hypothesis for why analytic blogosophere is less dysfunctionally vituperative

I think I've figured out why debates in the continental philosophy blogosphere are so much more likely to become vituperative than debates in the analytic blogosophere.

The tenure model in analytic philosophy is overwhelmingly based on number of articles published in a set of journals that generally have from three to fifteen percent acceptance rates (these are actually among the lowest acceptance rates of all academic journals). Say you are perfectly average for a published analytical philosopher. Then you'd have to submit over ten times for every one published article. So nine times out of ten you have to deal with blank rejections or referee reports justifying to an editor why your paper should not be published. And the chance of getting a tenure track job and then tenure depends upon this, so it's a huge emotional issue.

If that is your reality, then people disagreeing with you on the internet is just not that big a deal. You are already used to getting punched down and getting right back up over and over again in the one thing that most determines whether you will be able to follow your bliss. If you don't develop very thick skin the process is too traumatic and you can't do it. But then, as a result, analytic philosophers in blogs can even be fairly dismissive or challenging and it rarely escalates into ever increasing vituperativeness, personal attacks, weird defensiveness, and people being banned.

Of course these are just tendencies, and I would not have a basis for making them if I did not find a lot of the continental blogosophere to be philosophically valuable (check the links to the right).

Comments

[Mark Silcox]

Very plausible. I do think it also has something to do with analytic philosophy's Oxbridge roots. There's nothing like the way that upmarket British academics can rhetorically kick the shit out of one another without letting their feathers get ruffled.

[Jon Cogburn]

Yeah, it's actually much more democratic and inspires less cringing servility.

I remember hearing stories about the glory days of Iowa metaphysics when Gustav Bergman was there. He was "the last of the positivists" and probably actually accomplished as much as Kripke to make metaphysics respectable again. Anyhow, supposedly he still had very German views about how deference was supposed to work in academic departments. As a result (and this is all third hand), when Edwin Allaire (of "bare particulars" fame, as well as a fantastically insightful little piece on Wittgenstein on necessity and color exclusion) started to get into the late Wittgenstein and move away from the ideal of Iowa metaphysics, Bergman supposedly was astonishingly nasty to him- which precipitated Allaire going to the University of Texas.

The British thing is weird. On the one hand you get weird holdovers of the class system. If you are out drinking with a group of British philosophers the patterns of deference in conversation follow this in ways that are uncomfortable to Americans. On the other hand, there is exactly what you describe, which is a result of a history of healthy empiricism leading to more rationality in humanities departments (so the better reasoned argument with more evidence rather than the better academic politician can actually win the day) as well as the triumph of middle class cultural striving (which historically was a very good thing and something whose degradation is a very bad thing).

[Mikhail Emelianov]

I think you're right on the money, even though I don't know much about this aspect of analytic tradition, I know that back home criticism means criticism and you don't take it personally for the most part unless you perceive loud and clear signs of attack (and even then you don't really say much) - it seems that Continental tradition is the same way back home as well, I wonder if thin-skin and a general demonization of everything that is not nice and polite is just an American thing?

[Jon Cogburn]

That seems very plausible to me.

[Brian Leiter]

This is an interesting question, but what you are calling "the Continental blogosphere" is mostly comprised of people who know relatively little philosophy and seem to be preoccupied with identifying themselves with certain figures, mostly from the last hundred years. So in general, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of dialectical or argumentative acumen on these blogs (with occcasional exceptiosn, of course), so of course disagreements devolve in the way you describe, as any partisan dispute without a lot of cognitive content tends to do. I have seen little evidence that actual scholars of Continental philosophy, as distinct from your "Continnetal bloggers," are much different than the so-called analytic philosophers.

[sdfdfsda]

I think the Analytics' civility to one another stems from the fact that it's pretty hard to get worked up over the issues Analytics prefer to study, such as Russell's Paradox or what it's really like to be a bat.

Analytics reserve most of their venom for the Continentals (and vice-versa, when there's contact).

[Jon Cogburn]

Brian- Yeah, I've got to stop identifying "continental philosophy" with whatever happens to be popular at SPEP for the last couple of years. In my defense, it's a very common usage- I've been repeatedly told by people whom I otherwise respect that Schopenhauer isn't really a continental philosopher and that if you read early Heidegger as having anything to say about the mind-body problem or the analogous problems of reference that you aren't really reading Heidegger as a continental philosopher (though it is a very natural way to read Heidegger if you take seriously the fact that his teachers were Southwest school neo-Kantians and actually read his 1919 lecture on said teachers; also see Malpas' recently edited "Transcendental Heidegger").

sdfdfsda- I don't get that worked up about bats, but I think anyone who can get worked up over Kant's dialectic can get very worked up over Russell's Paradox, which is kind of the canonical paradox of totality. I highly recommend the recent graphic novel "Logicomix" as well as Graham Priest's "Beyond the Limits of Thought." I hear that Badiou has interesting things to say as well, and know that Meillasoux's work gloms onto issues about Russell's paradox in really fascinating ways too. I mean, all the issues that fall out of Russell's paradox get to the key of the post-Berkeleyan situation (most solutions to it are "correlationist" in Meillassoux's sense) and the whole thing is quite maddening. [On the other hand, I can't find myself getting too worked up about "the Other" in all of its SPEPy manifestations just because it always strikes me as a less clear restatement of what's already in Sartre (and more inchoately in early Heidegger's analysis of the they) just helping yourself to his (their?) account of facticity and change some of the words around (though to be clear, I know lots of philosophers whom I respect who are passionate about these kinds of reversals and who disagree with me about this).]

So I don't know. I guess the problem is that I really agree with Brian that most uses of the terms "analytic" and "continental" are seriously misleading. People doing Rauls should be conversant in Habermas, and vice versa! People interested in issues of totality should be interested in both Priest and Badiou. People interest in the philosophy of mind should read Fodor, Dennett, Churchland, etc. as well as early Heidegger and Ponty (and contemporaries like Okrent).

So I think the distinction often operates at this point as an excuse not to read as much philosophy as one should.

Of course it was me who nattered on about the "continental blogosphere" in the original post. . .