"Reply to the Reviewers" - Tom Kaspers (University of Chigaco)
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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
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