Do academic journals discourage the discovery of knowledge?
The medium of modern academic journals, through their style and methods of publishing, embody significant philosophical assumptions. However, some of these assumptions are flawed.
In my most recent post on Twitter and social media, I noted that we need to pay attention to how the medium we are using affects what we can communicate. There are good reasons to think that
the particular form of social media that Twitter has adopted - with short messages, focused on reactions to others, inbuilt tools to spread tweets virally (e.g. retweets) and instant feedback via voting from other users - shapes what can and can't be said with any effect on the platform.
This dynamic shapes the ‘epistemic usefulness’ of the platform - whether it is a useful tool for discovering truth, or whether it is better for other purposes. Given this affects social media, I think it is worth considering the medium that is commonly treated as the ‘gold-standard’ for epistemic usefulness or reliability: peer-reviewed academic journals. Does this medium, including the norms and production processes, shape the content in a way that encourages or limits our ability to discover truth?
This line of analysis is inspired by the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan and his famous arguments (originally from the 1960s) that the medium is the message. That is, the medium through which we communicate, whether it be oral story-telling, written letters, novels, radio or television, significantly shapes the content of any communication - or at least what content cuts through.
A good example was the first debate in the 1960 US Presidential campaign. It was the first televised presidential but also happened to be broadcast on radio. A clear majority of radio listeners thought Richard Nixon had won; whereas those watching on television gave the win to Kennedy. The medium shapes what can, and can't, be convincingly expressed.1
Academic journals as a medium
The norms, style, editing processes and other features of academic writing have been designed to promote the discovery of truth and therefore be epistemicly useful. The question I want to consider is whether these design features, which rely on certain philosophical assumptions, succeed in doing so.
As anyone who has read an academic paper knows, academic writing emphasises a flat, passive style. It is deliberately not meant to be an exciting read. It aims to reduce personal or emotional factors and emphasise evidence and argument. The information or ideas used have to be carefully sourced and cited. This is to ensure that appropriate acknowledgements are given to others and that papers are grounded in strong existing evidence and scholarship.
Another important feature of academic writing is that precise definitions and technical terminology are encouraged. These are meant to remove ambiguity and ensure that all conclusions reached are precise and repeatable. This is coupled with an almost pedantic attention to detail to ensure conclusions are solid and take into account all of the relevant information.
Given these features, it should be fairly clear that academic journals, as a medium, are built on the assumption that truth and accuracy are best guaranteed by adopting a disinterested, ideally objective, stance and paying very close attention to facts and details. This sounds highly reasonable and should guarantee solid results. It stands to reason this will ensure academic journals are epistemicly useful - and promote the discovery of truth.
However, things are not working out so well in practice. There is a well-known replication crisis in many areas of science as published research turns out not to withstand further testing. Moreover, John Iaonnidis famously argued that, in the field of medicine, over half of all published academic results are false. What is going on?
There have been many explanations offered for these problems, including perverse publication incentives, social pressures and group-think, unhelpful journal business models and deep problems within peer review. However, it is worth considering whether there is anything inherent in the medium of academic journals themselves that are causing epistemic issues.
From the perspective of my philosophical project here at Humble Knowledge, there are a number of flawed philosophical assumptions embedded in the medium of academic publishing. These are plausibly getting in the way of good epistemic practices and leading to some of the known issues. If correct, and this is still a series of hypotheses, fixing the problems of academic publishing might need to go as far as changing the styles of publications and editing processes. Below are four potential issues and I'm hoping readers with academic experience can chime in with their perspectives (or share with others who can comment).
As noted, the flat, passive style of academic journals is designed to embody objectivity. However, as argued previously, there is no neutral or objective standpoint from which we can achieve knowledge. Humans can only work within human limitations and therefore the normal academic style provides the appearance of objectivity that doesn't really exist.
This faux objectivity communicates a misplaced epistemic authority and therefore makes conclusions seem more justified than they are. One problem is likely that it convinces academic authors of the correctness of their views (as much as anyone else) and means that flaws or weaknesses are more easily missed.Technical terminology and precise definitions are often useful for clarity but these terms are never neutral and are always theory-laden. This means that once a set of terminology is embedded in a field, it is hard to question or critique the underlying theory as that would require a major redefinition of important terms. This isn’t a problem if the underlying theory is solid and there are no problems with that. Unfortunately, this is rarer than we’d hope.
Technical terminology can also give an impression of precision when none genuinely exists and it greatly narrows down the range of people who can understand and critique work, reducing the scope for epistemic challenge.
The insistence on careful and rigorous citations grounds work in evidence but it can also ensure that publications cannot deviate too far from orthodoxy. In fields where groupthink and social pressures are an issue - and given every academic field involves human social dynamics that likely includes every field - citations can be a subtle way to enforce orthodoxies. Publications must either build on existing approaches or argue against them - and this shapes the mindset of what acceptable academic scholarship is. It is very hard to argue that a field is asking the wrong questions or introduce truly novel ideas as there is often nothing specific to cite.
The flat, emotionless style of academic writing can reduce some biases, but completely stripping emotion out may also lead to problems. Humans use their emotions to make decisions and decide on whether things are true. There is evidence that completely unemotional people are worse than others at making decisions. Stripping emotion out therefore may bypass one of our human mechanisms for recognising truth and limit the epistemic faculties we can apply.
A personal reflection
These four potential philosophical weaknesses in the medium of academic publishing resonate with me personally. Depending on your epistemic assumptions, personal evidence may be a reason to discount the arguments or might count as a reason to take them more seriously as they are grounded in practical experiences.
Once upon a time, I was pursuing doctorate work with the intention of becoming an academic philosopher. In discussions and presentations, my work generally got good feedback and seemed promising - and my teaching went well. However, I struggled with writing anything up for academic publication - and it always took a long time. I could never make articles work in a way I was happy with and submissions didn’t go down well with peer reviewers. Since then, I have periodically tried to write something academic and have struggled every time.
By contrast, over the last 18 months I have been able to write an intellectual essay about every fortnight, around a full-time day job. Most of the articles here have been grappling with genuine intellectual and philosophical questions of the sort that are the focus of various academic journals. I would guess that at least a quarter have enough intellectual content for a published article in an academic journal. To put it differently, I've read plenty of journal articles with less intellectual content than many of my posts. However none of these posts are publishable in an academic journal in the form I've written them.
My past academic failures may be a personal one. Perhaps I'm just not very good at writing in an academic style and should have put more work into it. However, the analysis above suggests that the philosophical assumptions built into the medium of academic journals are at odds with the philosophical positions I've been trying to argue for. It therefore makes sense that my philosophical arguments were hard to write coherently in an academic style, given the norms of the medium embody opposing philosophical assumptions.
Either way, I've been excited to find a medium where I can express and work through the ideas that have been occupying me for decades!
I'll be interested in comments or feedback from those who are or were in academic fields. Does it ring true that important things might be unsayable or unwritable in academic publications due to the norms of the medium? Please note that this isn't really about bias or groupthink within fields, editors or peer reviewers, but focused on the norms and style of an academic publication.
To be clear, my concerns here are broader than McLuhan’s, so the analysis is inspired by his work rather than adopting his analysis. We will include considerations of cultural norms, stylistic rules, editorial practices and similar dynamics alongside the actual medium.
Excellent. You raise some powerful questions about academic writing which deserve discussion and debate.
In a sense, the journal methodology is designed to create a similar level of 'blindness' to that aspired to in the judicial system. Interestingly, in that system emotion is not removed and absolute certainty (even in criminal cases) is not required. The judicial context also involves an additional element - contest, by which interpretations of the facts and law are debated contemporaneously. Journal contest only occurs over time, and then only if someone bothers to question a finding. In the meantime journal articles stand as some form of independent truth. As you have previously noted novelty is valorised in academia, replicating past work is not.