Great observations. Personally, I wonder if this leads to duplicated efforts in the discipline more broadly. Just anecdotally, I feel like analytic philosophy has a huge problem with 'new' articles basically rehashing the same positions as old articles with little to no additional insight offered. I think other factors likely play a bigger role in this (e.g., in publishing a philosophy article, the author is not limited by the tools at their disposal to the same degree as in the experimental sciences) but I imagine this makes it difficult at all steps of the process from authoring to reviewing.
Academic philosophy would definitely benefit from a profession-wide standardization meeting every say, 10 years. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening as even defining "philosophy" in the context of a Philosophy department seems to be increasingly out of reach, especially as the analytic vs. continental classification slowly becomes less relevant. The closest thing I've seen to a unified terminology is in philosophy dictionaries. Routledge, Cambridge, etc. put out new ones every so often.
I couldn't agree more. I work in experimental philosophy and metaethics, and there's so little standardization in the terminology used in the literature: objective, absolute, mind-independent, stance-independent, observer-independent, universal, and so on. This works in two ways:
(1) Different terms for the same concepts
(2) Different concepts for the same terms
Sometimes different terms (e.g., "realism" "objective," and "stance-independent") are used to refer to the same concept, while at other times the same term is used to refer to different concepts. There are even instances where the same author uses inconsistent terminology in the same paper, or will use one term, then cite themselves using a different term (e.g., an author will write a paper where they consistently use "objective morality" then cite the paper as being about "moral realism" but drop usage of the term "objective").
I grant that philosophers may have legitimate disputes about terms should be used, but the inconsistency seems excessive. It's confusing, serves as an unnecessary barrier of entry to the field, probably makes finding articles and doing research more difficult, and in general, muddies the field.
I don't find it plausible the reasons for this continuing would outweigh the benefits of developing more standardized terminological conventions.
Great observations. Personally, I wonder if this leads to duplicated efforts in the discipline more broadly. Just anecdotally, I feel like analytic philosophy has a huge problem with 'new' articles basically rehashing the same positions as old articles with little to no additional insight offered. I think other factors likely play a bigger role in this (e.g., in publishing a philosophy article, the author is not limited by the tools at their disposal to the same degree as in the experimental sciences) but I imagine this makes it difficult at all steps of the process from authoring to reviewing.
Academic philosophy would definitely benefit from a profession-wide standardization meeting every say, 10 years. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening as even defining "philosophy" in the context of a Philosophy department seems to be increasingly out of reach, especially as the analytic vs. continental classification slowly becomes less relevant. The closest thing I've seen to a unified terminology is in philosophy dictionaries. Routledge, Cambridge, etc. put out new ones every so often.
I couldn't agree more. I work in experimental philosophy and metaethics, and there's so little standardization in the terminology used in the literature: objective, absolute, mind-independent, stance-independent, observer-independent, universal, and so on. This works in two ways:
(1) Different terms for the same concepts
(2) Different concepts for the same terms
Sometimes different terms (e.g., "realism" "objective," and "stance-independent") are used to refer to the same concept, while at other times the same term is used to refer to different concepts. There are even instances where the same author uses inconsistent terminology in the same paper, or will use one term, then cite themselves using a different term (e.g., an author will write a paper where they consistently use "objective morality" then cite the paper as being about "moral realism" but drop usage of the term "objective").
I grant that philosophers may have legitimate disputes about terms should be used, but the inconsistency seems excessive. It's confusing, serves as an unnecessary barrier of entry to the field, probably makes finding articles and doing research more difficult, and in general, muddies the field.
I don't find it plausible the reasons for this continuing would outweigh the benefits of developing more standardized terminological conventions.
Philosophers like getting tangled in their own bullshit and pretending its intellectually superior