Not that smart …

An exhortation, repeated with approval on various philosophy blogs: “We’re all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind.”

I’m all for being kind, and hope that — when I was in the business — I mostly was (and of course regret the times I knowingly wasn’t). But if you didn’t realize it before, then one thing you would learn by editing a philosophy journal, as I did for a dozen years (reading every submission that Analysis received in that time), is just how many philosophers aren’t smart. Honest plodders, no doubt: but quite capable of sending off for publication dull-witted, uncomprehending, point-missing, or thumpingly fallacious offerings. And we are just kidding ourselves if we suppose otherwise.

Of course, there’s a lot of public bullshit about this, for understandable and not wholly disreputable reasons. We rate each other’s works as “world-class” to help colleagues get grants; we rate someone as outstanding to aid accelerated promotion so that they get paid a tolerable wage. But that doesn’t mean that we really are outstanding, or world-class, or smart.

Mathematicians aren’t under much illusion about this sort of thing. Some are smart, and get to prove important stuff. Others plod, tinkering at the margins. (I was brought up in that hard school, and in part left it because I didn’t think that continuing to be a plodding mathematician was likely to be as much fun as becoming a plodding philosopher).

And it surely isn’t really very different for philosophers, is it? Extra kindness is called for exactly because quite a few of us lots of the time, and no doubt all of us some of the time, aren’t smart — and it hurts to have it rubbed in.