Peer Review and Oppression

Peer review, or what we call peer review, is a formal example of a wider social process of gatekeeping. It consists of some people with power deciding who gets certain positions, recognitions, or promotions.

The idea that it is something that your peers engage in is interesting because, in almost all cases of peer review that I can think of, it’s not your actual peers who are evaluating you. It’s usually people who are, importantly, not in your position, if for no other reason they have power over you that you do not have over them.

That in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem. We often turn to other people who have power over us to help us. We want some people to have certain powers to do certain things because those things need to be done and they need to be done by people who are qualified.

For instance a judge, not your peer, especially if you appear in their court, is someone who is ideally appointed to that position because they are expert enough on the law to be able to process the information of a trial and come to a legitimate decision on the basis of the law and the evidence. Most cases that get called peer review or gatekeeping are not actually presided over by experts.

One glaring way this shows up is in academia. If you become someone who’s in a position to share new research and is blazing a way forward, you will simply not have anyone who knows as much as you on the topic. Yet it is exactly in these cases that you seek to publish the results of your research that you will be judged by people who are least qualified to preside over the topic. This is strange and absurd and it wouldn’t be a problem if we had prohibitions against interpretation. Interpretation is the engine of oppression and insofar as interpretation is not prohibited, peer review becomes overtaken by interpretation. The result is that peer review functions to politically enforce the colonial expectations of the day.

What if Everyone Had to Explicate

If we had to explicate as a means of peer review, we wouldn’t actually have to be as knowledgeable as a researcher sharing their findings in order to evaluate the importance of their contribution. All we would need to be able to do is understand how it is a novel contribution to the controversies that we could discover if we were to explicate.

The call to explicate is to use logic to render explicit reasons for controversial conclusions and to hence understand the topics of research in terms of the controversies we discover by using logic. When we use logic we cannot use our beliefs or our perspective because reasoning is about the support that thoughts provide to other thoughts, irrespective of whether they’re true. When we’re engaging in interpretation we’re using our outlook, what we take to be true, as the criterion. To the extent that we do engage in explication, we wouldn’t be able to rely upon our outlook. If we couldn’t rely upon our outlook, there would be no bias or political irregularities in peer review. Would be filtered merely because we do not agree with it or because it’s something that is surprising relative to our received expectations. Rather we would evaluate something as worth promoting insofar as it contributes new light to ongoing questions of importance.

In the case of peer review for promotion and offices, the same type of logic would hold sway. We would evaluate people in terms of their capacity to contribute to our understanding of ongoing concerns and so we would not be constrained by our perspective. We would rather evaluate a candidate in terms of their capacity to bring new light to old matters and to hence push our commitment to the office or project under consideration beyond the status quo.

Interpretation is Irrational, and Also Permitted by All Academic Institutions

The shocking discovery that my research led to, after I came to appreciate how interpretation is the textbook essence of irrationality, is that the entire academic exercise (from peer review in academic journals and publishing houses to tenure and promotion) permits interpretation as a judgment point. There is no prohibition in any of these spaces that prevents adjudicators from relying upon their beliefs, desires, or outlook when assessing candidates or their research. Name is true for reviews in workplaces and, of course, in the public vetting of candidates for public office .

Since the beliefs that we have are largely conditioned by our experiences in a colonized world, relying on our beliefs in our evaluation of candidates is simply recycling the oppression as the criterion for evaluating anything new.

So basically by not disallowing interpretation, peer review, and every other means of performance evaluation simply reifies the irrationality of oppression that constitutes our world.

What Peer Review and Oppression Teaches:

In my writing, including Moral Philosophy and Decolonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression, I ask us to consider what happens if we were to allow any peer review to be adjudicated according to interpretive conditions.

Simple thought experiment: you could consider a scenario where there have to be two reviewers who agree on the publishability of a submission to a journal. The submitters are themselves 50% interpreters recycling beliefs that are readily available and the other 50% are explicators who are very serious about reason as the basis of their explanation. Half of them make cases on the basis of commonly held propositions while half of them do not.

Let’s further assume that the reviewers themselves are 50/50: half of them are interpreters and half of them are explicators. Let us further assume, as is the case that in order for a candidate or their submission to pass review, the reviewers must be unanimous in accepting the submission. If the interpreters will only ever accept for publication something they agree with, but the explicators are willing to accept something so long as it can be formulated as an argument-based contribution to scholarship, then what will happen over time is that the explicators (a portion of whom will always have non-standard beliefs) will be whittled down from the general population. Their contributions will always fail to meet with interpreters’ approval and hence over time interpreters will completely exterminate explicators.

I have played this game-theoretic scenario with different proportions of interpreters and explicators. As long as interpreters will only ever accept what they believe and explicators only half the time make a case for what interpreters believe, then in due course interpreters will take over. I think that’s where we are at now. We live in a world dominated by people who have benefited from interpretation. The result is that they end up being promoted, but not for the right reasons, but for all the wrong reasons.

There are two ways to look at this outcome:

One is to look at it as a comment on the system and the trends that it will produce over time.
The other way is to think about how any individual could possibly survive in a world dominated by such stupidity.

What I have come to appreciate is that while the system produces advantages for people because they are irrational in exactly the ways that the system prefers, as individuals we each suffer in proportion to our reliance on interpretation. Interpretation prevents us from innovating and building strength and capacities on the basis of cutting-edge research.

While it might seem that there is no advantage to investing in explicatory skills on an individual basis, there absolutely is. On an individual basis none of us can really trust that the system will promote us because whether we get promoted depends upon how we come across against common expectations. That’s not entirely up to us. The system will reify the prejudices and small-mindedness of the general outlook shared by interpreters, and everybody is going to be penalized to some extent, except perhaps a few. I suppose those end up being the billionaires. The rest of us, who are not billionaires and are not going to be billionaires, really have an interest in investing in decoupling ourselves from interpretation and learning to increase what I call Phitness: that is, clear thinking that makes possible free choosing and energetic activity.

If we can engage in clear thinking, we basically clear our nervous system of the emotional clogs that prevent us from processing information effectively. That allows us to become effective agents in a world that isn’t necessarily favorable to us.

If enough individuals come to appreciate their interest in exercising these skills, then we can stop the proliferation of interpretive judgment in our institutions. That would shake things up dramatically but it would also produce institutions that advance our shared interests in research, learning, and innovation.

For more on this check out Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism.