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Are top journals hostile to formal and/or experimental work?

Brian Leiter

A young philosopher writes:

I have heard some more senior philosophers say that the best philosophy journals are less likely to publish papers that have experimental content, less likely to publish papers that have formal content, and much less likely to publish papers that have both experimental and formal content. I'm not sure what to make of this sentiment. Are the top four or five general-interest philosophy journals really less likely to publish papers with experimental and/or formal content? (I am especially interested to know if people think that this is true about the Philosophical Review, since that journal is clearly in a class by itself in terms of reputation in the discipline.) If so, why isn't that a big black mark against those journals?

I'll note that PPR has published a lot of experimental philosophy, as well as important critiques of Xphil.  But I've opened comments for other opinions.  If your comment mentions a journal by name, you will have to include a full name in the signature line; all comments must include a valid e-mail address, which will not appear.

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3 responses to “Are top journals hostile to formal and/or experimental work?”

  1. Brian Weatherson

    I think it's very hard to say that the Review is hostile to formal work. Here's a small sample of what they've published over the last 18 months.

    Gabriel Greenberg, Beyond Resemblence, Apr 2013
    Malte Wilter, Dynamics of Epistemic Modality, Jan 2013
    Sarah Moss, Epistemology Formalized, Jan 2013
    Richard Bradley, Multidimensional Possible-World Semantics for Conditionals, Oct 2012
    Anna Mahtani, Diachronic Dutch Book Arguments, Jul 2012
    Darren Bradley, Four Problems about Self-Locating Belief, Apr 2012
    Richard Pettigrew, Accuracy, Chance, and the Principal Principle, Apr 2012
    Michael Caie, Belief and Indeterminacy, Jan 2012
    Matthew Kotzen, Dragging and Confirming, Jan 2012

    Short answer: The Review publishes plenty of formal stuff, and it's hard to see why someone would think otherwise.

    Two disclaimers though.

    Not all of these papers are the kind of philosophical logic papers that, for instance, Mind publishes a lot of. But they all have significant formal elements, either in the papers or in the authors' background models.

    And these aren't experimental papers. There are fewer of those in the Review, it's true. Nous has started publishing more (especially on EarlyView), and as Brian said, there are plenty in PPR. But there are fewer in the Review. There are papers like Sarah-Jane Leslie's "Generics: Cognition and Acquisition", and Eric Schwitzgebel's "The Unreliability of Naive Introspection" which rely heavily on recent empirical work, but even those papers didn't (if I recall correctly) rely on original experimental results. (Though of course both Leslie and Schwitzgebel have done important original research.) Maybe I'm forgetting one or two papers though.

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  2. Joshua Knobe

    As for experimental philosophy, I don't know of anything in Philosophical Review specifically, but there have been plenty of papers in Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Mind and PPR. So I wouldn't say in general that there has been any difficulty getting experimental philosophy papers accepted at top philosophy journals.

    But as Meena Krishnamurthy notes (http://tinyurl.com/knubyz9), there has been a surprising lack of experimental philosophy papers in the ethics journals, especially Ethics and PPA. I would be very curious to learn more about that from anyone associated with one of those journals. Is it just a matter of the manuscripts that happen to have been submitted, or is it a matter of deliberate editorial policy?

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  3. Bence

    I took the question about 'philosophy paper with experimental content' to be not necessarily about experimental philosophy, but rather empirically informed philosophy (especially philosophy of mind). And it's true that there are very few of these in Mind and Phil Review. JPhil started to publish more and there's lots in PPR. This is a difficult niche (cogsci journals are not always very friendly towards articles of this kind), so it would be good if more top journals published papers of this kind.

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