; regrettable as we might find such a state of affairs, it seems undeniable that such pressure to publish exists, and so I wonder to what extent there really has been a shift in attitudes on this matter.

    Reply
  4. Christopher Gauker

    David Velleman has hit the nail on the head. As a graduate student in the early 80's I heard a lot of people mumble through a lot of papers from which I could extract very little. When people started to give presentations from slides, and later PowerPoint, it seemed like a refreshing change. Paul Churchland led the way in the late 80's, but he actually had a lot of pictures he needed to show. Now people who have no pictures just use Power Point to give themselves prompts for what they want to say, sometimes a prompt for every sentence, which I find just distracting. An encounter with profound ideas is rare in any case, but I think I have never had it with a Power Point presentation. Could we go back please?

    As for trends in substance: In the philosophy of language it is certainly important to deal with semantic details. But like Velleman I sense that there is a reluctance to take on basic questions, in the philosophy of language and other areas as well.

    I'm not so sure that people's writing style has gotten any worse. I don't find many people anymore imitating Quinean declamation, Dummettian indirection or Fodorian impudence.

    Reply
  5. Jason Stanley

    I agree with a number of points in the senior philosopher’s comment. But there are some dangerously false dichotomies, perhaps exacerbated by David Velleman’s comment. First, there is a false dichotomy between creativity and being anal about every little detail. One can do mediocre work by being creative without being careful, and one can do mediocre work by being careful without being creative. Very good philosophy is presumably so extraordinarily hard to do because it requires both virtues. Another false dichotomy is between “publishing more and more flamboyantly” rather than “publishing little and conservatively”. I’m not sure how “flamboyantly” is supposed to function here. David Lewis is from a previous generation, yet he published a huge amount, it was tremendously creative, quite flamboyant in its claims, and conservative in detail. Saul Kripke published two books and several very important articles early in his career, which also had these features. Very few philosophers achieve greatness by publishing little and conservatively. Kripke of course is also an example of a great philosopher from a previous generation who wasn’t exactly known for reading from typescripts.

    I also think the specific change in philosophy of language is not so surprising, and not connected to any more general naturalistic bent. In the 1960s, the discipline of linguistics was in its infancy. Since that time, an entire science of language has emerged, descending in part from the work done by philosophers such as Richard Montague. It is natural that philosophers now working on the nature of linguistic representation are expected to be aware of advances in linguistics. In short, this particular change in philosophy of language is due not so much to intrinsic changes in philosophy, but to extrinsic changes outside of philosophy (though of course the great philosophers of language of the 1960s had a significant impact on these extrinsic changes). There is a wealth of resources available to philosophers of language today that was not available to philosophers of language in earlier generations. Of course, we ought to take advantage of that new knowledge.

    Reply
  6. Christopher Morris

    I posted a letter to the APA Proceedings more than a decade ago. I entitled it "A plea for less reading". It was prompted by my attendance of an APA presentation where the speaker read his paper, the commentator read his comments, and the speaker then proceeded to read his reply to the comments. A better parody could not be managed.

    None of us would dream to read a paper to our students, much less to friends and family. Admittedly some people are very able readers. But papers intended for academic journals, even when well read, are gruesome to listen to. Virtually no one can remember the details.

    If I were to post another letter arguing against this practice I think I'd give a new argument. The only other discipline I know where there is a significant practice of reading papers is in English and other fields infected by "theory".

    Reply
  7. Alan Thomas

    There are at least two parallel discussions going on here. On the issue of substance I am with Professor Velleman and he did not point the finger at new technology (the connection between the two discussions) but I am happy to do so. The dominant ethos of mainstream analytic philosophy is not too far removed from that of MTV producers: it is all about who or what is hot and what is not, and the half life of ideas and reputations is getting shorter and shorter. E-mail, social networking and blogging is feeding in to the cult of instant response and short lived fads. It is also contributing to "in crowds" of the cognoscenti sharing their views with each other and pressurising half finished work into print. The profession is increasingly dominated by citation rings and the members of such rings are clearly in virtually constant e-contact with each other but not with anyone else – a microcosm of what the net is producing. The second discussion is on "death by Powerpoint" and there I am happy to be pluralist. At the big annual conferences on consciousness if you read out a paper you would not leave the building alive. But a twenty minute Powerpoint talk is basically an infomercial in the hope people will read the paper. For a talk to a department why not pre-circulate the paper?

    Reply
  8. Paul

    "For a talk to a department why not pre-circulate the paper?"

    This is also a phenomenon I don't understand. If I have to read the paper ahead of time, then why have it read to me again by the author? I don't think that talks should be turned into powerpoint information sessions, but it also seems clear to me that whatever a speaker reads should be prepared as a presentation rather than as a journal article.

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    Surely there is a middle ground between Alan's and Paul's comments: namely, read a typescript, and make the typescript available to the audience so that people can follow the text if they choose. This permits the advantages of conveying the detail and subtlety of written arguments, while at the same time making it easier on the audience to follow.

    Reply
  10. Jamie

    Brian, that solution seems odd. When philosophers read aloud a paper I have in front of me, I always want to say, "Please be quiet, I'm trying to read."
    But I don't think Alan Thomas meant that the paper should be precirculated and then read aloud. I thought he meant that it should be precirculated and then some short presentation given (as often happens at workshops and rarely happens at departmental colloquia).

    I think this is a fine idea, but I doubt that many people at most departments would read the circulated paper.

    Jason: you have given David Lewis as a paradigm of flamboyancy. One of us needs a dictionary.

    Reply
  11. Brian Leiter

    Law schools standardly precirculate papers, and have speakers introduce it for 15-20 minutes. The problem with that approach is familiar to anyone who has attended several law school workshops: more often than not, one-third to one-half of the audience won't have read the paper, or read it carefully. The result is unsatisfying all around. We've run several of our conferences here using the method just described–presents more-or-less read their paper, but the paper is available to the audience. It has always worked extremely well, and been much-appreciated by the audience. But to each his own!

    Reply
  12. David Sobel

    I think people underestimate how important it is to be willing to send one’s paper ahead if one wants a good, informed discussion. In my experience no style of presentation can convey as much as I can get by sitting down with a paper and having a chance to re-read key sections at my own pace, and then talking over points that confuse me with colleagues before the talk. I think the expectation should be that if one is giving a talk, one will send along the paper a week ahead of time. This is easily done and is at least as important as the style of the presentation.

    Reply
  13. Thom Brooks

    Let me join the chorus of those in favour of reading papers (and I warmly endorse the circulation of papers in advance). I much prefer hearing the full story of what someone has to say beyond the quick and easy version. In fact, I blame the ability of philosophers to design such nifty Powerpoint slides: I too often find myself admiring their brilliant choice of colours and pictures (in addition to their arguments, of course) that focus too often seems to be away from the content. Instead of all eyes focussed on the speaker, all eyes converge on the screen. In between, plenty of gaps are jumped. With papers, you get a clear sense of the arguments are constructed and their details. Of course, pre-circulation is better still: the audience can then make queries such as 'in the second line of the third paragraph on page 24, you state that…' which is terrific. I certainly understand the move away from the more traditional practice of reading papers. Perhaps what has been lost is our ability to read them entertainingly…?

    Reply
  14. Eric Schwitzgebel

    I have experimented with several styles of presentation, but I think the most successful has been to read my manuscript word for word but to try to do it in a way that it seems that I'm not doing so. This combines the virtues of covering the material with a kind of depth and accuracy that is very difficult extemporaneously with the virtues of not boring the audience. After my talks, audience members are sometimes surprised to find that I'd actually read the talk from a manuscript.

    Part of the key here is to realize that natural speech includes pauses. If you've practiced reading your paper a few times, it's not hard use a pause to glance at your text, then deliver an entire sentence or two in a natural voice, eyes on the audience.

    Reply
  15. Peter Alward

    I'd like to follow up on a point in Eric Schwitzgebel's post. Both reading and talking through papers can be done fruitfully, but they can both also be failures. In order to make a successful presentation of either kind, one has to engage in adequate preparation. If you are going to read your paper (and I normally do), this involves practicing reading it a number of times. Moreover, you should provide a good handout — or use overheads — which make explicit the structure of the paper and the key points. In my view, the main problem with many presentations is not the decision to read or talk, but the decision to wing it rather than prepare and provide adequate aids.

    Reply
  16. Mark van Roojen

    On the point that Jamie, Brian and others are discussing about reading papers ahead: My department long ago adopted the read the paper ahead of time and have the author present a short commentary/summary to introduce the paper approach. I would say that almost all to all of the faculty do read the paper ahead of time, and some of us read them more than once if we think we need to to understand them. Visitors and students who attend probably are not uniformly as conscientious but quite a few of the grad students do read the paper ahead of time as well. When speakers get us the paper very late the numbers may go down and on occasion you can tell the author did not have time to finish the paper they intended to send before we need it. But mostly I think the speaker can proceed as though everyone has read the paper.

    As a result I think we generally have good discussions at papers presented. It may be that it works because we are a smaller department than most and that we want those giving paper to think we did a good job of providing feedback. But it is also that we get more chance to pursue followups because this way we can devote most of two hours to discussion.

    As for reading vs. power point, I think there are further options. I've seen very impressive people talk through papers seemingly without loss of content, but usually they did not use PowerPoint.

    I probably can't do that, but I try to talk through my material with a detailed handout that is essentially my lecture notes. I try to have enough detail about the crucial stuff in the handouts that if I misspeak on something important the audience can get it from the handout. Thus I think I get in most of the detail that a powerpoint presentation would leave out. Yet by talking rather than reading I think it is easier to track what I'm saying than if I simply read it. Of course, I can't speak to how well it comes across to an audience when I do this. But people's questions usually seem pretty good afterwards. And since this is also how I teach it is something I get lots of chance to practice.

    Reply
  17. Robert Johnson

    I'll second Mark's description and endorsement of his own department's practice. It is a very good system. In any case, it seems to me that all of these ways of delivering papers can work. A lot depends on what a colloquium philosophy is supposed to achieve. When the aim is to show that a water-tight case has been made for some position, it is difficult to see how to avoid reading the paper. But if the aim is to engage the audience in exploring some puzzling issue that has no clear 'winner' yet, a talk fits better.
    I'm not sure I agree with the original claim, that one or the other way of presenting a paper reflects a difference in how philosophy itself is done. Whenever I have talked a paper rather than read it, I was just doing with my own work what I do every day in the classroom teaching other people's. I'm teaching it.

    Reply
  18. Mark Schroeder

    Two things. First, I'd like to second everything that Jason said, above.

    And second, I'm with Mark on oral presentation. Why is there a dichotemy between using reading your paper as a crutch and using powerpoint slides as a crutch? Most of the best presenters I know of in philosophy neither read their papers nor use slides. They understand what it is that they want to convey to their audience, what its parts are, and how those parts are related. And then they talk _to_ their audience, rather than simply at their audience or in the presence of their audience. The central point is that "giving a paper" is a form of communication, and some people understand that – no matter what their tools – while others don't – no matter what their tools.

    Reply
  19. Steven Gross

    Sometimes you send the paper as asked and everyone reads it in advance. And other times you get there, give the 10 minute spiel you've been asked to give to get things kicked off, and some joker who didn't get the message stands up and says 'That's it?! How am I supposed to understand your position just from that?!'

    Yeah, you know who you are . . . .

    🙂

    Reply
  20. Sam Rickless

    Presenting a paper is an art, not a science. The crucial thing is to make sure that one's audience is able to follow what one is trying to say. This can be done in many different ways, by reading through the paper, using Powerpoint, slides, or what have you. It is also possible to fail miserably, no matter which method of presentation one chooses. In my experience, the pitfalls differ according to the chosen method.

    Powerpoint: The limitations of the medium are several. First, you only get one slide at a time. Often, a speaker talks through the slide, and then, boom, it's gone, replaced by the next slide. This taxes the memory, especially when some crucial point at the end of the talk turns on an early slide that whizzed by faster than Jeff Gordon. Presenters sometimes deal with this by providing a handout that is simply a printout of all the slides. But in that case, why use Powerpoint at all? You might as well provide your audience with a copy of your paper and read through it. The only nice thing about Powerpoint is that you can add color pictures and visual effects. Wowee.

    Read through the paper with no handout: The main pitfall here is that without a handout, it is difficult for the audience to remember the 67-step argument for transcendental idealism. This leads to questions such as the following: "Could you go back over the 67-step argument for transcendental idealism?" When this happens, I usually start sticking toothpicks under my nails….

    Read through the paper with a handout: Aaaah, much better. But sometimes handouts include no more than bits and pieces of text that the author wants to refer to without asking the audience to read them. Hunh? Sometimes I'll be sitting there during question time, and the author suddenly points to crucial text #17, a text that takes up an entire page in 8-point font, claiming that the answer to life's persistent questions is right there under my very nose. Of course, by the time I've made it through text #17, the custodial staff are turning off the lights and asking me whether I'm planning to stay the night in the seminar room…. And another problem: It often happens that the author's main thesis is nowhere to be found on the handout. Why? Call Guy Noir….

    Provide your audience with the paper ahead of time, and then read through it from beginning to end: This usually works well. But if the paper is read monotonously, then following along is a little like getting slow-roasted on a spit.

    The moral of the story is that gifted speakers find ways of making their talks accessible and interesting, no matter the medium of presentation. But there is no magic solution. As I know from my own experience as a presenter, there are more than enough ways to screw up, sometimes without even trying….

    Reply
  21. Paul Portner

    Linguists – at least those of us in syntax/semantics/phonology – used to mainly use handouts, but now Powerpoint or Powerpoint-like slides are more and more used. I think that you would get a parallel discussion about the new and old ways among linguists as we're seeing here about the new and old ways in philosophy. This suggests that reading a full paper vs. Powerpoint isn't the issue. A paper well-written for presentation and a well-constructed handout seem to have roughly the same virtues. Of course, given my background, I prefer detailed handouts to papers, since it makes the the presenter generate language on the fly, which automatically leads to the right intonation and all. There are also some examples of people who makes slides as detailed as a good handout (Kai von Fintel's, which he often posts on the web, for example), but what I prefer to do with those is just print them out and treat them like a handout.

    I myself sometimes use handouts and sometimes use slides. Handouts make sense when I have many people in the audience who I expect to follow the details of a formal semantic analysis, such as at a semantics conference; slides are better when I'm addressing a department which few or no semanticists or a general linguistics conference.

    Some final rhetorical questions about these language philosophers who are interested in linguistics: If they discover something which finds its audience among some philosophers and some linguists, is this a bad thing? Is the feeling that it's not addressing fundamental questions a prejudice against cross-disciplinary work with linguistics? It may turn out that, since linguistics is a resource for language philosphers, a language philosopher may help advance her/his field in the long run by making a contribution to linguistics when the opportunity arises.

    Reply
  22. Tom Hurka

    Re reading vs. talking:

    When an actor reads a novel on the radio, or a politician reads a speech, no one complains that they're not communicating, or that it's boring because they're not ad libbing. That's because they know how to use variations in rhythm and intonation to make the written text come alive. Philosophers who read their papers can do the same (though admittedly not all do).

    And I think David Velleman — who by the way gives the best PowerPoint talks I've heard — is exactly right on the issue of content. Someone who talks a paper typically goes more slowly, because they're working out exactly what to say, and is often tempted into needless repetitions and digressions. So less in the end gets said. More than a few times I've heard a talker reach the 55-minute mark and say, 'Oh, I haven't got to my main argument yet — let me summarize that in two minutes.' That's a complete waste of time. If you work from a written text and prepare properly, you have complete control over the length of your presentation.

    The best talked paper may be better than the best read paper, but talking well is much harder than reading well. And a lot of people who talk their papers aren't nearly as good at it as they think.

    Reply
  23. Varol Akman

    Sometimes giving an example may be useful (in this case, as to what I mean by a good philosophy talk). Thus, I humbly claim that a good talk should be like http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=8593

    (This is 'The Meaning of "Ouch" and "Oops"' by Prof. David Kaplan. I realize that it is somewhat longer than most regular philosophy talks.)

    Reply
  24. Peter Carruthers

    In some 30 years of attending philosophy conferences and colloquia, I've never yet heard a good talk that was read. (I should confess, though, that I haven't heard talks by many of those who have contributed to this debate.) This isn't to say that a talk from powerpoint or handout can't be even worse – e.g. if the speaker rambles and never gets to the main point. But the moral I draw is that if you aim to give a good talk, you shouldn't read.

    I should add that in the circles in which I move in cognitive science, the stereotypical philosopher who reads a paper (footnotes and all) is a standing joke.

    Reply
  25. Peter Millican

    There are a number of differences between giving papers for a one-off seminar, and giving papers at a big conference. One of them, which hasn't yet been mentioned, is sheer audience stamina.

    I'm REALLY interested in Hume, and most decent papers on Hume – even pure historical stuff – will interest me to a fair extent (just as well, since I edit Hume Studies). But at Hume conferences, which I attend most years, even I find it just exhausting to listen to papers being read, hour after hour for several days. By the end of the week staying awake can be an effort, and keeping concentration near impossible. Potentially interesting papers can be completely ruined because with all the detail being presented, and my tired mind drifting in and out of focus, it's impossible to see the wood for the trees. I've also sometimes seen members of my own audiences in the past, struggling to stay awake, and I don't think I'm a soporific speaker.

    So now I always talk rather than read, often with the assistance of PowerPoint, which enables things to keep to time much more reliably than an extempore delivery. Sometimes a picture can put things across really quickly, quotations (usually more or less familiar to the audience) can be displayed without reading them through, and the headings ensure that one keeps going in the right direction. If textual stuff needs to be referred to a fair bit, it can all be put on a handout, together with key points. At Hume conferences the papers are provided in advance, so a separate handout is usually unnecessary if the talk goes in the same order as the paper – people have all the detail in front of them if they want it. And if the slides have a lot of extra stuff on them (e.g. diagrams), then it's easy to print them out as a handout for reference.

    Since I've done this, I've not noticed any sleepers! And it makes it much easier to make the "big picture" clear, which is very helpful to those who have difficulty keeping 100% concentration right through.

    But of course PowerPoint should be used as a tool to help the talk, not a substitute for it – the talk mustn't degenerate into a reading of slides, which is the worst of both worlds.

    Reply
  26. Michael Sevel

    As an addendum to Aidan's comments and Jason Stanley's post on Wittgenstein, and speaking to some of the issues in the original post, here are some relevant remarks by Tom Nagel in a 2002 book review:

    "Wittgenstein was a great philosopher, and Russell was always proud of having encouraged him in youth – but Russell, too, was a great philosopher, though not as deep or as obscure. In the present philosophical climate, depth is unfashionable, and systematic, scientifically based theories of knowledge, thought, and reality are again pursued without embarrassment by analytic philosophers much more in the mold of Russell than Wittgenstein. … Things will certainly change again, but in Russell's technical virtuosity, his distrust of obscurity, and his vast appetite for a comprehensive understanding of the universe, he has left his imprint on our time." (from "Bertrand Russell: A Public Life")

    The notion of "depth" here is intuitive at best, but he seems to agree that the "brilliant loner" culture has faded away, due in part to Russell's influence.

    Reply
  27. Randall Rose

    When I've talked with other grad students about this, almost all of us would like to be able to read the paper. I've never heard students objecting to informal talks as such–but often we get more out of a presentation when we have a full-length text to refer to as well. The text can be more formal than the actual spoken talk, if that's what the speaker has; or it can be a full-length writeup in conversational style marked "Do not circulate."

    I suspect the problem is that speakers often don't have a full-length writeup at all; at times I've gone to the department office on the day of a talk to see if the text is available, and I'm told "He's still working on it." And yet it's not hard to produce a writeup once you have the talk worked out. It's easy to write a long email explaining your views to a philosophically-minded group; if you're ready to give a talk, just sit down to write an email, pretending as you write that your words are also being spoken to an audience, and you'll soon have a full-length written version.

    It's true that many of us, as speakers, prefer not to write up our talks in advance if we don't have to. But for the audience, there's hardly any disadvantage in having the full-length text available, and it requires little effort on the speaker's part to accommodate the audience here. (I'm not impressed with the reasons why many speakers avoid giving writeups; I've heard of one philosopher who refuses to distribute texts of his talks so as to make it harder for less fully-trained listeners to ask questions.) And as for shorter handouts: yes, they help somewhat, but unless you have the kind of handout that could be read on its own and fully comprehended by a first-year grad student, it's probably more helpful to go all the way and write it up.

    Outline-style writeups tend to produce arguments that seem adequate to the author's own eye while concealing serious gaps. The audience should be able to check whether these gaps are there, as some faculty have mentioned above. If your audience has a text, the person who's sensed the flaw in your reasoning will be able to point it out in a compelling way that stimulates your thinking; getting lots of feedback like that has been crucial for the people who've been best in our field, and if you don't get much of it you have to wait years before you can turn your paper into something worthwhile.

    Reply
  28. Remy Debes

    For the most part I'm in agreement with David Velleman, Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Alward, and Tom Hurka: reading papers is conducive to more productive and interesting philosophical discussion, even when this means listeners may need to be armed with a little extra java from time to time. In particular, what must be aimed at is not a mere reading, but a reading which recreates the tensions and drama of spoken language.

    Too often speakers settle for an either/or option between reading and the power-point style talk, but one clear lesson in the thread of these comments is that this is not the only choice – if there is a false dichotomy in all this, that is it. With a little practice before hand, reading a paper can still provide the speaker with many of the advantages of the power-point style, such as periodically walking away from the podium (or simply not looking down), moments of ad lib comments, etc. And then, when it comes time for careful details, the speaker can more easily beg the audience's patience while a stretch of text is read verbatim from the available manuscript.

    The trick is, the speaker needs to care enough to spend some time lightly revising the original manuscript with language more appropriate to spoken conversation, and not try to use the exacting prose we expect from published work. But how and where to do this is easily discovered if one takes the time beforehand to practice reading the paper aloud, suggested earlier. Is this too much to ask?

    As for the changing climate of how philosophy is done, Velleman said it best: “The ‘old boys'’ network may be a thing of the past, but networking is clearly coming back with a vengeance.” A few days at the most recent Eastern APA made the reality of this abundantly clear to me, whatever its merits, and however much I might have enjoyed a bit of networking myself.

    Reply
  29. Peter Millican

    I don't think anyone has disagreed with the desirability of circulating a full paper in advance. Then members of the audience can, if they wish, examine all the detail – to learn from or argue with – and the debate can be fully informed. But why then assume that the only options available on the day are either to read the full paper (or a speech-friendly version thereof), or to talk through or "introduce" it by delivering a short highlights-only presentation?

    The kind of presentation I had in mind runs the full 30 or 50 minutes – or whatever would have been allocated to a paper – and has just as much detail *in the crucial parts*. Indeed because it devotes less space to all the peripheral detail, and has made less demand on the audience's stamina up to that point, it can focus *more* on the crucial issues, taking time both to give an intuitive gloss on what's being said, *and* to spell out all the detail (maybe specified on a handout, or read verbatim from the paper). This can mean effectively composing two pieces of work – one for printing, and one for presentation – but the discipline of doing this can make the paper itself better. Examining the flow of the argument as an oral presentation often highlights problems that could hinder effective reading of the printed paper. So reorganising the paper to create a good line of oral argument often makes it better written too, and more logically organised (e.g. by forcing it to present a coherent line of thought in a consistent direction).

    Randall suggests that "Outline-style writeups tend to produce arguments that seem adequate to the author's own eye while concealing serious gaps". True, but bear in mind that detail, as well as outline, can be used to camouflage gaps in arguments. I presume I'm not the only one to have come across arguments that seem plausible or hard to assess when fully written out in complex prose, but are then revealed to be nonsense when one takes the trouble to analyse their overall structure. The moral I draw is that an argument is most likely to be a good one if it can appear plausible *both* when written in detail *and* when glossed in oral presentation .

    All this is quite apart from the other advantages of presenting a talk rather than reading a paper out loud (e.g. less soporific, better for engaging members of the audience who haven't read the paper, less boring for those who have, far more fun, etc.).

    Reply
  30. Alex Leibowitz

    What is interesting is that the new generation would favor increased 'creativity and provocativeness' while also being more 'communitarian' than the previous generation, which believed in the value of precision while also appreciating the contributions of the 'brilliant loner' — after all, Wittgenstein is *nothing* if not provocative.

    Reply

Designed with WordPress