BUPS and collaborative papers

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

To reply to this message or start a new topic please email: BUPS-DIS@bups.org


Hi everyone,

I'm spending a month writing an experimental blog, mainly philosophical 
commentary, BUPS background and self indulgence, at:

www.carefullyclear.com

I haven't decided if I'm going to do it full-time, I'm just trying it out 
at the moment.

Here's (below) the entry that's going out tomorrow (Sunday) morning, as I 
thought it might interest some of the regular discussers here.

It's about the idea of perhaps putting some of these bups-dis discussions 
to work...

And perhaps the earlier posts from today and yesterday might make it a bit 
easier to understand why I've been having these thoughts. As with most 
blogs, the entries are in reverse order, so if you go to the page, start 
reading from the bottom up! (Fnar, fnar... etc. - sorry, got '25 years of 
Viz' for Christmas...)

Any replies very welcome.

Rab.


A solution to the problem of content?
-------------------

I really dislike it when people just whinge about something and don't at 
least try to find a solution. It also strikes me that there is a tension 
between my posts on how much content I produce for BUPS and how there is 
too much unreviewed content in philosophy at the moment. So I've been 
trying to think of what can really be done to help.

The first big step forward, I think, is to get people posting in a truly 
discursive environment. This blog, in common with almost all others, has 
the facility for people to add comments at the bottom. And of course 
people can refer to it using html tags from their own blogs. But this is 
not true discussion. My words up here are always going to carry more 
weight than the smaller, tacked on, words of a commenter below. I am 
privileged in my own blog above those who comment on it.

And two people arguing with one another in their blogs makes this worse. 
As I'm finding out writing this every day, your blog is always your own 
church. Psychologically you are already preaching to the converted when 
you write on it. If people really disagreed with you, they wouldn't come 
to read your blog (or subscribe to its feed). The net effect is that these 
debates are actually blog-wars, with two entrenched camps sniping at one 
another, neither able to meet and discuss with the other in a flat, 
unprivileged hierarchy. It changes the nature of the debate, and I think 
explains the coarsening of public debate in the blogosphere.

The answer, I think, lies in lists like BUPS-DIS. A lot of people new to 
online discussion prefer online forums rather than an email list - in fact 
there were several suggestions (to use a diplomatic word) that I use a 
forum rather than a mailserver when I was putting together BUPS' online 
lists. But forums slow down debate with lots of extraneous detail and 
require a web-browser. The advantage of an email list is that you are 
already familiar with the interface, because it uses whatever email client 
you are already familiar with. It is more cognitively transparent.

Furthermore everybody checks their email more regularly than they browse 
the web - it allows online discussion in exactly the 'flat hierarchy' that 
I think lends itself to academic discussion, in a way that already fits 
into your existing workflow. The discussions from the last 6 months of 
BUPS-DIS are very different to the ones I've seen on different blogs. I 
also think it helps that there are two people who watch over the list, and 
warn people if they get offensive. It feels like a shared but safe place 
to me, which is why I post some of my own ideas there before I've worked 
the kinks out of them, knowing that I can be rightly criticised for their 
flaws. I will be taken seriously, given a chance to reply, will not be 
mocked (too much!)

But what does this produce? Well, that's what I think might benefit from 
some work.

Discussion is excellent in itself, but it isn't reviewed and it doesn't 
produce final papers or further your career directly. But some of the 
ideas on BUPS-DIS are really excellent. So perhaps, since the list already 
brings together people who would never bump into one another in normal 
life, there ought to be a way for these discussions to be worked up into 
collaborative papers?

Collaborative papers (i.e. with multiple authors) are a far more familiar 
phenomenon in science rather than philosophy. In something like 
biochemistry it is not uncommon to find papers with eight or ten authors 
listed. In philosophy it is relatively rare to find even two. It is often 
said that this reflects the nature of private thought in philosophy; the 
natural form of philosophical argument stemming from a single person's 
protracted rational reflection. But there is at least one kind of paper 
that I think would fit the format very well. There are papers that get 
published, that do important philosophical work, that share structure and 
form of content with Professor Lowe's 'New directions in metaphysics' from 
BUPC 05. These are papers that show the different emerging lines of 
argument, that give each branch of a developing topic a decent hearing, 
list of criticisms, and opportunity for reply; but still take a firm 
argumentative line through their material. They are overview papers, that 
give the reader a map to the state of the art in a given subject area; and 
then offer an overall opinion on what is going to work and why. They are 
often the foundation stone of further papers by individuals, spurred on or 
alerted to new content by the initial paper. The BUPS-DIS discussions 
would be brilliant starting material for a paper or two of this kind. The 
recent discussions on animal worth and time would be great initial topics, 
and the workload would be quite manageable shared between the main 
protagonists.

I would be happy to act as editor *as the paper progressed*, making sure 
that it was the sort of thing that could be published right from the 
start. It would be a great experiment to see if philosophy could be done 
this way. The secondary question, from my point of view, is whether BUPS 
could offer a standard package of resources to such impromptu 'research 
groups'. A closed email list for each collaborative effort would be the 
least we could do - and we could provide a place to keep the central copy 
of the papers and resource links each group were using. I believe this 
could really help.

And of course the journal would be happy to put the resultant paper to 
review with postgrads and staff members in the relevant speciality - 
providing that essential layer of review and revision that marks out 
publication from simple opinion.

So the questions are: would anybody like to have a go? And can we do 
anything to help you along your way?


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