"Reply to the Reviewers" - Tom Kaspers (University of Chigaco)
Synthese, 2025
Excerpt from “Reply to the Reviewers” (Synthese 2025) by Tom Kaspers:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05248-4
[This paper is a satire of the response document submitted when a manuscript requires revisions. Instead of actually tackling the reviewers’ comments, the author gets sidetracked into a monologue about the role of peer review in philosophy. He argues that peer reviewers shouldn’t judge a theory on the basis of whether it is true. Unlike the scientist, who may assess a theory’s truth by testing it against a shared body of evidence, the philosopher, who doesn’t have much of a shared body of evidence at all, could only answer the question of the theory’s truth by answering the question of whether they happen to agree with it. And whether they agree with the theory might depend, at least in part, on their personal intellectual tastes. The excerpt is of the last few pages of the article, in which the author criticizes and reconsiders the role of these intellectual tastes in peer review.]
I say we leave our personal tastes out of it, for two reasons. The first requires me to address the elephant in the room: your referee reports, though equally insightful, didn’t exactly align perfectly. This particular elephant finds its way into the halls of philosophy rather often; there is nary a feat more considerable than getting two philosophers to agree with one another. Yet, our elephant did give me a beast of a problem. For wherever one of you told me to go right, the other said, ‘Go left!’
I wouldn’t dare to suggest that we get rid of one of you. There’s a purpose to having two reviewers. For example, there was a rather glaring inconsistency in the third section of my manuscript. One of you failed to notice it—fair enough, so did I—but the other caught it. The second peer reviewer is a safeguard. But this system only works if both can keep their personal tastes out of it.
This brings me to my second reason. You are peer reviewers—and I do consider you to be my peers. Normally, we take each other to be peers—within a given community—by default; if you’re a fellow philosopher, you’re my peer unless you say or do things that disqualify you, e.g., you commit an instance of academic fraud. But where matters of taste are concerned, the mechanisms are entirely different. To judge whether I should trust your testimony on novels or music or pistachio ice cream, I must first establish that our tastes in these areas are aligned. I shouldn’t trust you by default.
So, where it comes to judging the internal coherence of philosophical theories, I do take you to be my peer, but if your judgment of my theory depends on your intellectual tastes, I might not. Hence, for peer review to actually be peer review, it’s important that we don’t let our tastes cloud our judgment.
So where does this leave us? You’ve spent days, weeks perhaps, reading my manuscript so attentively. You’ve written an incredible number of comments that you genuinely believed would profoundly improve it. I promised you that I would go over each and every one of them in this response document. Instead, I’ve called your comments irrelevant; I’ve criticized your tastes; I’ve even questioned whether you are my peer!
Having offended you so, I no longer see the point of resubmitting my manuscript. As someone who resigns to avoid getting fired, I retract my submission. But I’ll still submit this response document, not to taunt you, but because I think that my taunting has led to some important insights into the nature of philosophical inquiry and the role of the peer reviewer.
I truly appreciate your tireless efforts, and your commitment to our discipline. But I worry that these efforts have been misdirected. Your most noble belief in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and your conviction that rigor and generality is worth every sacrifice, have plunged the system of peer review in a state of absurdity. Far too many papers presenting perfectly coherent theses get rejected.
Having grown too accustomed to rejections, we tend to shake it off as a mere difference in intellectual sentiments—luck of the draw—and submit again, hoping to get a reviewer who happens to be more sympathetic to our style and tastes. If everyone has to submit five times to get their paper accepted, we’d need ten reviewers for every paper. We don’t have that many reviewers, so editors are forced to desk reject many of their submissions. All in all, one’s perfectly coherent theory exists in the limbo of peer review for years before it sees the light of day. And before that day arrives, there is the day of major revisions. This is the day the author, defeated and desperate, will betray their own theory by accepting every wayward suggestion the peer reviewers have made—performing an impossible and highly destructive balancing act to cater to both reviewers, even though their comments often point in very different directions.
It seems nothing short of a truism to say that it’s always better to engage with as many views as possible, and to clarify as many terms as possible. It makes the paper more rigorous, more defensible, more general. But rigor shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself. And why should we mangle our theories for the sake of generality, when we already know which views we want to cater to and which we don’t? Given the boundlessness of theoretical space, rigor and generality also knows no bounds; you can dive as deep and soar as high as you would like. But when developing a theory, we must set limits. And I’ve argued that in setting these limits, we should be allowed to let our intellectual tastes guide us.
This is not to say that you, the reviewer, mustn’t ever be concerned with matters of taste at all. Internal coherence shouldn’t be the sole pillar of peer review; a good review must also be based on whether the manuscript is sufficiently original and whether it is likely to reach a sufficiently broad audience. To judge the latter, we must know what’s in vogue, so to speak. In that respect, a philosophy journal, like Synthese, might be likened to the Architectural Digest. If everyone is building in the neo-futurist style, it makes little sense to publish the designs of some niche architect firm devoted to reviving brutalism. Or, better put, it would be strange to publish a piece on brutalism that makes no attempt at addressing the neo-futurist crowd. The kind of articles we’d expect to see would have titles such as, “Brutalist Neo-Futurism? Ten Surprising Ways to Integrate Exposed Concrete in Your High-Tech Design” or “Starkness over Sleekness: Brutalism as Neo-Neo-Futurism.”
The judging of the originality of a thesis is also influenced by taste. Unless a thesis is simply plagiarized, this judging shall partly depend on the perceived relevance of the issues addressed. Assuming that a philosophical theory is generally not conjured up from thin air, the theories created today all exist somewhere between being slight amendments to and major departures from theories that came before. Taste determines not only whether you like hard bop better than bebop, but also whether you think the former is meaningfully different from the latter—where those who enjoy neither forms of jazz would presumably be inclined to say that it’s just more of the same. A similar effect is at play when we judge whether the fortieth iteration of dualism is worth the trouble. Yet, when we use taste as a backdrop for judging the originality of a philosophical thesis, we must once again look for the tastes and sentiments of the broader philosophical community, and refrain from inserting our own tastes.
I ask you not to lower your standards, but to define your task more narrowly. You’re just trying to improve the paper, I know. But you’re doing so by inserting your own intellectual tastes. You’re trying to draw it into your own equilibrium, judge it against the backdrop of your own theoretical horizon. Instead, the only tastes that should be relevant are those prevalent in the field of research. These offer a much more limited backdrop for the simple reason that the wider community often doesn’t have many outspoken tastes.
Given the abundance of philosophical theories, and the persistent lack of agreement, what’s in vogue is much more frequently a set of problems or a general method for solving such problems, rather than any one particular solution. For example, there is an overabundance of possible solutions to the liar paradox and the philosophical community hasn’t settled on any one of them. Therefore, it might be too stringent to demand that the author talks about some particular theory x that deals with the liar paradox. But the community has generally come to believe that the liar paradox is a profound problem that those who work on formal theories of truth ought to address.[1] Hence, the reviewer is within their right to demand some kind of mention of the liar paradox if they genuinely and justifiably believe that it would be of interest to the journal’s readership. A good peer reviewer goes beyond judging the internal coherence of a thesis by testing it against the backdrop of the current intellectual tastes of the field. Most of the time this will amount to judging whether the proposed thesis answers questions that might be on the readers’ minds and whether these readers might think the answers provided are productively original.[2]
Though the opportunity is now long gone, I ask of you that you judge my own thesis along these same standards. Instead of asking whether the thesis is true (which, I’ve argued, often amounts to asking whether you agree with it), I would like you to consider the following conditions. (1) Does it meet basic standards of clarity and correctness, e.g., does it clearly and correctly describe the theories and arguments of other philosophers? (2) Is it internally coherent? (3) Does it address well-known questions frequently asked by the field? (4) Are its answers to these questions likely to be productively original to a sufficiently large share of the readers? If you think it does, you ought to accept it, no matter how much it offends your own tastes. Not all that shall be built will appease your eye, but the philosophical land is expansive and plentiful. My hovel is but a dot on a map. And while I’d agree it might offend one’s tastes when seen in a context in which it doesn’t belong—like a Venetian palazzo on the Las Vegas Strip—in its proper surroundings, it actually looks quite charming.
I predict that if we stick to the above conditions and refrain from inserting our personal tastes, the peer review process will become both faster and fairer. It’ll be faster because the reports will become shorter; there will likely be fewer instances of inconsistencies between peer reviewers; replying to the reviewers will be less cumbersome; and acceptance rates might go up (which means less repeated submissions). Nevertheless, it would still be appropriately difficult to get one’s paper published, since it remains quite the feat to engage the readers by walking sufficiently well-worn paths, whilst at the same time leaving behind enough novel footprints to help the readers find their own way across the terrain. Therefore, getting a paper accepted will remain a mark of academic excellence—probably even more so, since it’ll become less of a crapshoot.
That’s also why I’d expect it to become somewhat fairer. Different people will have different philosophical tastes, and some of these tastes will be less common than others. I think this holds true especially for those from more philosophically diverse backgrounds who didn’t breathe the same air as the famous mainstream philosophers and who (for better or worse) didn’t mirror their philosophical tastes to their famous mentors through the kind of informal chats in which one shares one’s sentiments more readily than in print. In a world in which the chances of getting a paper accepted are correlated with the chances of getting a peer reviewer who happens to have similar philosophical tastes, those who have unusual tastes will unfairly be disadvantaged. That’s not to say they should be exempted from having to connect to the shared tastes of their audience, e.g., by addressing popular philosophical problems. But once they’ve done so they don’t deserve to get their paper rejected for no better reason than that the reviewers just didn’t like it.
[1] It is perfectly imaginable that in thirty years’ time, enough philosophers have personally settled on some answer to this problem, even if they might not have settled on the same answer, and that it thus becomes permissible to ignore the liar. Hence, any author who currently does not believe that the liar paradox poses a significant problem can explain why they are of this opinion, or they may wait for the hype to blow over.
[2] I mean by productive originality that the journal’s readers might be inspired by the solutions given to come up with their own solutions. The most straightforward way this could happen is if the readers simply accept the solution provided. More likely, though, the solution would at most offer a novel angle that could form the beginning of the readers’ own solutions.