Here’s some big news: scientists are human! They cherish
their own views and find it bracing if the views of their intellectual
opponents fail to gain traction. Moreover, given the evident hierarchical
organization of scientific investigation (e.g. people do not enter the game on
an equal footing given that prestige is not evenly allocated across
institutions or practitioners, journals are managed by people with skin in the
game, friends like to help friends, careers depend on the relative success of
one’s ideas, big and small etc.) it should come as no surprise that some try
(and succeed) to prevent good ideas that gore sufficiently prominent oxen from
seeing the light of day. How? By denying
funding by trashing grants asking for such, by making it hard to get into
print, by limiting conference invitations to the non-fashionable etc. The
official line is that though scientists as
individuals may lack the requisite impartiality to give a wide range of
views a fair hearing, Science (btw, always capitalized) as an institution allows good ideas to bubble up to the surface given enough time. In other words,
Science encourages what scientists don’t.
Let’s assume that this optimistic tale is correct (but who
knows really). It is still intriguing to see just how strong the forces of intellectual
self-interest can be and just how long “given enough time” can be. It can be
quite a long time. A Nobel Prize eventually came to Barry Marshall and Robin
Warren for their work on ulcers being bacterial effects, but only after a long
fight with the medical establishment that was sure that it was due to stress (here). Recently, a
little window into the ways that thought leaders try to protect their favorites
seeped in the NYTs science section (see here).
Nathan Mhyrvold recently disputed some findings in dinosaurology in PloS One.
The paper he criticizes was published in Nature in 2001, the lead author being
Gregory Erickson. Mhyrvold claimed to
find a flaw in how growth rates were computed. The details, though interesting,
are not important here. What is intriguing is how Erickson responded. He tried
to stop publication of Mhyrvold’s paper claiming that the paper, if published,
would “hurt our field by producing inherently flawed growth curves,
misrepresenting the work of others, and stands to drive a wedge between labs
that are currently cordial with one another.” This did not prevent publication
in PloS One, an open source journal, but it also surely helped that Mhyrvold is
himself a really big deal (here). One can imagine
how things might have gone had this issue been raised by a somewhat less
prominent critic, say a graduate student submitting her first publication and
looking for a “prestigious” venue, like Nature, in which to publish it.
I don’t wish to suggest that there is anything nefarious in
all of this. It’s another “crooked timber of humanity” sort of thing. However,
I suspect that this sort of political maneuvering is more efficacious in
smaller fields like linguistics. This is especially true given the paucity of
publication outlets. Publication rates in our major journals are very low and
so it is easier to prevent unfortunate ideas from seeing the light of day.
On a more personal note, I have found that reviewers often
mistake agreement with the position expostulated to be a criteria for favorable
review. I don’t mean that I have personally felt this to be true about my own
work (though of course, whenever any paper of mine is rejected I am sure that
it is because the reviewers have it in for me!) but because I have been asked
on more than one occasion concerning a review I have submitted how I can
recommend publication despite my professed views that I believed the position
being explored to be wrong. It seems that (some) editors find it odd that one
might think a paper incorrect and yet worthy of publication. I don’t have to agree with a paper to find it
interesting and provocative. Indeed its interest may lie precisely in advancing
a view that I disagree with.
This problem is further exacerbated by the peer review
process, I believe. Peer review pursues
the lowest common denominator. It’s hard enough to convince one person that an off-beat idea is worth investigating. It’s
harder still to convince five.[1]
I once asked a friend of mine if he believed that Einstein’s 1905 papers could
have been published today? They were very quirky given the standards of the
time; quite informal, from a patent clerk, sent to the most prestigious physics
journal in the field at the time. He thought not likely. Luckily, the journal editor at the time was
Max Planck and editors were more like impresarios than scholarly bureaucrats. Today,
one threatens eviction if one is too interesting. I personally believe that
this is what happened to Jacques Mehler at Cognition.
His journal was too different (and IMO, by far the most interesting cog sci
journal ever), a problem remedied by appointing Gerry Altmann to replace him.[2]
One of the hopes for the web is that it will allow debate
over ideas to flourish without having to be squeezed through the narrow review
portals of the major journals, something that Paul Krugman notes (here)
has begun to happen in economics. Maybe something similar will occur in
linguistics and debates that are currently largely confined to the review
process (where submitters and reviewers hash it out endlessly), will be held in
public and given a good airing (but see here: Mark Liberman notes
that the most linguistics institutions lag far behind other scientific fields
in disseminating new ideas; a holdover perhaps from our illustrious humanistic
philological tradition? The timeless
humanities don’t pursue “cutting edge research.”).
Let me end: I am curious to know how singular my impressions
are. The above may just be the maunderings of an embittered isolate. Do you find that institutional Linguistics
does a good job at finessing the all too natural self-serving aspects of
linguists? Do you find that the journals
and granting agencies try to promote worthwhile debate and investigation? If not, can you think of how things might be
improved? I’d love to know.
[1]
The inherent empiricistic data of linguistics, its basic lack of interest in
theory as opposed to data (no doubt another holdover from our philological
past) is another serious impediment against encouraging new ways of looking at
things. But this is a topic for another day.
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