Editorial

In the editorial office of this journal an eventuality has become uncomfortably common. A referee’s report describes a paper that has been offered to us for publication as being knowledgeable and well argued but not containing any major new ideas or results. Such evaluations are of course to be expected every once in a while, but when they are involved in the majority or near-majority of our acceptance decisions, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that something is wrong in the state of philosophy. Part of the proliferation of competent but uninteresting papers is explainable by the pressure on untenured assistant professors to amass Brownie points for their tenure decisions in the form of refereed publications, together with the associated fear of publishing anything that would be objected to by potential tenure evaluators. However, this explanation is only a partial one. Philosophical thought is unmistakably experiencing a dearth of genuinely new and interesting ideas – or at least a perceived shortage. This unfortunate fact is also attested to by the clustering of papers by subject. In a journal like Synthese, there have been plenty of papers on the tired old subjects of direct reference, realism, indeterminacy of translation, narrow vs. broad content, the Chinese Room argument, to mention but a few, but fewer papers striking out in radically new directions. Likewise, there is no shortage of papers on Frege, Wittgenstein, and Quine but considerably fewer on Hilbert, Ramsey or Hao Wang even though the latter arguably offer more leads for new developments. As a consequence, editors and referees alike are tempted to judge contributions, not by their original ideas, but merely by the persuasiveness of their argumentation. Almost twenty years ago Stuart Hampshire lamented privately that genuine philosophical research was being undervalued at the expense of the argumentative aspects of philosophy. His plaint has come home to roost. This situation is not a concern of philosophy editors only. We are not under any illusion as to how much the average quality of published papers matters sub specie aeternitatis. But in the present economic and political climate it presents a serious threat to the entire philosophical community, especially in the United States. At a time when universities are (as the euphemism goes) “downsizing”, our profession needs all the solid reasons it can muster in order to defend itself against economic and sometimes